Secrecy

Richard Reeves, author of an acclaimed work on President Kennedy, has joined other leading historians in criticizing President Bush's executive order last fall that tightened access to presidential records of previous administrations. Currently working on a book about President Reagan, Reeves held up an index of government documents that he has been prohibited from seeing. "There's great determination to prevent these papers from ever becoming public," he said.

"Wars often have had a profound impact on journalism," writes former journalism professor Betty Medsger. For example, the trend toward "news as entertainment" began with the war in the Persian Gulf in early 1991 when "the military, prepared by its 1980's marketing classes in how to sell a war, set new restrictions and higher levels of censorship that guaranteed coverage would be controlled by the military." That trend continues today, as "marketing practices honed by the Pentagon in the brief Gulf War now seem to be the standard M.O.

"Newspapers may provide a rough draft of history, but archives are where the raw materials are stored," writes Celestine Bohlen. "And so when politicians start messing around with public archives, historians -- and, of course, archivists -- can be counted on to rise up in arms." She details the outrage of historians when former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in his final days in office decided to move the public records out of City Hall and into a private warehouse. And Giuliani isn't alone.

"Science has now become the leading edge of the [Bush Administration's] crackdown on public access to government information," according to the New York Times. The Administration has withdrawn from public access over 6,600 technical reports concerning biological and chemical weapons production on grounds that they might help terrorists or others develop weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration is also calling upon scientific societies to impose limits on their scientific publications.