Let’s take a leap fifty years ago! Washington was steeped in what would become the Watergate scandal: spying on President Richard Nixon’s Democratic opponents, then his lies and cover-up efforts that ultimately led to his resignation.
At the time, the United States experienced a furious crisis of confidence in the political class, a crisis which seems to us all the more exaggerated today that a former president, having succeeded in getting himself elected by bluff and deception, maintains the myth of his stolen re-election with fabrications and falsehoods.
One of the lessons learned from the Watergate nightmare and Nixon’s deceit was to consider the sprouting White House documents as public property and to be preserved in the National Archives. Congress passed a law to this effect and all presidents have submitted to it since Ronald Reagan.
ALL EXCEPT TRUMP, OF COURSE
Indeed, the real estate developer-turned-reality star has shown no more respect for that obligation than for a host of other aspects of the presidential office. The revelations have been multiplying for weeks: he had the reflex to tear up papers that no longer interested him, papers that his staff took out of the trash cans and glued back together behind him.
Much has been made of the White House toilet clogged with documents that someone wanted to get rid of. It’s both in bad taste and difficult to prove, but nothing is surprising with the 45th president.
On Friday, the National Archives confirmed finding items marked “classified” in fifteen boxes of documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s compound in Florida. The businessman, as we already knew, had taken with him, when he reluctantly left the presidential residence, the famous “love letters” sent to him by Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. Everyone has their own fantasy.
PRESERVING FOR HISTORY
Nothing is more exciting than going through Kennedy’s moods during the Cuban Missile Crisis or Johnson’s shenanigans during the Vietnam War. No doubt that Trump, who conceived of the presidency as an absolute monarchy, is hiding a lot of mind-boggling conversations and decisions.
Photo archives, AFP
US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signs a document during the naval blockade of Cuba at the White House on October 24, 1962.
Fortunately, such a flood of confessional books emerged from his visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that scholars and amateur historians will be entertained for generations. Not to mention Trump himself: the Twitter archives are full of pearls that national archivists certainly envy.
That said, there are big gaps, like what he was doing while his supporters attacked the Capitol or what was said during his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Hamburg in July 2017. The American president then demanded that the translator’s notes be confiscated. Where are these notes? Are they hiding a Machiavellian plot or nothing significant? Or perhaps confirmation that the man—as Rex Tillerson, his secretary of state at the time, had himself concluded—was a “fucking moron”?
That, we would all like to know.
The National Archives of the United States
A treasure of history american and global…
- 13 billion pages of documents
- 10 millions maps, charts and drawings
- 44 million still photos
- 40 million aerial photos
- 28,000 km film rolls
- 992,000 video and sound recordings
The originals of the “Charters of Freedom”…
- The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
- The Constitution and its famous first three words: We the People
- The “Bill of Rights” and its ten amendments to the Constitution, preserving individual freedoms.
Too…
Abraham Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” of 1er January 1863, abolishing slavery
The Louisiana Purchase Treaty of April 1803, bearing the signature “Bonaparte”
Japan’s act of surrender, signed aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945
70,000 rolls of microfilm reproducing all the German and Nazi documents seized during and after the 2and World War