Partisans and Historians

Since its inception in 1861, the Historical Division of the State Department has worked on a non-partisan basis to compile and publish complete records of United States foreign policy. Until World War I this job was neither a particularly big nor important one. The Division had no difficulties in keeping the records up to date simply because of the relatively minor role this country played in international affairs.

But this situation changed radically after 1914. The increased activity of the State Department since then has been reflected in the work of the Historical Division. For the first time, it started to lose ground to the increasing mass of factual material which it was expected to systematize and to make public. World War II and the Korean conflict added to the burden. Consequently, the Division is now 15 years behind in its work, the most recent volume on foreign relations dealing with 1940.

Many legislators and historians have criticized this time lag between events and their subsequent public release, especially when the events concerned such secret dealings as the various war conferences between the allied powers. Not until this year, however, has any one criticized the Division for the accuracy of the material which it did issue. When it released records of the Yalta conference in the spring, many people, including Sir Winston Churchill, asserted that serious mistakes had been made. And less than a month ago a dismissed member of the Division, Donald M. Dozer, publicly stated that efforts were being made to "pretty up the record of U.S. diplomacy during the Second World War."

Dozer was fired, he says, mainly for objecting to the "distortion of the Yalta record, the delays in proceeding with the records of the Cairo-Tehran and other World War II conference, and the failure of the Division to meet any of the deadlines set for publication of other World War II papers."

These charges have cast a serious doubt on the impartiality of the Historical Division, despite the fact that its members are civil service, not political appointees. No one questions the importance of issuing complete records; but Democrats are accusing Republicans of wanting to use the records as "political ammunition" in next year's presidential campaign, and Republicans are blaming the Democrats in the Division for the delays and reported inaccuracies.

The Division chief, G. Bernard Noble, firmly defends the impartiality and accuracy of his staff. "We don't even ask a man what his political views are when we hire him," he says. The delays in publication, he claims, are due to the tremendous amout of material which has to be correlated and the frequent need to get clearance for publication from military authorities and the governments of foreign countries. "Nothing crucial to the story is ever left out," he says.

The Republicans have been particularly concerned with speeding up the Division's work, despite these many unavoidable delays. In May, 1953, a Republican controlled Congress gave it a large appropriation for this purpose. That the politicians did this to prove as quickly as possible that the Democrats had blundered, however, is doubtful. It was a high State Department official--an Eisenhower appointment--who investigated Dozer's charges and found that none of them could be substantiated. He decided to dismiss Dozer, not the Democratic holdovers in the Division itself. The criticisms of the Division, he said, were based "entirely on emotions and very little on fact."

This opinion indicates that the Historical Division is still doing its work on an impartial bass and to the best of its ability. The delays in publication are reasonable ones, not the result of Democratic stalling. Unless more substantial evidence comes forth, it would be well to assume that both Democrats and Republicans want records of U.S. foreign relations released as quickly and accurately as possible for the benefit of the country as a whole.

The American Historical Association set the Division in its proper perspective when it passed a resolution in 1951 to "remind the appropriate federal officials...that in this time of crisis maximum official publication of documents on foreign relations is essential to public understanding, without which United States foreign policy will be subject to ill-advised pressures."