Im tom blanson onn r the to floor of the main library of George Washington university. Which is where we live. And were in a room ful of declassified documents. A lot of the people using our collections are using them online. For a lot of these kids, if its not online, it doesn exist. Part of our whole mission has been to get these primary sources loose from the government through frae dom of information act request. And then get them into digital format how are you funded and where did you come from . We were started from a group of journalists to save their family, i think they created the National Security archive as a institutional memory and a follow up. We inherited their pending information of class. The really sensitive documents, theres a debate about is this kl ally secret . ejnni or can this be released . It can take years to get a declassification request through the system. This has been an iterative story for 50 years. To get the documents loose. Bits and pieces and not t
One of the books that brings us he here, Warren Harding, the harding affair, love and espionage during the great war, published in 2009. Right. We also have dr. Karen femia whos an archivist who prepared the papers, the harding papers. For reader use. On july 29. Karen has a ph. D. From brown in musicology. But shes an excellent, excellent historian and really, really a firstrate person. We have dr. Richard harding, the grandnephew of president harding. He was he is a psychiatrist on the staff of the university of South Carolina and was the president of the american psycho Analytical Association in 1981 82. American psychiatric association. Psychiatric. Sorry. Okay. The i shouldnt make that mistake since we have Sigmund Freuds papers here. I need to apologize for that. A very brief description of the harding papers here which is probably unnecessary given the publicity theyve received. But there are about 1,000 the collection, not the papers the major collection, the papers are in the
i would call people to my car at 11:00, 12:00, we were working around the clock. i would drop them off one after another and then i would go to my little apartment that i had, and so one night i m dropping all these people off and the last person is hillary, who i have been working with. hillary rodham who was a star on the staff and dole liked her and i liked her. she was a hard worker, really aggressive, and really smart. so anyway i m driving she s now in the car alone with me. i m about to i m driving to where she lives. she was living with a woman named sarah who ended up in the white house later on with me. in any case i m about to sort of pulling up to a place, not quite there, and she says to me, i want you to meet my boyfriend. he s coming in tomorrow, something like that. i say, oh, great. what s his name? and she said bill clinton. i met him in law school, we ve been going out. i didn t i wasn t paying attention to people s personal lives at the time. reall