Chapter 6: “The Necessary Limitations Upon Open Diplomacy,” 1920–1945

Between 1920 and 1945, the Foreign Relations series left its 19th century roots behind as it experienced profound transformations in purpose, production, clearance procedures, and audiences. In 1925, within months of the Department of State’s recruitment of a professionally trained historian to take charge of its publications program, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg approved the first formal editorial guidelines for FRUS. Kellogg’s order mandated historical “objectivity,” as derived from emerging scholarly best practices, and served as the charter for the series (with minor revisions) until 1991. Despite this high-level endorsement for Foreign Relations, unprecedented clearance problems, both within the U.S. Government and with other countries, resulted in steadily mounting delays and, occasionally, significant excisions in published volumes. During the 1930s, political controversies over the outbreak and legacies of World War I heightened foreign government anxieties about releasing potentially sensitive historical information. World War II exacerbated those difficulties. Counterpoised against this impulse for secrecy, professional academic organizations lobbied for timelier publication and more comprehensive documentation. Although FRUS continued to garner occasional congressional and media attention, during the 1930s and 1940s, scholars established themselves as the primary direct consumers of the series. By the end of World War II, the Foreign Relations series had evolved to become an instrument of responsible historical transparency.

Before FRUS could evolve, it had to survive the loss of its 19th century utility. In the aftermath of the First World War, Department of State officials assessed the Foreign Relations series. Over the previous decade, the publication of FRUS had moved farther away from the events it documented. Resource limitations aggravated the mounting FRUS lag that began in the first decade of the 20th century.1 From 1909 and 1930, the period between the creation and the publication of documents grew from 3 years to 12 years. This lag became permanent; with only a few notable exceptions, no FRUS volumes produced after 1933 included documentation less than 15 years old.2 The growing publication lag meant that FRUS lost much of its value for Congress and other government officials who wanted to mobilize public support for (or opposition to) current policies. At the same time, the traditional scope of the series left new constituencies, primarily the academic community, unsatisfied with meager coverage of the decisionmaking process in Washington. At this critical juncture, when FRUS had grown too tardy to fulfill its 19th century function, the continuation of the series remained in doubt. As late as 1924, the Department officer responsible for the series reminded his superiors that he had “not yet been informed whether Foreign Relations . . . is to be continued.”3

FRUS survived the 1920s because it evolved. To be sure, memory of its 19th century mission helped sustain the series during this transitional period. High-ranking officials noted that FRUS helped U.S. diplomats perform their operational duties. Assistant Secretary of State John V.A. MacMurray, for example, drew upon nearly two decades of service at diplomatic posts and stints in the Department’s geographic divisions to explain that “it would be as impossible for a consul to conduct the business of his office properly without a set of Foreign Relations as it would be for a carpenter to get along without a hammer and saw.”4 Despite this endorsement within the Department of State, FRUS lacked a strong constituency outside the Department during much of the 1920s.

By the late 1920s, the academic community began championing the Foreign Relations series. In 1928, former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes “put just a little push behind” legal scholars’, historians’, and political scientists’ efforts to promote FRUS by arguing “the only difficulties that the Department of State . . . really has occur when people do not know the actual truth.”5 This activism was an early return on the Department’s decision to professionalize the production of the series in 1925. Scholars—including the historians hired by the Department to compile FRUS volumes—brought new expectations for thoroughness to the series. In helping to shape a new 20th century paradigm for responsible historical transparency, the academic community defined new standards for quality by criticizing past practices.6 In 1930, Dr. Joseph Fuller, who headed the Research Section of the Division of Publications, derided the “perfunctory character” of the 19th century FRUS. He caricatured the contents of volumes published before 1924 as “innocuous material—exchanges of birthday greetings, records of ceremonial visits, formal documents, and emasculated correspondence on more serious topics.” Returning to this approach in response to clearance difficulties (described below) would, Fuller predicted, lead the series to “lose all credit in the eyes of scholars who would naturally depend on it for the material of their studies.”7 In providing public support to the series—and in shaping professional norms that a new crop of professional historian FRUS compilers would bring with them to the Department—the academic community pushed Foreign Relations toward a new paradigm that traded timeliness for comprehensiveness in coverage.

Enter the Historians: Implementing the Kellogg Order

The Department of State’s professionalization of FRUS production followed a series of decisions that seemed only tangentially related to the future of the series. In late 1918, the Department of State appointed its first official historian, Dr. Gaillard Hunt, to undertake a major project documenting the Department’s involvement in the Great War.8 Hunt later served as the first head of the Division of Publications (DP), the office charged with responsibility for producing Foreign Relations volumes, after it was created in 1921. Although Hunt died before he could complete his “History of the World War,” the project raised multiple questions about the future of FRUS. Although Hunt had proposed a documentary history, he actually produced a hybrid that coupled an interpretive narrative with a documentary appendix. Indeed, his original title for the project made no reference to the FRUS series.9 Even before Hunt’s death, Congress and the Government Printing Office balked at publishing the first volume of his larger project under existing appropriations for producing Foreign Relations, arguing that the “History of the World War” was something else entirely.10

The struggle to secure appropriations for Hunt’s volume led the Department of State to reaffirm the documentary character of the FRUS series. Even though the Department ultimately found a way to incorporate Hunt’s work into Foreign Relations, the drawn-out process of negotiating with Congress and the GPO—and Hunt’s death—gave officials an opportunity to reconsider whether to continue Hunt’s project. Hunt’s successor as head of DP, Harry Dwight,11 opined in May 1924 that “a Foreign Office can do great service by making diplomatic documents and other historical records available to the public, but I do not feel that it lies within the functions of a Foreign Office to compete with the narrative historian.” Dwight also noted that the Department staff’s lack of “any experience of serious historical research” militated against continuing with Hunt’s project. In June, Wilbur Carr, Director of the Consular Service and long-time supporter of the series,12 made the decision to maintain FRUS as a documentary history.13

The Department also recognized the need to augment the resources devoted to Foreign Relations. Throughout the 1920s, Department officials pleaded with Congress for appropriations sufficient to reduce the publication gap.14 In June 1924, Dwight reported that “the work of the [Publications] Division has steadily been falling behind for the last 18 years” owing to a combination of increased expectations, diminished manpower, and inadequate equipment. These problems hit FRUS especially hard. At the time, three members of DP had the “theoretical” assignment of editing FRUS, but Dwight reported that “they are constantly called off to do other work” for the Department. He concluded that “any serious effort to bring Foreign Relations—including the war papers—up to date within a reasonable length of time” required both additional personnel and adequate office space.15

Although the Department elected not to “compete with narrative historians” in 1924, it enlisted professionally trained historians to assure that FRUS met emerging scholarly standards. In December 1924, just as Great Britain announced plans to publish its pre-Great War documents,16 the Department hired Tyler Dennett, who earned a Ph.D. in history at the Johns Hopkins University, to take charge of the Division of Publications.17 Dennett quickly laid the foundations for a new FRUS by proposing formal editorial guidelines to define the purpose of the series and establish clear standards for omissions in published documents. Less than three months after taking office, Dennett submitted draft principles to Assistant Secretary MacMurray. In framing the new FRUS charter, Dennett echoed familiar statements of purpose for the series: “A well informed intelligent public opinion is of the utmost importance to the conduct of foreign relations” and therefore “as much of the [diplomatic] correspondence as is practicable ought to be made public.” FRUS provided “in a form economical, compact, and easily accessible, the documentary history of the foreign relations of the United States” and, as such, “must therefore be recognized as an important part of the duties of the Department of State.” Dennett proffered four admissible justifications for exclusions:

• to avoid “embarrassing current negotiations,”
• to “condense the record and avoid needless detail,”
• to “preserve the confidence reposed in the Department by other Governments and by individuals,”
• to “suppress personal opinions.”

MacMurray revised Dennett’s draft to add a fifth exemption category (which grew in importance in subsequent decades):

• to “avoid needless offense to other nationalities or individuals by excising invidious comments not relevant or essential to the subject.”18

Dennett encountered minimal resistance to establishing an official Departmental mandate for FRUS because the value of transparency had been regularly acknowledged for 135 years. In 1925, precedents established during the 18th and 19th centuries shaped the first formal guidelines for deciding what kinds of information the Department could release to the public responsibly and what kinds of information it had to keep secret to safeguard the public interest.

Later in March, MacMurray hosted a meeting where Dennett and other high-ranking Department officials held a “thorough discussion of the principles which ought to guide the editing of Foreign Relations.” Their conversation yielded a consensus that added two “innovations” to existing FRUS traditions. The first concerned including in FRUS “decisions of the Department on subjects of international law which are of peculiar interest to students.” The second entailed “publication of important documents concerning treaty negotiations” (which had typically been covered by Supplemental FRUS Submissions in the 19th century) that would “increase the value of Foreign Relations as a source-book of American history.” Dennett informed Secretary of State Kellogg that “this proposed new material ought to contribute to the promotion of interest in questions of foreign policy and in turn assist in the maintenance of an intelligent public opinion.” The consensus was also important because it established “a uniform standard for . . . the editing of diplomatic correspondence” for the entire Department. Moreover, Dennett believed that publicizing the new FRUS guidelines would help the Department “define some of the aspects of the necessary limitations upon ‘open diplomacy.’”19

With support from senior officials,20 Dennett secured Secretary of State Kellogg’s approval for the far-reaching “Principles to Guide the Editing of Foreign Relations” as a Departmental Order on March 26, 1925.21 The order called for FRUS to document “all major policies and decisions of the Department in the matter of foreign relations.” It mandated that, aside from “trivial and inconsequential details,” the volumes “be substantially complete as regards the files of the Department.” “Nothing,” the order specified, “should be omitted with a view to concealing or glossing over what might be regarded by some as a defect of policy.” This required a caveat to Dennett’s initial proposal to exclude “personal opinions” from published FRUS volumes: “in major decisions it is desirable, where possible, to show the choices presented to the Department when the decision was made.” Finally, the order instituted an important change from 19th century practice that conceded the altered circumstances of post-World War American diplomacy: a prohibition on publishing foreign government documents without first securing that government’s permission. This mandate was originally interpreted narrowly: only documents originating from a foreign government required such clearance. The Department retained the authority to decide whether to publish U.S. documents (i.e., authored by American diplomats) that contained foreign government information (FGI), such as memoranda of conversation with foreign officials.22

Even before final approval of the 1925 Order, Dennett began evaluating Department records in preparation for reviving FRUS production. He was “shocked” by what he found. In a letter to outgoing Secretary Charles Evans Hughes, Dennett described how “the distinction which has been made between public and private papers” had left the U.S. Government with “extremely defective” records of recent diplomacy. He cited his own research in Theodore Roosevelt’s papers for his work on U.S.-East Asian relations to explain “how much important diplomatic correspondence was not a matter of record in the Department of State”: “the Department records” by themselves were “so defective that the narrative of . . . important events cannot be given from the official correspondence.” Dennett’s “casual . . . survey” of Department records for the “war years” revealed them to be “extremely deficient,” and, when such “deficiencies are eventually revealed by the publication of the Department diplomatic correspondence,” he warned Hughes, “the Government is then placed in an awkward and embarrassing position.”23

Over the next several years, Dennett, Fuller, and the DP staff did the best they could to prepare “substantially complete” supplemental FRUS volumes covering the war years. This effort was necessary because the Department excluded war-related documentation from the regular annual volumes that it had already published for the years 1914 and 1915. In his testimony for the 1928 appropriations bill, Dennett also pointed out that “we are today about the only great Government which has not given to the public its diplomatic correspondence of the war period. . . . It seems to me that that correspondence, following the practice of other governments, ought to be published.”24 Alongside eight supplemental “World War” volumes for the years 1914–1918 (published between 1928 and 1933), Dennett’s team also prepared four special volumes documenting U.S. policy toward revolutionary Russia during 1918 and 1919 (published between 1931 and 1937). In addition to Department records, they used whatever material they could gather from former diplomats to help “get the papers which we have into their proper relation to one another.”25 Efforts to augment FRUS coverage of the critical war years culminated in 1940, when the Department released two volumes comprised of documents collected from files taken by Robert Lansing at the end of his term as Secretary of State and later returned to the Department’s records.26

The Kellogg Order’s mandate for comprehensive coverage from Department files presumed that the Department of State controlled U.S. foreign policy. Virtually all the documents published in the volumes covering the 1920s (produced between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s) came from the Department’s central files. When other U.S. Government agencies, like the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury, led the way in using U.S. financial and commercial power to pursue political objectives during the 1920s, these efforts remained outside the scope of Foreign Relations.27

Despite the consensus to publish a “substantially complete” record in FRUS that Dennett secured in 1925, he and his staff encountered opposition from their colleagues in the Department as discussion shifted from general principles to publishing specific documents. In 1929 and 1930, concerns about the risks of releasing sensitive information jeopardized Dennett’s efforts to revive the series and close the widening publication gap. The 1916 supplement for the war was “held up” in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson and President Herbert Hoover pending the conclusion of naval arms limitation negotiations with Great Britain.28 Boundary disputes in Central America also led to several excisions in the regular volume for 1918 at the behest of the Division of Latin American Affairs.29

Dennett’s most significant debate involved supplementary volumes on the Russian Revolution. On April 25, 1930, Dennett met with officials in the Division of Far Eastern Affairs (FE) to discuss their opposition to publishing U.S. reporting on conditions in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria in 1918. FE officials feared release of those documents would “constitute an indictment of Japanese activities, the appearance of which in an official series might give such an offense as to embarrass the present conduct of relations with Japan.” Roland Morris, the former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, supported Dennett’s arguments that his telegrams “formed an essential part of the record and should be included” if FRUS were to document the story of Japanese “military authorities’ breach of faith” and the “American Government’s moves to check” their expansionism. Nevertheless, he agreed with FE Chief Stanley Hornbeck that “this story had better be left untold in our publication.”30 The new Department regulations for FRUS notwithstanding, Morris and Hornbeck dismissed historical integrity when they feared it could endanger current diplomacy.

Dennett resisted FE’s restrictive impulse. He complained that excising the documents dealing with Japan’s role in Russia would “ruin three volumes” representing “a year’s work apiece by three members of our staff and the expenditure of over $5,000 for printing.” To excise “the record of Japanese action and American reaction is to leave out an essential part” of the story “and to present a mangled and transparent farce which would be worse than the total omission.” Dennett also recruited support from the Division of Eastern European Affairs, which judged “the story of America’s relationship to the interventions in Russia . . . one of the most creditable aspects of our Russian policy. Its omission . . . would seem to result in a disturbance of the balance unfavorable to the credit of our Government.” By enlisting support from other Department officials, Dennett forced his colleagues to take a wider view of the choice confronting them. Whatever risks the 1918 Russia supplement posed to U.S.–Japanese relations, the Department had to balance them against the possible benefits of clarifying the limits of American intervention in the Russian Revolution and meeting the Department’s publicly announced commitment to responsible transparency.31

Dennett’s arguments won the day, but he paid a price. The Department published the 1918 Russia supplement volume with the Japan material intact in 1932. Just as FE warned, the volume elicited “a good deal of comment and discussion in Tokyo.” Although the Japanese Government did not lodge a formal protest, Ambassador Katsuji Debuchi registered concern about the publication with Secretary of State Stimson.32 Dennett, however, took a leave of absence from the Department in 1930 and resigned in 1931. A few years later, his successor Cyril Wynne recalled that Dennett “resigned from the Department . . . [to] wide publicity [that] resulted in much unfavorable criticism . . . partly because he believed the provisions of the [Kellogg] order were not being complied with.”33 Although his desire to complete his biography of John Hay (which would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1933) certainly figured into his decision to leave the Department, Dennett’s resignation revealed the potential costs of advocating transparency.

Some of these costs were borne by the FRUS volumes themselves. Even with a growing publication lag, early 20th century FRUS compilers had to make tough decisions when the Department’s or another government’s reluctance to release significant documents stalled the publication of other important material. Amidst the debate over the 1918 Russia supplement volumes, Fuller suggested jettisoning the “annual volume” model in favor of more topical volumes “relating to single or small groups of countries or subjects over convenient periods of years.” Not only would such compilations allow for streamlined clearances within the Department, but “volumes on certain subjects could be held back without delaying others and without impairing the integrity of the publications issued.” Fuller anticipated that delayed publication of volumes covering especially sensitive regions or topics would “be less obvious than when brought repeatedly to public notice by glaring omissions in one annual volume after another.” Fuller’s scheme would “break up Foreign Relations into handier, more logical units” that could be produced, cleared, and published more rapidly than the existing annual volumes. It also offered a more finely-textured way to reconcile the Department’s general commitment to transparency with specific diplomatic and security sensitivities.34 Fuller’s prescriptions were not adopted during the interwar period. Although additional supplemental FRUS volumes covering Robert Lansing’s papers and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference were later incorporated into the series, the Department continued to produce and release FRUS as a single compilation for each year until after World War II.35

During the 1930s, U.S. diplomats criticized FRUS for releasing documents that risked jeopardizing current relations, deterring candid reporting, and curtailing frank discussions. In 1936, Engert, Minister and Consul General in Addis Ababa, cabled Near Eastern Affairs Division Chief Wallace Murray to warn that a 15-year gap for publishing documents invited all of those consequences. He suggested either editing documents to “exclude any passages that might cause embarrassment or offense” or waiting 25 to 30 years to publish previously confidential information.36 In 1937, retired diplomat D.C. Poole criticized FRUS for disclosing confidential communications with British intelligence officers in revolutionary Russia. Although Poole’s concern about disclosing intelligence sources and methods anticipated later efforts to accord intelligence information special protections against disclosure, his complaint employed the same “old diplomacy” discourse as Engert’s telegram. In 1919 Poole had served as U.S. liaison with anti-Bolshevik Russian groups and as the de facto chief of U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts in European Russia. Nearly two decades later, he wrote Secretary Cordell Hull to protest the inclusion of one of his confidential despatches in the 1919 Russia volume. Poole saw no reason why “a little considerate effort” was not made to “conserve a suitable regard for the conventions of gentlemanly intercourse” and edit the cable in question to obscure the source of his reporting, a British army officer. He predicted that the disclosure would injure relations between U.S. diplomats and the British and “tend to destroy that complete confidence which the public interest requires to exist between American Foreign Service Officers and the Department of State.” Poole suggested that the Department adopt a “more careful editorial policy” for FRUS.37

Cyril Wynne responded vigorously to these assaults on FRUS. Indeed, to address Poole’s letter, he wrote a 45-page memorandum38 that left his superiors bewildered and apprehensive about his judgment.39 Wynne deprecated criticism of the series by describing the careful review and clearance process that preceded publication to ensure that FRUS volumes conformed to the 1925 order. He warned that retreating from a 15-year line would result in thunderous criticism from the academic community. The Department historian also belittled both Engert and Poole, suggesting that they “take [themselves] perhaps a little too seriously.” Although he acknowledged the “special authority” of “career diplomats,” Wynne preferred the friendly attitudes of “such men as Mr. Joseph Grew and Mr. Howland Shaw, both of whom,” he claimed, “have forgotten more about the Near East than Mr. Engert will ever know in his life.” Wynne placed special emphasis on Grew’s support for a 15-year line, since he served in Japan, “the most difficult post in our entire Foreign Service.”40

Despite Wynne’s spirited rejoinder, Poole’s intervention altered FRUS clearance procedures for a brief period. In producing the 1924 and 1925 annual volumes in the late 1930s, the Division of Research and Publication (RP) submitted “a large number” of American memoranda of conversation to foreign governments for clearance. Although “higher officials in the Department” did not formally alter clearance procedures to require these expanded clearance procedures for foreign government equities during the interwar period, RP’s brief and voluntary accommodation to foreign government anxieties foreshadowed how later efforts to document closer U.S. coordination with other governments would complicate clearances for the series.41

During the 1930s, the Japanese government generated the most significant foreign clearance problems for the series. In the mid-1930s, Japan objected to FRUS’s de facto 15-year publication line and U.S. policy regarding FGI. By the end of 1935, RP identified Tokyo as the “usual” source of delays in foreign government clearances. When the documents compiled for the 1922 FRUS volumes included information about the 1917 Lansing-Ishii Agreement’s secret protocol (pledging restraint in China during World War I) that had already entered the public domain via the former Secretary of State’s memoirs and a widely-read work of diplomatic history, Wynne anticipated that Tokyo would object to their publication. Through Ambassador Grew, he warned that the Japanese Government would be blamed for any omissions of this material to “prevent the Department from being criticized” by “those who are a bit critical of what is described as the ‘Hush! Hush!’ policy in publishing Foreign Relations.” The Japanese Foreign Ministry granted permission to print the documents in FRUS but requested that, in the future, even retired American officials should secure Tokyo’s permission before publishing confidential information relating to Japan.42

Another source of clearance problems, Iran, reflected intra-departmental disputes over Foreign Relations. Iran clearances evoked fears in 1936 that U.S. transparency would alienate the Shah, who was already offended by the dissemination of critical American periodicals in Iran. As a result, the 1922 Foreign Relations volume lacked any documentation on U.S. relations with Iran. In 1937, though, transparency skeptics proved capable of persuading Tehran to cooperate with FRUS after senior Department officials backed RP. Wallace Murray, who warned that even mentioning the U.S. Government’s interest in publishing documents in 1936 could prove disastrous, instructed Cornelius Engert, who had criticized FRUS the previous year and was now stationed in Tehran, to suggest to Iranian officials that “their present position with regard to publication of material concerning them in Foreign Relations is hardly in line with Iranian aspirations to be up-to-date and ‘Western’ in the conduct of their affairs.” Engert secured permission to print the requested documents from the Iranian Foreign Minister, and Iran returned to the pages of FRUS.43

In these and other clearance debates during the 1930s, FRUS historians received support from openness advocates both inside and outside the government. For many officials responsible for conducting the nation’s foreign affairs, the series remained a valuable resource. For example, when the transition to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration threatened austerity measures that would endanger funding for FRUS, Morrison Giffen, a University of Chicago Ph.D. who replaced Fuller as Chief of the Research Section, explained that Foreign Relations—“the most laborious” and “the best known”44 of the Section’s products—proved useful to the Department since “to be without these collections of ordered and carefully selected documents is to lack easy and instantaneous access to the data upon which to form judgments.” Without FRUS, Giffen warned, “the Department’s officers would often be compelled to take action after the most hasty and necessarily superficial researches of their own.”45

The professionalization of FRUS production also helped mobilize an entirely new base of academic support for the series as a vehicle for responsible historical transparency in the late 1920s and 1930s. Dennett welcomed this development; indeed, he cultivated it with a careful publicity effort for the Department’s publication program.46 Professors of international law took a leading role in supporting FRUS during the interwar years. In 1928, the Teachers of International Law Conference formed a committee to lobby the Department to accelerate FRUS production. In 1930, when clearance problems sparked fears that the Department might abandon the standards of the 1925 Kellogg Order, the committee insisted that, “from the standpoint of teachers of international relations, . . . the discontinuance of [Foreign Relations] would be a disaster.” In the mid-1930s, the American Society of International Law formed a Committee on Publications of the Department of State that issued reports lauding the quality of recent FRUS volumes. Although not as prominently involved during this period, the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association also lobbied for the Foreign Relations series—especially for a special subseries documenting the 1919 peace negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles.47

Individual scholars also praised the improved quality of post-1925 FRUS volumes.48 In 1934, Yale University historian Charles Seymour praised the World War I and Russian Revolution supplementary volumes for their “comprehensive . . . range of documents . . . form[ing] the essential stuff of the material which the students of American diplomacy in the war period will use.”49 In a 1939 review of the 1921 and 1922 volumes, Institute for Advanced Study historian Edward Meade Earle judged that 15 or 16 years was “a long time to wait for official papers, but it is a relatively short time in view of the comparative completeness of the dispatches and documents now made available” in FRUS.50 This support from the academic community proved essential in persuading Congress to appropriate the funds necessary to revive Foreign Relations after 1925 and to hold the line against those Department officials, diplomats, and foreign governments who wanted to restrict historical transparency in pursuit of contemporary concerns.51

Despite those victories, by the late 1930s, the Kellogg Order’s requirement to accommodate foreign government clearances raised significant obstacles to the Department’s efforts to satisfy academic requests to improve the timeliness of the FRUS series.52 Academic demands to accelerate FRUS clashed with opposition from abroad to publishing more recent diplomatic documents. In 1937 and 1938, U.S. media coverage of foreign government clearance difficulties generated calls for increased openness.53 The Department responded by asking selected foreign governments to agree, in principle, to publishing documents less than 15 years old. Nine capitals concurred, but also insisted that Washington continue submitting documents for clearance.54 The French Government opposed accelerating Foreign Relations,55 and Department officials agreed that even broaching the idea with Tokyo would “result in the Japanese Foreign Office making use of the occasion to insist on widening the present gap rather than shortening it.”56 FRUS historians faced a quandary: if foreign governments were reluctant to let the United States divulge their secrets, how could they improve the timeliness of FRUS without sacrificing its higher—and publicly announced—standard for thoroughness? And, as World War II approached, foreign government concerns about revisiting the negotiation and implementation of the controversial Treaty of Versailles mounted, intensifying the dilemma between timeliness and comprehensiveness facing FRUS stakeholders.

“A Cramping Effect”

The first potentially series-paralyzing clearance battle stemming from conflict between the Kellogg Order’s requirements for comprehensiveness and its recognition of foreign government equities unfolded as the Treaty of Versailles collapsed in the summer and fall of 1938. In March 1938, the Department sought permission from the Governments of France, Great Britain, and Italy to publish documents from the 1919 Peace Conference. As the Department noted in its instruction to posts in Paris, London, and Rome, memoirs and other published accounts from virtually all sides of the negotiations had already disclosed, in general terms, the discussions that produced the Treaty of Versailles. The jointly “owned” formal minutes of conference proceedings, however, remained unpublished.57

The nature of these documents posed unique challenges. Since any of the countries with equities in the documents could veto their release, all participants had to agree to publish or nothing could be done. Unlike previous annual or supplemental volumes, Department historians could not simply omit portions of the conference record that raised intractable clearance issues. The volumes also required systematic research in private papers that exceeded the Kellogg Order’s mandate that FRUS volumes “be substantially complete as regards the files of the Department.” Casting this broader net required the Department to invest additional resources and time for travel and copying documents.58

Although the Italian and British Governments gave the desired preliminary approvals in the summer of 1938, the French Government proved much more hostile to the project.59 The French Foreign Ministry recoiled at the proposal to publish such politically sensitive records in the midst of international tensions directly related to the postwar settlement. When Director of Political Affairs at the French Foreign Ministry René Massigli met with Edwin Wilson, Counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Paris, he argued that “Europe was today in a highly dangerous situation, perilously near war, and every effort was being made by those in responsible positions to prevent war, to save civilization, and with that end in view to appease conflicts and remove so far as possible every pretext for misunderstanding.” Wilson reported that Massigli “was frankly terrified at the thought of how publication of the secret documents of the Peace Conference could be seized upon by people who want to promote trouble and misunderstanding. As between the embarrassment . . . by being put in the position of objecting to the publication of these documents, and the danger of adding fuel to the flames of international controversies, he much preferred the former.” Even delayed publication, Massigli worried, “might merely prejudice the work of appeasement which might have been done in the meanwhile.” Massigli concluded the conversation by pointing out that, “if during the next month things take a turn for the worse, our thoughts may look forward to the next peace conference rather than to the question of publishing the documents of the last one.”60 After the fall of the Popular Front government produced a “sweep” of Massigli and others from the French Foreign Ministry, Wilson correctly anticipated that the Daladier government would be more amenable to the project.61 French officials agreed to the Peace Conference project in late December, allowing Cyril Wynne to announce it at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting on December 29, 1938.62 France’s initial opposition and subsequent acquiescence to the Department’s proposal to publish the records of the postwar peace treaty negotiations illustrated how the Kellogg Order surrendered a measure of U.S. sovereignty over disclosing secrets in pursuit of preserving international comity.

The outbreak of the war created new difficulties for the Paris Peace Conference volumes and, after the United States entered the war, British and American leaders vetoed releasing especially sensitive records out of fear that doing so could undermine their own summit diplomacy. Even after the Department secured agreement in principle to the project, it still had to obtain clearances for specific documents proposed for publication. The first Peace Conference volumes appeared in 1942, in part because the fall of France and hostilities with Italy nullified two foreign equities that might otherwise impede publication. Great Britain, the lone remaining foreign equity-holder, reluctantly agreed to release the majority of Peace Conference records in 1942.63

The most crucial documents, the minutes of the discussions of the Council of Four, remained a concern because British officials feared that releasing the records of past summits could undermine the confidentiality required for successful high-level diplomacy during and after the current war.64 In 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Minister Anthony Eden balked when the United States asked for permission to publish the Council records. Eden explained that “the publication in particular of the minutes of the Council of Four would have a cramping effect upon any similar confidential discussions which it may be necessary to hold after the present war.” He also worried that printing the minutes might “provide hostile propagandists with welcome material.” Finally, Eden objected to the publication of “rough workings kept for the convenience of the statesmen concerned” while one of those statesmen—David Lloyd George—was still alive.65

After the Department appealed the British decision,66 President Franklin Roosevelt intervened to quash the Council of Four volumes. In preparation for a September 1943 Hyde Park summit meeting with Churchill, Roosevelt asked Secretary Hull why the U.S. Government intended to publish the Council minutes. The President expressed “distinct hesitation,” believing that “notes of these conversations ought not to have been taken down anyway.”67 Roosevelt’s “hesitation” evoked bitter resentment within RP. Staffer Philip Burnett surmised that the “real reason” for the President’s attitude was the “wretchedly shortsighted” impulse to avoid releasing any information that could potentially be used to criticize a future peace settlement.68 Hull’s response to Roosevelt echoed the Department’s arguments to the British Government, emphasizing the pressure from academics and Congress for publishing the full record of the Paris Peace Conference, as well as the information about the Council of Four discussions that was already in the public domain.69

Roosevelt remained unconvinced. He told Hull that publication “would probably result in wholly unwarranted sensational articles” from “hostile sources.” He also explained that “no notes should have been kept. Four people cannot be conversationally frank with each other if someone is taking down notes for future publication.” Roosevelt “felt very strongly about this” and, during his meeting with Churchill at Hyde Park, they vetoed publication of the Council of Four minutes for the duration of the war.70 Only in November 1945, after Lloyd George and Roosevelt had died and Churchill and Eden were out of office, did the Department renew its efforts to secure British permission to publish the minutes.71 The volumes appeared the next year72 and Roosevelt’s intervention in the series’ publication schedule was itself included in the FRUS volume covering the 1943 Quebec summit, released in 1970.

Roosevelt’s reservations about publishing diplomatic documents during World War II did not apply to material intended to mobilize public support for the war effort. On June 17, 1942, Hull proposed to Roosevelt publication of “papers pertaining to relations between Japan and the United States dating from the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 to the outbreak of war.” The compilation, which “would be of a character similar to the Foreign Relations of the United States,” “would cover American-Japanese relations in general and also deal with the conversations of 1941 in regard to means of solving problems underlying relations between the two countries.” While Hull “realized that there are possible disadvantages to publication at this time,” he believed that “on balance it would be desirable to publish these papers” since they demonstrated “that this Government could not sit still and watch Japan carry out a program of unlimited aggression to the menace of our national security.” Since the envisioned compilation included many records of Roosevelt’s personal involvement in prewar diplomacy with Japan, Hull wanted explicit permission from the President to proceed with the project. On June 20, Roosevelt responded: “OK. Cover it all.”73 Although two FRUS volumes purporting to “cover it all” in U.S.-Japanese relations between 1931 and 1941 appeared in 1943, some journalists justifiably “criticized [the volumes] rather sharply as being only a partial picture.”74 In 1943 and 1944, the Department proposed an analogous project documenting U.S. policy toward the European Axis powers before the outbreak of war. While Roosevelt was “all in favor of the objective,” he believed that “the mechanics” would be “difficult” because of the foreign equities involved in telling the story of U.S. opposition to Hitler’s Germany.75

Rather than privileging historical integrity or openness in government, public diplomacy considerations guided Roosevelt’s decisions regarding FRUS during World War II. Publishing the record of Wilson’s negotiations at Versailles promoted no identifiable public diplomacy objective. Moreover, it seemed likely to invite criticism of summit diplomacy at a time when Roosevelt relied on personal meetings with Allied leaders to shape a strategy to defeat the Axis powers and sustain cooperation after victory.76 The “Peace and War” volumes and the proposed compilation of prewar counter-Hitler diplomacy, in contrast, did offer value at a time when the U.S. Government was mobilizing public opinion with “white propaganda” in support of the war effort.77 In the few exceptional cases when FRUS garnered Presidential attention during the war, Roosevelt deprecated responsible historical transparency in favor of the nationalistic and politicized approach employed by European governments debating war guilt during the 1920s and 1930s.

The FRUS production staff remained committed to the new paradigm and persevered through other obstacles related to the war. Their biggest shock came in September 1939, when Cyril Wynne, who “had been in ill health for several months,” committed suicide.78 Wynne’s deputy, Wilder Spaulding, a 1930 Harvard Ph.D., took charge after his death. In 1940, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long chided RP for failing to adhere to upgraded security procedures.79 In 1942, most of RP was moved to temporary quarters on Constitution Avenue, which made it “less convenient . . . for officers and employees of divisions in the main building to confer with” RP staff.80 Despite these disruptions, the FRUS production process proceeded relatively smoothly when clearance difficulties did not interfere.81 The biggest threat to publishing the cleared volumes during the war was a congressional proposal to reduce appropriations for Department of State printing by 40 percent. The still-influential octogenarian John Bassett Moore and other members of the scholarly community successfully lobbied to reduce the cut to a more manageable 10 percent.82

Scholarly engagement with the Foreign Relations series during the war extended beyond lobbying Congress for additional resources to addressing key questions about editorial methodology and assuring the integrity of the series. In 1942, Duke University history professor Paul Clyde inquired about material withheld from the 1927 volumes. In response, Spaulding explained that the selection criteria employed by FRUS historians to keep compilations from growing “impracticabl[y] . . . bulky” necessarily led to the omission of most political reporting, routine correspondence, and other “background materials.”83 When Samuel Flagg Bemis cited gaps in a critical review of the 1928 FRUS volumes in the American Historical Review, Ralph Perkins84 suggested that the Department invite the AHA to “appoint a committee to investigate our problems and make a report” to the academic community. Such a committee would “give some time to the study and [have] full access to the records. They should be allowed to see the . . . files themselves. They should also see what omissions we have made because of objections in the Department or from foreign governments.”85

Following Perkins’s proposal, the Department invited scholars to a conference on the Foreign Relations series in October 1944. The agenda focused on editorial matters like the format, timeliness, scope, and annotations in the volumes. One attendee, Harvard law professor Manley O. Hudson, suggested that—for some academic purposes—the “series ‘presents too little too late.’” Hudson evaluated the utility of the series from a variety of academic disciplinary perspectives. To improve FRUS for historians, he urged the Department to streamline and accelerate the volumes. “For people interested in our current international relations,” Hudson concluded, “the excellent material in the volumes is wasted. It only appears after the occasion for its use has passed.”86 Although there is no evidence that the 1944 FRUS conference resulted in significant changes in editorial practice or afforded scholars an opportunity to compare published volumes with the unpublished record, it did foreshadow increasingly close collaboration regarding the series between the academic community and Department historians.87

Between 1920 and 1945, the Department of State released 56 FRUS volumes covering the years between 1913 and 1930. The average lag in publication doubled during the period. In the tense international atmosphere of the late 1930s and the war years, releasing sensitive documents that drew attention to the post-World War I settlement seemed unnecessarily risky to many in Europe and East Asia, but essential to democratic accountability in the United States. Balancing transparency and national security grew increasingly difficult during the 1930s and produced additional kinds of tension during the Second World War. In February 1945, as the prospect of victory over Germany came into view, Wilder Spaulding reported to Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish that “our first objective in publishing [FRUS] volumes is to produce a ‘substantially’ complete and honest definitive record which should, so far as possible, be above criticism by experts who are inevitably suspecting the Department of suppression of the record.” In balancing demands for timeliness and concerns for security, Spaulding predicted that “the nearest approach we can make to the ideal time lag would be ten years.”88 Despite John Bassett Moore’s persistent calls to restore FRUS to its 19th century standard of currency,89 even the series’s most ardent supporters no longer believed a one-year line possible. Nor did they consider it advisable. The events of the two decades after the 1925 Kellogg Order caused openness advocates to support a new transparency paradigm centered on historical accountability that arose after World War I. Nevertheless, the clearance battles of 1930–1945 paled in comparison to the controversies that buffeted FRUS as the United States waged the Cold War.