04 December 2008
For the Record
by Terry Good
“You come in with nothing. You leave with nothing.” This is the simple guidance offered to White House staffers upon their departure to explain that the Presidential Records Act of 1978 established government ownership of all White House records. The Office of Records Management is charged with the responsibility of overseeing the transfer of the records to the National Archives and subsequently to the president’s library.
Terry Good was detailed to the White House from the National Archives in January, 1969, as a member of a team to begin preparations for Richard M. Nixon’s Presidential Library. Following President Nixon’s resignation, Terry joined the White House Office of Records Management and in October, 1988, became its director, the position he held until retiring in July, 2004. He and his wife, Evelyn, now live in Ohio.
January 20th, 11:55 A.M.
Whew! Finally. We did it. Another transition. Another massive emptying of the White House complex. Of people. Of papers. Of electronic records. And all before 12:00 noon.
In my office, I collapse onto the sofa, exhausted and sleepy, having been here all night, catching only a catnap on occasion, having continued to make last-minute sweeps of the White House complex (the West Wing, the East Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the New Executive Office Building, and several other facilities), looking for those files, those documents, that inevitably, somehow, were overlooked in cleaning out the offices. I turn on the TV and watch the inauguration ceremony on Capitol Hill while sipping a cup of cold coffee and finishing a stale doughnut.
But I can’t rest long. I need to make another sweep of the West Wing. In five minutes, the advance guard of the new presidential administration is due to enter the gates.
The job is only half done. I’ve said my goodbyes to the outgoing administration, people I came to know, to respect, to like. Four years or eight years. It seems so short a time in retrospect. But there is little time to reminisce. The next phase of the transition is about to begin. I must be prepared to greet the newcomers with a smile and an offer to support them with as much dedication and enthusiasm as I exhibited to their predecessors, party politics notwithstanding.
And I will -- and so will my staff in the Office of Records Management (ORM), for we are part of the White House staff that stays on from administration to administration. We are among the White House nonpartisan “career” employees who serve “the office not the man.”
In those few moments I think about what is in store for the incoming administration and for my office. I take the liberty of fast-forwarding through the life cycle of the next four or eight years.
You’ve Got Mail!
In a matter of days, an avalanche of mail will descend upon the newcomers. It will be the first wave. They will be overwhelmed. Yes, they had been forewarned, but it will still be a shock, a staggering number of boxes of incoming mail from the general public that has been accumulating in the weeks since Election Day. Tables will need to be set up in the hallways of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. Over time, they will discover that reading 200 letters a day is about average. They will code each letter for further action: a response; a referral to an agency for action; or in some instances, no action. The incoming high volume, however, will continue throughout the administration.
Surprisingly, the processing task is not devoid of levity. The American people possess a creativity that surpasses belief. Almost unimaginable formats have been -- and will be -- employed to communicate with the presidents: cans, pieces of wood, zucchinis, and coconuts exemplify the variety of choices.
Those of us in the Office of Records Management will be prepared to offer our advice on how to handle this mail. This will be our first test, our first opportunity. We must be able to convince the new administration that the vast majority of this mail, once read and processed, need not be kept for more than several months. If we can convince them that these communications are expendable, not only will storage space requirements be reduced, but we will also greatly reduce the logistical challenges facing us when we once again come face-to-face with our greatest nemesis, the next transition. Yes, planning for the transition starts that early.
Fortunately, the e-mail flood, initially so overwhelming, will no longer create the crises that arose in the past when this new technology came of age. In volume it will be staggering, but processing it will be fairly routine. The next wave, while not so large, will soon arrive. Within days, ORM’s phones will begin to ring with requests for files on the people who have written in or for background on government policies that the new administration is now wrestling with. Our response will be always the same, always shocking and disappointing: Our files are empty. All the information, the papers, and the electronic records are gone. You are going to have to start from scratch. The agencies within the executive branch of the government can assist. They have the program responsibilities and the knowledge. In short order, the new administration will gain its footing and the wheels of government will begin to turn, quickly getting up to speed.
Throughout the White House complex, another wave will begin to build in the ensuing weeks. Staff assignments and responsibilities will require large quantities of information. In every office, the papers, documents, and books will flood in, far more than the majority of the new staff will have ever before encountered. The influx will be relentless and tsunamic in volume. Initially, they will try to cope by requesting more filing cabinets and shelving. Within weeks, all the available space within each office will disappear. Worse, the papers, documents, and books will mount up, pile up, in the file cabinets, on the shelves, the desks, the chairs, the tables, the sofas, and finally on the floors -- in rare instances, to a point where there will be literally only paths from the door to the desk, perhaps once again to a point where, as happened on one occasion, only the threat of a visit by the fire marshal will bring some order and cleanup to the office.
The Organizational Challenge
By this time, some of the administrative staff will be overwhelmed and discouraged. Many will be unprepared for this daunting challenge, few will have had previous experience with an office that is so busy, so burdened, so in need of the quick turnaround times that are part and parcel of a White House office. Additional staff will not be an option. Fearing criticism for an alleged “bloated” White House staff, the new administration must make do with a lean staff partially supported by volunteers and interns. It will not be easy.
It will not surprise the Office of Records Management. In every administration, the challenge of organizing the information, whatever its format, has been a matter of low priority initially. Rarely do the newcomers sufficiently anticipate the crucial nature of this component of government business or its volume. The staff, of necessity, must focus on national and world events that dwarf such mundane tasks as where to put a document. History will repeat itself.
The Office of Records Management, an office they didn’t know existed, will soon become a godsend. The ORM records managers will be able to begin to bring some relief to the buildup of paper within the offices. In some instances, the suggestions will include filing arrangements. In many cases, it will be a matter of encouraging the staff to inventory and box up those materials that are not of immediate use. These boxed records can then be transferred to ORM’s custody, where the inventories will be optically scanned into the ORM database and the boxes will be numbered and shelved -- and available within the hour should any of them need to be returned. While ORM doesn’t mention it, this is really another piece of the first phase of the “end of administration” process, of preparing to move the administration out at the end of four or eight years. Files that are inventoried and boxed will be ready for transfer to the National Archives and Records Administration when the administration ends. One box at a time will present little challenge over the span of four or eight years, growing incrementally to at least 12,000 at the end of four years, at least 20,000 over eight years.
Equally important, perhaps even more important, the Office of Records Management sees this as the first phase of writing the history of this administration. Documents are witnesses: They talk. Organized documents tell stories. To the extent that ORM can convince the staffs to create and maintain organized files, to that extent can the history of the administration be better understood, better written, and better told, first by the president when writing his memoirs, later by historians and others when attempting to emphasize and interpret selected events and policies.
And so over time, ORM’s reputation will spread, either because staff offices feel rescued in their struggle to avoid sinking amid the growing quicksand of paper, or because ORM will, in fact, be able to quickly respond to their requests for information or the return of their boxed and stored files.
Coming Full Circle
With the passage of weeks, months, and years, as the administration ages and matures, ORM’s relationship with the political staff will grow accordingly. Acquaintances inevitably will become friends, and departures, whether during or at the end of an administration, will be occasions for genuine sadness. The analogy is stretched, but there is a bit of similarity in the White House experience to being aboard a ship attempting to navigate treacherous waters. Everyone, side-by-side, will pull equally on their oar to see that the “ship of state” passes safely through unnumbered rapids, uncharted channels, and violent maelstroms to reach the harbor. Differences between political and career staff will slip into the background. Bonds will develop.
As the administration enters its last year, ORM will begin -- quietly and softly at first -- to mention more frequently the advantage and the need for the staff to inventory and box up the files in their offices. Most of the staff will realize this and conscientiously strive to put their “houses in order” for posterity, for “their” president and for themselves.
The situation will not be nearly so calm if the incumbent president’s re-election bid fails. Everything will telescope into a matter of weeks from that first week in November to January 20th. The White House complex will morph into a huge mortuary suffering through an extended wake.
Fortunately, the transition process, once set in motion, will follow a fairly well-worn path. Guidelines will be issued to the staff to continue to carry out their responsibilities while preparing to leave. There is an understanding that the White House complex, like the residence, belongs to the American people, and everything should be done to ensure that it is left as a guest would leave the home of a host -- in as good a condition, and perhaps better, than when entered. In most cases this attitude will prevail.
As for the records, guidelines and deadlines will also be issued. The Office of Records Management will receive the green light to survey all the offices within the White House to ascertain how many boxes to distribute to the staff for the remaining files.
Staff departures will commence, bringing to a head another issue -- ownership of the files.
Invariably some staff members will come to believe that their office files are their personal files. Prior to the enactment of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, these papers and all others within the White House were historically considered the property of the president, who could do with them whatever he wished. No longer. The PRA has established government ownership of the records. With the exception of certain “political” records, neither the president nor the staff has a claim to them, whether originals or copies. They can’t leave the White House except to be transferred to the National Archives and subsequently to the president’s library. Being on the front lines of this matter, ORM struggles to explain this law, knowing from experience that it will often receive a cool reception. Offering up a simple guideline suffices in many instances: “You come in with nothing. You leave with nothing.”
The Pace Quickens
This ownership question, however, doesn’t equal in importance the bigger question of boxing and moving the records out of the complex. That task, understandably, takes center stage. Very soon after the election, the National Archives and the Department of Defense will arrive to assist. The pace will quickly increase, reaching almost a fever pitch as the weeks of November and December pass.
Calls will begin to come in informing ORM that inventoried boxes are ready to be picked up. Staging areas will be set aside for stacking boxes on pallets, strapping them down, and finally wrapping the entire load with a plastic covering known as shrink wrapping. Forklifts will move them into semi-trailers on the driveway between the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Once filled, the loads will be transported to off-site locations. The logistics will be daunting. Unfortunately, files that will be moved off site will not be off-limits. They will still be active files, should the staff need them. Retrieving a particular box will become a nightmarish endeavor. It will happen. And, yes, it will be the box on the bottom of the stack on the bottom pallet in the far corner of the staging area.
This task will take on a certain heart-in-the-throat drama in other ways also. The electronic database, by then a huge accumulation of information, will need to be downloaded, duplicated, and transferred, like everything else, to the custody of the National Archives. The process will be, as always, extremely involved. For weeks the National Archives computer technicians will work with their White House counterparts to facilitate this mammoth task. After creating a copy, there will follow a seemingly unending series of tests to make absolutely certain that every bit and byte of all the data has been copied and can be retrieved. For this duplicate database to fail would break too many hearts and careers; to re-create it would break too many budgets, if it could be done at all. There is no margin for error. There will be celebrations when the last test query is run and the results match perfectly those of the query of the original data base. Then and only then can the White House computer center finally begin to remove all of that data and begin to prepare to support the new administration.
Yet even this decision and its timing will require careful thought, for there are serious ramifications to severing this umbilical cord. Yes, from that point on to the end of the administration, the duplicate database can support ORM’s needs to provide information to the White House. If only that were all there was to consider.
Unfortunately, there is another side to that coin. The Office of Records Management will no longer be able enter data into either the old or the new database. The computerized record of this administration will be finished, closed. With that act, the nature of the computerized records of this administration will change, will become an archival database. In a sense, without the umbilical cord, the body will die. Thus, the timing of this surgery will present ORM with a wrenching tug-of-war between its desire to clear the decks to prepare for the new administration and its desire to enter as much data as possible for the outgoing administration. The decision will not be easy.
Meanwhile, another factor will hover over the playing field, causing worried glances at the thermometer and the sky. Mother Nature may frown or smile on this effort, coming as it does between November and February. At best, one will hope for above-freezing temperatures. Rain, sleet, and snow will be unwelcome guests: Coupled with subfreezing weather, they will become something far worse, playing havoc with the movement and the timing of the semi-trailer trucks and forklifts. Hours and days of good weather will become precious commodities.
It won’t stop there. Looming over all of this will be the concern that January 19 will find material still in various stages of removal within parts of the White House complex. It has happened. Usually, by the morning of January 20, nothing will move: not trucks, not boxes. Only a very limited number of personnel may enter the complex. Everything will enter a “lock-down” phase in preparation for the Inaugural Parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. What hasn’t left the White House complex will simply be held until the next day. As complicated as it will become, everyone will understand and will accept the situation. There are priorities after all. In fact, it is not as though any documents not gathered up at this point will never be accessioned into the presidential library. Weeks and months into the new administration, overlooked files will surface, from closets, stored file cabinets, and unoccupied desks. When notified, ORM will transfer them to the National Archives for deposit in the appropriate presidential library.
Hail and Farewell
Looking at the clock, it is now 12:15. I must make another visit to the West Wing from my office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. As I approach the door to the West Wing, I encounter a scene that will remain indelibly imprinted in my memory.
Several stragglers are just leaving the West Wing basement entrance as several members of the new administration are approaching. Momentarily everyone pauses, not certain what protocol requires in this chance meeting. Then tentatively, they shake hands, with fresh smiles on the faces of two, worn smiles on the other two.
“Hello.”
“Good afternoon.”
Rising to the occasion, one departee can’t let the moment pass without a slight wink to partisanship, asking softly and with a smile, “Please take care of the place … we’ll be back in four years.”
The newcomers return the smile, and one responds in a tone of voice that conveys understanding: “Okay.”
And then they part to go their separate ways. Handshakes, but no fisticuffs. No barricades. No guns.
And so one cycle ends. Another begins. American democracy in action.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
