Last week, I was in Missouri for archival research at the Truman Library. I flew into Kansas City airport Sunday afternoon, drove to Independence, parked, and didn’t touch the car again until Friday afternoon for my return flight.1 The weather was pleasant, the people were nice, and the research was enlightening. Overall, it was a productive and worthwhile trip.
While I am still going through the documents I scanned, some statements stood out during my “Hoovering” (a British term derived not from our President but the vacuum). For example, this passage from a formerly Top Secret 37-page report compiled in 1951:
Because the United States has not defined its ultimate objectives and has, therefore, not directed all programs toward a common goal, i.e., the reduction of Communist influence, many of the psychological operations of the United States have: (a) had a beneficial effect in one area and caused considerable harm in another; or, (b) tended to cancel each other out.
Or this one from a report lamenting that so many agencies are doing their own “intelligence” and “research,” without established definitions – thus distinctions – for each. The result was likely severe duplication across (and within) government agencies, but this was speculative because it wasn’t clear because of the lack of definition. “There is a great [deal] of overlapping and confusion.” But it’s this passage from the same 1952 memo that caught my eye:
But what matters is not what things are called – just what people are actually doing… The real point is that there is no such thing as psychological warfare in intelligence or research as distinct from intelligence and research necessary for the formulation of national policy, particularly in its political aspects. What is happening, of course, is that the needs of psychological warfare are bringing about an overdue and necessary change in the traditional concept of political intelligence.
Third, and last for this post, was a statement from 1942 that had such an impact on one person, that he put it on a notecard and shared it with a colleague nearly ten years later:
It is no solution of a problem to ignore it and it is no argument against a thing to say it is administratively difficult. Nothing about war is easy but we have a job to do... so let's do it.
My Capture Process
For those interested, here is how I capture documents at libraries. I welcome any suggestions to streamline this process. First, I use Adobe Scan on my phone to create a PDF for each document. Adobe Scan does a great job identifying the page and automatically taking a picture. This does mean I hold the phone near the table and not near a document so it fails to see a document and won’t add a false page. When I finish a document, perhaps it’s a page or 20 pages, I hit finish in the app and Adobe Scan uploads the document to the cloud. As long as the document is less than a hundred pages, Adobe OCRs the document in the cloud. From Adobe Acrobat on my laptop, I download a folder’s worth of PDFs to a DropBox folder structure that mirrors the archive: Library : Collection : Box : Folder. This gives me the citation information I’ll need later. (I could “share” from the app and drop the file into the DropBox – or other cloud – file system, but the laptop interface is faster, and as it processes, I can put away the folder and get a new folder.) Sometimes, I need a better OCR engine than Adobe’s. I use ABBYY, and as I write this, ABBYY is re-ocr’ing batches of documents.) I then copy the folder tree into DevonThink, a program that allows detailed searching, tagging, highlighting, reviewing, and analysis. Overall, this method is much faster and more reliable than the process I used a dozen years ago, my last major foray into the archives.
In case you missed it
I am proud to say that I was sanctioned by Russia, so I have that going for me. I also have this, given to me by DarthPutinKGB himself (a good number of years ago):
I await a meme with a Sharpie-modified map placing Kansas City in Kansas.