The Foreign Service Journal, June 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2016 39 ments. Congressional and pub- lic reaction was mostly positive; it turned out those ambassa- dors actually knew what they were doing. Budget cuts, followed by the outbreak of World War I, eroded the timeliness of the series. By 1930, FRUS had set- tled into a 15-year publication lag and become a mechanism of historical, not immediate, accountability. Later attempts to bring the volumes back to currency were eclipsed by post-World War II changes in Washington’s foreign policy- making machine and the birth of the interagency. Today’s FRUS volumes are more heav- ily weighted toward documentation of the decision-making pro- cess than the back-and-forth between Washington and posts. Department of State documents that once made up 90 percent of the material in FRUS fell to less than 30 percent by the Nixon and Ford administrations, with the addition of White House, National Security Council, Defense, Treasury and other U.S. government agency records. At the same time, the inclu- sion of intelligence information whenever necessary introduced inevitable but lengthy delays as governmental declassification apparatuses struggled to accommodate the regularized release of once highly sensitive material. Indeed, in the 1980s, a battle royal developed within the State Department between parties in favor of expanded trans- parency and those inclined to keep the foreign policy sausage making hidden from public view as long as possible, if not forever. Transparency won the day with the 1991 FRUS stat- ute, signed by President George H.W. Bush, which forced the department to facilitate Historian’s Office access to classified documents and systematically declassify records at the 30-year mark (or justify withholding them). This tug-of-war over the publication of our official history produced the mostly collegial atmosphere in which FRUS is compiled today. A State Department and Central Intelligence Agency joint historian facilitates searches of the CIA’s historical records and greases the declassification machine by serving as a thoroughly vetted intermediary. Relations are also good with the external FRUS governing body, the Historical Advisory Committee. Founded in 1957 and statutorily mandated since 1991, this body of academic and public-interest representatives monitors the progress of the series. The HAC has lobbied on behalf of FRUS, protesting to Congress when its members believed the series did not meet transparency stan- dards—as with the “incom- plete and misleading” Iran, 1951-1954 volume—and advocating more timely release, as when the series fell nearly 40 years behind in the 1990s. (A fascinating account of the series’ history produced by the office of the Historian’s special projects division, Toward “Thorough, Objective, and Reliable”: A History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series , received the prestigious Society for History in the Federa l Government’s Pendleton Prize for 2016. It is available at history. state.gov.) The Making of a FRUS So what’s it like to be a FRUS historian? The general con- sensus: like a kid in a candy store. With access to the universe of primary source governmental documents and immersion in the particular period now under study—the 1970s and 1980s—FRUS historians can claim the greatest expertise on U.S. policymaking during these decades of anyone in the world. No serious book on U.S. foreign policy is published without FRUS footnotes, and few outside historians have the pride— or responsibility—of knowing the books the president and Secretary of State have on their nightstands are based in large measure on the documents they have compiled. In addition, the globe-spanning nature of U.S. foreign relations renders FRUS as much a record of world history as American history. For citizens of some countries, particularly those whose governments have yet to, or will never, publicly share their own documentation, the work of FRUS historians offers their only window into their own nations’ foreign policies. Since the 1990s, FRUS has been organized chronologically In the 1980s, a battle royal developed within the State Department between parties in favor of expanded transparency and those inclined to keep the foreign policy sausage making hidden from public view as long as possible, if not forever.