Trouble with the U.S. Foreign Relations Record Also

It's not just in Russia that historians run into difficulties when they try to promote the timely release of key archival documents related to foreign policy. There is also big trouble at the State Department's Office of the Historian, responsible for the magnificent series Foreign Relations of the United States, the official record of U.S. foreign relations since 1861. My friend and colleague Doug Selvage has written a column on this for the History News Network, which gives a pretty good view of the situation. He could have gone even further, as recent New Yorker piece did, and simply put the problem squarely at the feet of the Office's head, Marc Susser. (Doug is correct, of course, to argue that the new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, now has an opportunity--and an obligation, one could add--to begin fixing this). I only know of the situation through newspaper articles, but the attrition numbers seem to speak for themselves: something's wrong at the top there.