Chapter 7: “Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire,” 1945–1957

During the 12 years following World War II, the Department of State published 56 FRUS volumes, nearly doubling the pace established during the previous quarter century. The average publication lag crept upward from 16 years to 18 years. That relatively minor increase in the publication lag masked significant challenges to producing the series after World War II. The Cold War added another dimension to FRUS clearance difficulties because new entities such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Council played substantial roles in foreign affairs. During the interwar period, interagency coordination for research and declassification of Foreign Relations compilations had been largely unnecessary. Since practically all of the documentation for most volumes came from Department of State files, little reason existed to consult other agencies for clearance. Although the Paris Peace Conference volumes required an unprecedented amount of research beyond Department files, most of that work involved private papers at the Library of Congress.1 FRUS historians first confronted the documentary consequences of the rise of the national security state in the 1950s, when the U.S. Senate demanded that the Department of State publish the “Yalta Papers.”

“The Historical Voice of America”?: FRUS and Cold War Public Diplomacy

In July 1949, the distinguished historian of U.S. diplomacy Samuel Flagg Bemis reviewed the five Foreign Relations of the United States volumes for 1932 in the American Historical Review. His otherwise favorable comments concluded with a warning: “the present rate of back drift” could jeopardize the usefulness of the series unless Congress provided the resources for Department historians to keep up with the steady expansion of records generated by the U.S. Government in the new era of American global engagement. “If the editorial labors of the learned scholars in the Department of State are to be really useful in more than a remote academic sense,” Bemis argued, “Congress had better get a move on” and support “the historical Voice of America.”2

Bemis’s characterization of FRUS reflected ambiguities concerning the intended purposes and actual functions of the series in the postwar era. After all, Voice of America radio broadcasts, which the Department of State began managing in 1946, were not intended to present an objective viewpoint or conform to scholarly standards. Instead, the program operated as an instrument of public diplomacy and psychological warfare directed toward foreign audiences on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The interwar years had been a critical period in the evolution of the Foreign Relations series and, by the eve of World War II, FRUS had established an impressive scholarly reputation. During the war, Roosevelt preferred to employ the series—along with other government information programs—to mobilize public opinion. Even though Roosevelt delayed the Paris Peace Conference volumes, whose contents clashed with his propaganda requirements, his intervention did not alter the character of the series.

Within days of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, however, Wilder Spaulding advised Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish to approve a publication program designed to pre-empt historical revisionism concerning the origins of World War II. This project would release “full, frank, and convincing” documentation that was “much more complete than what was printed in [the 1943 volumes on prewar Pacific diplomacy] but . . . confined to the main line of events which lead [sic] directly to the war.” If the Department had difficulty gaining access to essential documents in Roosevelt’s papers that made it impossible to compile a coherent narrowly-focused collection of documents, it should “at least” accelerate FRUS to ensure that the available record reached the public “within the next four or five years.” Spaulding wanted the Department to employ FRUS to shape public and scholarly discourse about recent history in ways that served U.S. interests.3

This abortive project illustrated the possibility that policymakers would abandon the maturing 20th-century historical transparency paradigm in favor of a politicized alternative as they entered the postwar era. By 1947, historian Justin Hart argues, “the increasing relevance of public participation to U.S. foreign relations sent a clear message to U.S. officials” that “building public support for . . . strategic priorities at home as well as abroad” was essential. One way of securing support was “propaganda to get people speaking their language . . . of the Cold War.”4 Was Bemis more right than he knew when described the series as “the historical Voice of America” in 1949?

To be sure, U.S. officials believed that “objective” history could also promote U.S. interests during the Cold War. Between 1948 and 1952, the Department of State and the Truman administration published historical documents to support their diplomatic objectives. In January 1948, as American and British scholars collaborated to publish captured German documents, the United States “caught [the Soviets] flat-footed in what was the first effective blow . . . in a clear-cut propaganda war” when it unilaterally published the inflammatory Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (among other embarrassing records) in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941.5 In August 1949, the Department of State published a thousand-page dossier of documents on U.S. relations with China to defend the Truman administration from Republican charges that he had “lost” the mainland to Soviet-allied Communist revolutionaries.6 Despite the White Paper’s failure to deflect criticism of his China policy, President Harry Truman remained convinced that history could serve as a weapon in the Cold War. In a December 1950 letter to American Historical Association President Samuel Eliot Morison, Truman declared that “Communist imperialism has made falsehood a dangerous weapon; but truth can be a far more potent weapon. American historians can contribute to the cause of the free nations by helping the Government to record and interpret the policies our Nation is following to secure peace and freedom in the world.”7

In some ways, Cold War FRUS volumes also fell within Truman’s proposal that the United States deploy history as a “potent weapon.” For example, the Historical Division (HD) accelerated coverage of 1930s U.S.–Soviet relations in FRUS during the early 1950s in coordination with a planned (but never published) “White Book on . . . relations with the Soviets.” To differentiate the volume from propaganda, the preface specified that the published documents had been compiled according to FRUS principles. Clearance debates within the Department focused on information concerning the Soviet-Finnish War that could conceivably compromise Finnish officials who maintained a “very close connection” with Washington in 1939. The Department released the volume in 1952; FRUS had joined the Cold War.8

The Department correctly anticipated that the Foreign Relations series would help shape both American and international views about international politics. FRUS provided a vital resource for historians and political scientists whose goal was to educate the American public about the risks and opportunities of global leadership. Some volumes received media coverage. Foreign audiences paid attention to the documents printed in Foreign Relations because revelations about past U.S. policies contributed to foreign perceptions about America’s role in the world. Many in the Department of State and other agencies responsible for national security and foreign policy, therefore, believed the Foreign Relations series could shape international discourse—for good or ill. Across the U.S. Government, officials insisted that FRUS conform to their Cold War objectives.

To a limited extent, those officials got their wish. Instead of casting the 1925 Kellogg Order aside in favor of a propaganda mission for the series, the Department reinterpreted the 20th century transparency paradigm for a less secure world. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Cold War imperatives affected the timeliness of the series as well as decisionmaking about the declassification of U.S. Government records. When the Cold War began, FRUS averaged a 15-year publication line; by the 1980s, that lag had doubled to around 30 years. Volumes also received greater scrutiny within the U.S. Government before they were released. In part, this was a consequence of the widened bureaucratic scope of the compilations. As FRUS included more documents from government agencies beyond the Department of State, those agencies gained more authority to review the records chosen for publication. With additional veto-points for clearing records, the declassification process grew increasingly contentious and lengthy.

A qualitative shift also heightened the perceived risks of releasing historical information. As Mary Dudziak explains, “once war has begun, time is thought to proceed on a different plane,” requiring belligerents to embrace “extraordinary action” even as they “belie[ve] that [the wartime] moment will end decisively. . . . In wartime thinking, the future is a place beyond war, a time when exceptional measures can be put to rest, and regular life resumed.”9 For officials in the U.S. Government, the national security imperatives of the Cold War required just such a shift in temporality. They prioritized containing Communist influence and Soviet power above maintaining traditional levels of transparency in government.10 American officials wanted to cultivate partners abroad and feared releasing historical documents might provide fodder for adversaries’ propaganda or alienate current and potential allies. When foreign governments protested the inclusion of material in FRUS or when U.S. diplomats warned that records scheduled to be published in an upcoming volume could harm national interests—both of which occurred repeatedly throughout the Cold War—U.S. Government officials had to determine how to balance operational goals with the core values of democracy, accountability, and legitimacy. As they did so, FRUS evolved. The Cold War spawned key changes in the series: broadening its bureaucratic scope, limiting its size relative to the total archival record, and lengthening the gap between events and their documentation in FRUS.

The key catalyst for FRUS’s “modernization” came from an unexpected source: a partisan political maneuver in the early 1950s that resulted in the “Yalta Papers” controversy. The Yalta documentation project began in late 1947 as a classified analysis of wartime conference records requested by Department officials for internal use. The resultant policy study formed the basis of a FRUS project that commenced in the summer of 1953, after leading Republican Senators requested that the Department publish the records of Franklin Roosevelt’s controversial wartime diplomacy and accelerate the Foreign Relations series (which had fallen to an unprecedented 18 years behind currency). The FRUS acceleration initiative echoed 19th century congressional requests that generated Supplemental FRUS Submissions, but in the midst of the Cold War and an expanded national security state, the Senate’s initiative led to unintended and profound consequences.

The public controversies surrounding the volume caused the New York Times to declare the March 16, 1955 publication of the Yalta Papers among the “fifty important dates” of the year.11 The compiler of the volume, Bryton Barron, leaked information about its contents and debates over its publication to the press in 1954 and 1955. Release of the Yalta Papers generated headline news across the United States on March 17 and throughout the rest of the world the next day. Churchill commented on the documents in Parliament on March 17, President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the release at a press conference on the 23rd, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles faced an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 19 to explain the whole affair. After Barron was fired for insubordination, he launched a public campaign lambasting the Department of State and its Historical Division that led to further investigations.

The most significant effects of the Yalta Papers episode, however, only became apparent over time. Creating the volume forced FRUS historians to adopt key methodological changes. Expanded research and compilation expectations required Department historians, led by Bernard Noble, to mine an unprecedented array of governmental and non-governmental archives. To declassify and release these records only 10 years after the Yalta summit, even under insistent congressional pressure, Noble confronted intense opposition from officials in the Department of State and the Pentagon. The production of the Yalta volume established interagency precedents that shaped all subsequent FRUS volumes. Finally, the controversies surrounding creation of the volume spurred the Department to institutionalize academic community oversight for the series by creating the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC).

Most importantly, the Yalta Papers imbroglio confirmed FRUS’s shift from its original 19th century function to embrace a 20th century paradigm that traded timeliness for comprehensiveness. The volumes no longer manifested constitutional checks and balances, or a contemporary accounting of diplomatic activities. Instead, FRUS emerged as the leading vehicle for responsible historical transparency. FRUS readers gained richer historical documentation about U.S. foreign policy drawn from a wider variety of sources, but they paid a steadily mounting price as the publication lag for the series grew.

“These Publications Would Be of Tremendous Value”: The Politics of the Yalta Papers

Columbia University Ph.D. (1935) and former Reed College political science professor Bernard Noble took charge of a reorganized Historical Policy Research Division (RE) in 1946. This reorganization placed the editing and publication functions—including FRUS-related technical editing and printing responsibilities—into a revived Division of Publications (PB) headed by Wilder Spaulding. Noble’s staff researched and coordinated declassification of FRUS, participated in the Anglo-American Documents on German Foreign Policy project,12 administered the Department’s library, and performed policy-supportive historical research studies for Department officials. As initially organized, RE devoted more personnel to FRUS production than any other function; the Foreign Relations Branch had a staff of 15 while the Library Branch totaled 13 members and the Foreign Policy Studies Branch numbered 12.13 For most—but not all—of the years that followed, FRUS shared an organizational home with professional historians assigned to policy-supportive research projects.

In the midst of mounting Cold War tensions, policymakers needed a clear understanding of wartime diplomacy to build a stable postwar order. In November 1947, the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs (FE) requested that RE compile information about international conference discussions and decisions relating to East Asia dating back to 1943. Franklin Roosevelt had marginalized the Department of State as he conducted high-level diplomacy from the White House. Department officials, therefore, lacked important information about critical negotiations and agreements. With records of the major summit meetings scattered in various office and personal file collections across the Department—as well as throughout the rest of the government—seemingly straightforward questions like “What did Roosevelt discuss with Chiang at the First Cairo Conference?” proved nearly impossible to answer.14

The Department’s records proved inadequate to the task of producing a comprehensible account of the Yalta Conference. To the extent that the Department had an institutional memory of the wartime conferences, it was maintained by Charles Bohlen, Counselor of the Department. His office files included the informal minutes he kept as Franklin Roosevelt’s interpreter in meetings with Josef Stalin. In 1948 and 1949, RE began collecting additional relevant records in other Department offices and bureaus as well as non-Departmental sources, including the Pentagon, the White House, and the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, NY. Even for a classified, official policy study, securing access to records outside of the Department of State, especially those of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), proved difficult for RE researchers. After Bohlen transferred certain records to the Department’s recordkeeping system in the summer of 1949, RE took over full responsibility for systematically compiling the records of all the wartime conferences.15

These compilations proved unexpectedly challenging for researchers accustomed to mining the Department of State’s central files to produce comprehensive documentary collections. Roosevelt himself created one daunting obstacle—he disliked keeping detailed records of decisionmaking. As Ralph Perkins, the Chief of the Foreign Relations Branch of RE, noted, “it appears that President Roosevelt was not in the habit of making memoranda of his conversation.”16 The most meticulous records for many of the wartime conferences were those kept by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who often served as Roosevelt’s primary advisers at summit meetings where military strategy and operational planning dominated the agenda.17 Department of Defense officials, however, were reluctant to share their records with historians from the Department of State. In 1952, a Pentagon request for Department of State records of the Tehran Conference gave RE the opportunity to propose more expansive cooperation and records sharing. The resulting access allowed RE to make progress on classified compilations for official use within the Department.18

As RE accumulated the records of Roosevelt’s summits, partisan debate focused public attention on wartime diplomacy.19 By 1950, escalating conservative demands to divulge the secrets of Yalta and other wartime conferences led Noble to inform Secretary of State Dean Acheson that the existing public record was “substantially complete” from the memoir literature and that publishing the Yalta documents posed several risks. Some statements in the minutes of summit meetings, he advised, could prove embarrassing to the United States and Great Britain. The lack of agreed minutes might allow the Soviet Union to release an “alternate” version of the conference to mobilize world opinion against the West.20 Finally, Noble warned that the Department’s poor wartime recordkeeping left it incapable of satisfying the inevitable public demand for releasing the records of the other conferences. “With respect to the First Cairo Conference of 1943,” he admitted, “the real reason we cannot publish the minutes of the political discussions is that we have none . . . and that fact cannot be disclosed without giving the Chinese a completely free hand in telling us and the world just what commitments President Roosevelt made or may be alleged to have made at Cairo.”21 Choosing security over transparency, the Department kept the Yalta records secret.

After Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election in 1952, the new Republican congressional majority dictated a different choice. On April 22, 1953, Senate Majority Leader William Knowland (R–CA) sent Secretary of State John Foster Dulles a letter that quoted from an unattributed memorandum claiming that RE was sitting on “a rich mine of historical materials of immediate political significance.” Knowland’s source explained that, “before the American people can know in detail the bungling of diplomacy by the Roosevelt-Truman Administrations this material must be published.” Unfortunately, “old-line administrators” and “Roosevelt–Acheson supporters” in the Department of State had “stalled publications of any political importance for the Republicans,” especially FRUS volumes for the World War II years. Publishing these records could “give in detail the mishandling of Japanese relations, the failures to estimate the Russian role in the Far East, and the omissions of previous State Department publications on Japanese-American relations” and also “demolish the claims of the China White Paper and confirm the charges of Democratic misjudgment on the Far East.” Knowland’s correspondent predicted that “if Democratic holdovers in the Division of Historical Policy Research are prevented from excluding key documents these publications would be of tremendous value.” In addition to accelerating production of FRUS volumes covering U.S. policy toward China in the 1940s, Knowland requested Dulles to publish a special series on the secret wartime conferences held between Allied leaders during World War II.22 Bernard Noble did not wait for the newly ascendant Republicans to make these demands. He proposed publishing the Yalta records in advance of the regular FRUS volumes on March 6.23

Knowland’s request led to an investigation of the Historical Research Division and a crash program to accelerate FRUS. The investigation exonerated the leadership of the renamed Historical Division (HD) of partisan shenanigans, but failed to satisfy critics like staff historian Bryton Barron, who continued to accuse HD management of manipulating history for partisan purposes even as he bungled his assignment to complete compilation of the Yalta volume in 1954 and 1955. The FRUS acceleration plan assigned the China series to the Foreign Relations Branch, while the Policy Studies Branch focused on the wartime conference volumes. As a result of this attempt to speed up production, the historians working on the conference volumes were not necessarily familiar with—or constrained by—existing FRUS methodologies.24

The continued sensitivity of many of the issues discussed at the wartime conferences and the partisan aura of the accelerated production of FRUS alarmed other government agencies and former officials. Already-obtained documents had to undergo declassification review and those who controlled access to as-yet untapped sources were wary of the widely-reported partisan dimension of the project. It took years for HD to gain access to Truman’s papers for the Potsdam volumes, and the widow of Edward Stettinius (the Secretary of State who attended the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt) refused to allow the Department to examine her husband’s papers held at the University of Virginia.25 Even some agencies that had cooperated with the original policy study resisted additional requests for access or declassification. The most consequential bureaucratic opposition to releasing the Yalta volume came from the Pentagon.

Interagency rancor bedeviled the Yalta Papers. Without established procedures for interagency researcher access or declassification review, the Departments of State and Defense had to build a collaborative FRUS process from scratch. Facing tight deadlines and congressional scrutiny, both sides pursued their conflicting institutional priorities in a messy process of trial, error, and recrimination. Despite the Secretary of Defense’s pledge of cooperation, his chief historian, Rudolph Winnacker, repeatedly recoiled at Noble’s efforts to examine military records.26 An April 1954 White House meeting between Noble and Winnacker to clarify the Pentagon’s role and responsibilities for FRUS reduced bureaucratic friction, but failed to harmonize thinking between State and Defense. Although Winnacker agreed that the wartime conference volumes had to include “high-level” papers containing “official [military] positions and advice,” he and the JCS insisted that this “agreed scope” be defined as narrowly as possible.27 For their part, State historians were all too aware that incorporating non-Department of State records into FRUS was likely to be “the big problem from 1941 on”—and that they were “now coming up to it face to face.”28 Both HD and the Pentagon realized that they were negotiating precedents for the future in an atmosphere charged with partisanship. At one point in the summer of 1954, Winnacker exploded in frustration, characterizing the way that Department of State historians handled Pentagon equities as “outrageous and indefensible.” He accused Noble of “telling the Department of Defense to go to hell.”29 These bureaucratic tensions over FRUS continued to plague the Yalta project, disrupting congressionally-mandated deadlines and, briefly, jeopardizing the future of the series.

Powerful opponents of publishing the Yalta Papers tried to scuttle the project in 1954. In Congress, the conservative FRUS acceleration agenda championed by Knowland and other Republican Senators clashed with the House Appropriations Committee’s austerity agenda. In its FY 1955 report, the House Committee eliminated funds for compiling and printing the Foreign Relations series. While the Senate Appropriations Committee restored funding after its hearings in the spring of 1954, the political maneuvering over FRUS remained at a fever pitch as Democrats and Republicans alike perceived the series as a potential weapon for partisan purposes.30

Doubts about publishing the Yalta Papers also crystallized in the executive branch. In an August 1954 review of the first galley proofs of the volume, Winnacker conceded that “the responsibility for decision” to proceed with publishing the Yalta Foreign Relations volume “is not mine nor that of the Department of Defense, but that of the Department of State.” He nonetheless tried to convince his counterparts across the Potomac that “this publication at the present time under U.S. Government auspices is not in the national interest.” Despite his familiarity with the wealth of material already a part of the public record, Winnacker reported “a sense of shock when reading in the present EDC [European Defense Community] atmosphere the actual 1945 plans for the postwar treatment of Germany, its dismemberment, reparations, and standard of living.” He predicted that “the cavalier disposal of smaller countries or the attitude toward France is also not likely to facilitate our foreign relations.” He also suggested that the compilation would be subjected to withering criticism for the absence of documents from the papers of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and an “indefensible,” “arbitrary, incomplete, and, at times, silly” selection of pre-conference records. “With such shenanigans,” he predicted, “it is doubtful, to say the least, that this publication will enjoy a reputation for reliability.” Winnacker concluded his review by recommending the project either be forgotten, be published in a revised form (along with “an understanding that mutual assistance funds are to be increased to undo the damage”), or be published in a revised form subject to controls that would “prohibit export or republication in foreign languages.” The one alternative that Winnacker could not accept was to “publish it as a Government publication and ‘In God we Trust.’”31

Within the Department of State itself, the Bureau of European Affairs (EUR) also advised that the Yalta volume was too sensitive to release. Livingston Merchant, the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, argued that “publication at this time would give a great deal of ammunition to the Soviets, as well as to the displaced or subjugated peoples in Central and Eastern Europe, the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, which could be used against the U.S. Government on questions which are still controversial and far from settled (e.g. territorial changes).” Merchant urged Dulles to order the deletion of pre-conference background materials that revealed “the permanent workings of the Department, inter-agency conflicts, statements of long-term interests[,] and reports on our allies,” all of which would be of tremendous “intelligence value to other foreign offices.” He feared that “one lesson other foreign offices might draw from such disclosures would be to be more careful about giving us information in the future.” Another danger was that publication would “undermine the relationship of future Secretaries of State and their professional advisors,” which required an “uninhibited willingness . . . to express their views freely . . . on controversial issues.”32

Coburn Kidd, head of the Office of German Political Affairs, went further. He worried that “the cure that is apt to suggest itself to a great many people will be ‘no more secrecy,’ whereas what may be needed is ‘a good deal more diplomacy.’” Although he recognized that the Yalta compilation “contains some material which could be used . . . to illustrate the shortcomings of the preceding Administration,” Kidd cautioned that “it contains a great deal more which could be used by foreign countries against the U.S. Government and which could be used by the legislative branch against the Executive.” He warned that “if the conclusion were to be drawn from this one conference and agreement that all international conferences and agreements were too full of risk . . . or if the publication of this story ten years after the event sets a precedent for the next administration to publish state papers five years after the event, we should be out of the frying pan into the fire.”33

In the summer and fall of 1954, EUR did all it could to block release of the Yalta Papers. Bureau officials recommended eliminating the briefing papers in the pre-conference section and discussions of the German-Polish border question. They also dismissed the relevance of previous memoir disclosures in emphasizing the potential repercussions of officially acknowledging sensitive documents by publishing them in FRUS. In essence, EUR urged Secretary Dulles to cut out the heart of the Yalta volume.34 In September 1954, Dulles rejected EUR’s views, but delayed publication until after the imminent midterm election “so as not to,” as the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Carl McCardle put it, “damn the entire operation as political.”35

The Yalta volume still faced another significant obstacle: the British Government had to approve the release of Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff papers that were included in the compilation. As early as November 1953, Richardson Dougall (head of the Policy Studies Branch with responsibility for the wartime conference volumes) had suggested reaching out to Whitehall informally to gauge HMG’s thinking about publishing the records of the wartime summit meetings. In February 1954, Noble heard from James Passant, at the Foreign Office Library, that consultations with the Cabinet Office had begun but that he did “not think it at all likely that permission will be given for the publication in extenso of any of these records which have not yet been published.” Noble replied the following month to suggest that “there is not much secrecy left to the official records of the conference proceedings” after the flood of memoirs during the past nine years. He also assured the British that “none of your documents would be published by us without your consent.” Passant remained skeptical of the project and, in April, urged Noble to lobby the Department to make an official approach to London “on the question of principle involved before any unilateral publication of classified records of conferences” was undertaken.36 This was not done. Under existing Department of State procedures for handling FGI, the British had no right to decide whether to release U.S.-origin documents—even those containing substantial and potentially-sensitive British information (such as Bohlen’s and then-Director of European Affairs Freeman Matthews’s notes of negotiating sessions that formed the heart of the Yalta compilation).37 Unlike the Department’s documentary diplomacy for the Paris Peace Conference subseries in 1938, the U.S. Government never consulted with any foreign government on the basic decision to publish the Yalta records.

Instead, the Department began the formal clearance process for British- and jointly-originated documents with London in July 1954. The British proved reticent. From London, where Winston Churchill38 and Anthony Eden had resumed their wartime positions as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, it appeared that the U.S. Government was relying on a narrow technicality to prevent the British Government from protecting its own legitimate interests. Although the Foreign Office assented to publication of most British documents, Eden asked to review the entire compilation before publication. The Department sent proofs of the complete Yalta volume to London—for “information only,” not for clearance—in early December. In early January 1955, after several weeks of waiting for British approval for a few remaining British-origin documents and after consulting with Eisenhower about the volume, Dulles informed Eden that the Department would proceed with publication “unless you have some personal observations that you would want me to consider.”39 Eden did. On January 13, the Foreign Minister explained his “very real concern over the publication of all these documents so soon after the event.” He argued that “publication now of such detailed records may cause misunderstanding or create controversy without significantly increasing public knowledge of the events” and warned that British “anxieties about this project and our fear that the publication of such detailed records in the political lifetime of so many of the participants may make it difficult for us to be as frank as we should wish in future conferences.”40

Eden’s message put Dulles and the Department in a difficult position. Senate conservatives had already complained bitterly after the Yalta volume was delayed before the 1954 midterm elections;41 leaks to the press were stoking public interest,42 and now London introduced another roadblock to publishing the volume. Dulles suggested removing all references to Churchill and Eden from the compilation until Noble explained that such deletions would render the summit meetings incomprehensible and the volume worthless. Dulles grew increasingly frustrated, and when, in late January, McCardle worried that the intense interest in the Yalta volume made leaks inevitable, the Secretary confessed that he “wouldn’t mind that.” In the same conversation, Dulles pointed out that Senator Knowland and his conservative colleagues had pushed the Department of State to expedite FRUS because “they thought there was a lot of stuff which would be useful. Actually there is nothing.” After several weeks of debate, Dulles accepted Noble’s suggestion to limit access to the galleys (and responsibility for leaks) to Congress.43

With Democrats back in the majority on Capitol Hill in January 1955, however, that strategy backfired. After gaining control of the congressional committees that had originally demanded the wartime conference volumes, Democratic leaders refused to accept delivery of the Yalta records, disclaiming responsibility for the classified documents and demanding to know why the Department didn’t publish the volume itself. Aware that blaming Great Britain could damage relations with London, Department spokesman Henry Suydam hedged, saying the Yalta Papers contained information potentially damaging to “national security and our relations with other powers.”44 Technically, the compilation had been declassified when Dulles approved the volume’s publication in November, but, by justifying continued secrecy on security grounds, the Department worsened its already compromised position.

As rumors swirled about the contents of the Yalta Papers and the reason why they could not be released, New York Times reporter James Reston approached Assistant Secretary McCardle and offered to publish the Yalta records in full to prevent protracted damage from their piecemeal release. On March 15, 1955, McCardle gave Reston a copy of the Yalta galleys. The Chicago Tribune quickly caught wind of the scoop and enlisted Senator Everett Dirksen (R–IL) to demand that Dulles release the volume to everyone.45 Backed into a corner, Dulles cabled London to explain that he had no choice but to officially release the leaked volume. Eden realized that further resistance was futile—and potentially toxic for Great Britain’s image in the United States—and accepted the fait accompli.46

The release of the Yalta Papers on the evening of March 16 sparked headlines across the United States and the rest of the world.47 At home, coverage emphasized Roosevelt’s discussions about the future of Poland and the Far East and Alger Hiss’s role at the summit. Columnists, including Walter Lippmann, debated the propriety of publishing unofficial records of informal conversations and the wisdom of pursuing summit diplomacy in the future.48 To many, the partisan agenda behind the Yalta Papers seemed more newsworthy than the release of any additional, official evidence for conservative attacks on Roosevelt.49 Instead of damaging Democrats with new, sensational disclosures, the Yalta Papers showed that the public already knew what happened at Yalta.50 Scholars voraciously consumed the released documents to enrich their assessments of both recent history and current events.51 When Dulles testified about their release before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, Democratic Congressmen pummeled the Secretary with questions about security breaches and the mishandling of classified information.52

In the short term, U.S. policymakers worried about the international reaction to the Yalta Papers. One area of obvious concern was Anglo-American relations, already strained by disputes over China and U.S. skepticism of Churchill’s hopes for Cold War summit diplomacy. Many foreign observers saw the Yalta release as a Department of State gambit to undermine Churchill’s hopes for further “parleys” between world leaders.53 In public, British leaders took pains to distance themselves from the Yalta Papers and downplay their significance. Speaking in Parliament on March 17, Churchill explained that British records reflected a different story than the American documents—although he declined requests from members of the House of Commons to publish any British records to show how.54 Behind the scenes, Eden reminded Dulles on March 21 that HMG remained opposed to the publication of recent diplomatic records, especially the Potsdam FRUS volumes that were rumored to be nearing release later in the spring.55 At a press conference on March 23, President Eisenhower acknowledged that there had been “some difference of opinion” between the United States and Great Britain while denying that the United States had acted in bad faith in releasing the Yalta Papers. In a letter to Churchill, Eisenhower admitted that “both Foster and I have been unhappy about the affair,” but that “future political battles will create . . . irresistible demands for the publication of particular papers.”56

Both U.S. and British officials were concerned that the Yalta Papers could jeopardize NATO’s expansion to include West Germany. The Yalta Papers appeared on the eve of votes in France and Germany to complete ratification of the London and Paris Agreements and to usher a rearmed Federal Republic into the Western alliance. In both countries, however, the Yalta Papers had little effect on policy. Some French politicians used them to illustrate the danger of French isolation and “the empty chair” (the French were not invited to Yalta) while others blamed Anglo-American chauvinism for dividing the continent.57 Western-leaning Germans explained that the anti-German sentiment exhibited by Roosevelt and Churchill was an inevitable consequence of Nazi aggression and an argument for continuing liberal reforms and contributing to Western security. Neutralist opponents of alignment with the West used the papers to question Western commitment to German unity.58 For Western European leaders, the Yalta Papers served as additional ammunition for debates that were already underway rather than as a catalyst for rethinking Cold War policies.

In the rest of the world, the Yalta Papers were a temporary irritant in relations with the United States. The most common reaction in the foreign press was criticism that the release of the Yalta Papers had been driven by partisan politics. For those predisposed to criticize Dulles, the release offered powerful evidence of his “utter incompetence to handle affairs of nations with necessary tact and discretion.”59 Smaller countries found in the documents affirmation of the superpowers’ indifference to their fates. According to an intelligence report prepared in the Department of State, Taiwanese officials privately celebrated to U.S. diplomats that the Yalta Papers helped prove that the U.S. had “lost” China and therefore had a moral obligation to help liberate the mainland. From Moscow, U.S. Ambassador Charles Bohlen reported that Soviet propaganda cited the publication of the “so-called” Yalta Papers as evidence that the United States had abandoned wartime cooperation, undermined the United Nations, and eschewed future summit diplomacy. Later, after the Yalta FRUS volume was printed and published in December, Pravda characterized it (along with the March release) as a “falsification of history in service of [the] Cold War.” As irritating as the release of the Yalta documents proved for America’s foreign relations, short-term embarrassment did not fester into lasting damage to U.S. interests abroad.60

The Yalta Papers imbroglio proved most consequential within the U.S. Government. Within days of their release on March 16, Winnacker, backed by the JCS, urged the Secretary of Defense to insist on “additional terms of reference . . . to prevent a repetition of the Yalta experience.” He complained that “the entire compilation process during the past months has been accompanied by security violations in the form of leaks of still-classified information to the press, culminating in the clandestine transmittal of a copy of the entire Yalta volume to the New York Times.” He also resented that his advice, which predicted that publishing the Yalta volume would be “prejudicial to the defense interests of the United States,” had been “ignored” despite the “intent of the National Security Act of 1947 . . . to give Defense a voice in decisions on international problems.” Winnacker suggested that “the current State Department concept for its Foreign Relations series,” which “provides for the detailed publication of how policy decisions were reached within this Government, . . . is no longer appropriate for the U.S. now that we are the major world power.” Unless new terms of reference for Defense cooperation could be reached, Winnacker decided, “no more classified military documents will be made available to State for this project.”61

Negotiations between the Departments of State and Defense over terms of reference for future collaboration on FRUS began in June 1955 and continued until October. When Noble received a copy of Winnacker’s memorandum in May, he pushed back against Winnacker’s expansive claims for Defense Department authority and his objections to FRUS. Noble argued “it is difficult to see why the fact that the United States is now a major world power should change [the FRUS] concept. Indeed, the growing complexity of our foreign relations would seem to make it even more important to provide our citizens with the facts of our policy.”62 For Department of State historians, the key issues to resolve were the scope of the military documentation to be included in future volumes, security handling of records not yet declassified, and administrative procedures for decisionmaking about the declassification and release of specific documents. In the Pentagon, the JCS acted to preserve military institutional prerogatives and force the Department of State to pay greater heed to military advice about declassification issues. Negotiations were fraught with bitterness on both sides. In HD, Assistant Chief for Policy Studies William Franklin fumed that “over-classification, combined with a highly bureaucratic reluctance to declassify documents even ten or more years old, has been a very real part of our basic difficulty with Defense.” In October, State and Defense finally agreed on terms of reference for future World War II-era FRUS volumes that affirmed continued inclusion of high-level military documents and preserved State authority over “political” decisions regarding national interests and declassification.63

As State historians soon discovered, however, opposition to FRUS proved tenacious for the remainder of the decade. Within weeks, they found that the new Terms of Reference gave the Pentagon additional tools to withhold essential documents. The Department of Defense rejected precedents set with the Yalta and Potsdam compilations and interpreted the new agreement more narrowly to exclude the minutes of JCS meetings from the Cairo-Tehran volume. Defense officials also continued to weigh in on questions of political interest, which had been assigned to the Department of State’s exclusive purview, such as whether to publish Potsdam conference discussions about the Dardanelles.64 Inside the Department of State, officials in various geographic bureaus described the Yalta release as an experience to avoid in the future, and their objections ultimately delayed release of the China and Potsdam volumes until the time of the Kennedy administration.65

Multiple démarches from abroad66 spurred a debate about how (friendly) FGI incorporated into U.S. documents should be cleared for future FRUS compilations. HD argued that only foreign government-originated documents should be submitted for foreign government clearance and that decisions on U.S. documents—regardless of the kind of information that they might contain—should be made exclusively within the U.S. Government. Other Department officials argued that friendly foreign governments should agree before the U.S. Government published documents containing information that they provided. The Department ultimately affirmed the existing distinction between foreign government-originated documents and U.S. documents with FGI, but the Cairo-Tehran and Potsdam compilations—like the Yalta Papers before them—were both sent to London for the British Government’s “information only.”67 In 1961, officials in the Bureau of American Republic Affairs proposed that U.S. memoranda of confidential conversations with foreign officials be cleared with the foreign governments in question before being published in FRUS. Historians in the (yet again renamed) Historical Office (HO) argued that the existing system of clearances within the Department safeguarded the legitimate sensitivities of foreign governments and that consulting other governments about publication decisions would create more problems than it would prevent. The Department again affirmed its existing FGI procedures.68

In sum, the Yalta volume exacerbated institutional struggles within the Department of State, between the Department and other national security bureaucracies, and between the United States and friendly foreign governments over the authority to define national interests and properly balance security and transparency. Ultimately, the Yalta Papers controversy strengthened the Department’s commitment to publish comprehensive and objective documentary histories of U.S. foreign policy.

The Formation of the Historical Advisory Committee, 1956–1957

Formalization of the relationship between Department historians and the academic community proved to be the most lasting legacy of the Yalta FRUS volume. When Congress linked continued support for FRUS to partisan demands for the Yalta Papers, the historians, political scientists, and international lawyers who relied on the series worried about its integrity and its survival. They expressed suspicions about the partisan prioritization of the wartime conference and China volumes, which were scheduled for release before regular annual volumes could establish the broader context for these controversial episodes. Although academic groups hoped to prevent further conservative pressure on the series by passing resolutions affirming the desirability of publishing FRUS volumes chronologically, many scholars also found right-wing accusations of censorship in the Yalta compilation alarming. Prominent diplomatic historians, like Howard Beale, urged the leadership of the American Historical Association to investigate these charges to safeguard the integrity of the Foreign Relations series.69

The most consequential critic of the Yalta FRUS was the volume’s original compiler, Bryton Barron. Although Barron had been part of the FRUS staff between 1929 and 1944 (rising to the rank of Assistant Chief of the Division in 1940), his presence in HD during the 1950s followed a disastrous stint as Chief of the Treaty Section from 1944 to 1950. There, Barron’s mismanagement sparked widespread staff criticism. Following an investigation that concluded that “Barron’s personal methods of operation . . . can no longer be tolerated,” he was demoted and reassigned to RE. There, Barron’s superiors suspected that he began leaking “material to editors of weekly magazines . . . defamatory to the Department of State and its officials.”70 He also leaked such information to Republican political leaders after Eisenhower’s election in 1952. In December 1952, Barron advised Dulles’s personal assistant, Roderic O’Connor, how to give the Department a “housecleaning” that would oust “friends of Alger Hiss and his sympathizers” and reduce the “disproportionate influence . . . exercised by the foreign born.”71 Even before being assigned to compile the Yalta documents for FRUS, Barron was a troublesome addition to RE.

Once assigned to the Yalta compilation, Barron relentlessly criticized management decisions related to the wartime conference volumes. To cultivate congressional pressure on the Department, and especially HD, Barron passed to political allies accusations that Noble, Franklin, and the Roosevelt Presidential Library intentionally suppressed information that could embarrass FDR.72 He selected for publication relatively insignificant documents that reflected poorly on Roosevelt’s decisions and ignored more significant ones that didn’t. He complained that the compilation obscured the influence of Alger Hiss by scattering his papers throughout the volume rather than collecting them in a discrete section. He doubted that Noble and Franklin had exhausted all their options to examine papers controlled by the Stettinius estate and James F. Byrnes (who had attended the Yalta summit as the Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion). He felt betrayed when Dulles postponed publication until after the 1954 midterm elections. With each allegation, Noble and Franklin carefully documented the substance and rationale for their decisions to guard against Barron’s continual appeals to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Robinson McIlvaine, Assistant Secretary McCardle, and congressional critics.73

Barron’s actions embittered his colleagues within HD. When interviewed for a subsequent congressional investigation into Barron’s charges against the Division, none of the HD staff “furnished favorable comment concerning [Barron’s] character, demeanor, or ability.”74 The Department forced Barron to accept early retirement in August 1955.75 After his dismissal, Barron took his charges against Noble, the Historical Division, and the Department to the public in a series of speeches, articles, books, and appearances before Congress, and as the John Birch Society’s coordinator for Northern Virginia.76 An investigation ordered by Congress in 1956 refuted Barron’s charges of political bias in the Historical Division and illegitimate censorship in the Yalta compilation.77

As the Historical Division grappled with partisan intrigue, interagency conflict, and office disruptions in the wake of the release of the Yalta Papers, Noble found the prospect of academic oversight a useful buffer against continued congressional scrutiny. He cooperated with the AHA and other professional organizations as they inquired about the status of FRUS in 1955. In early 1956, Noble contacted noted diplomatic historian Dexter Perkins, then President of the AHA, to propose that the academic community institutionalize its engagement with HD and FRUS into a permanent advisory committee. Noble explained that “in this day and time, when the number of diplomatic papers has reached such gigantic proportions, the task of compiling Foreign Relations has become inordinately complicated.” He elaborated that the Historical Division “would welcome highly qualified professional advice from the outside” on “a number of problems involving the scope of the selection of the papers, the nature of the contents of the volumes, and the inadequacy of State Department files to cover the subject of our foreign relations.”78

Throughout the rest of the year, HD cultivated academic and Department support for an advisory committee. Noble’s efforts with private scholars and professional organizations representing historians, political scientists, and international lawyers proceeded relatively smoothly over the course of 1956 and 1957. The American Historical Association, the American Society of International Law, and the American Political Science Association nominated candidates for service on the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC), and HD selected the nominees who were subsequently invited to join the Committee by the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. The HAC members received security clearances in line with existing Department procedures for granting access to unreleased (and potentially sensitive) information to approved “serious” researchers.79

Within the Department, progress was smooth until the eve of the first HAC meeting, when Dulles grew “fearful that we were creating a group who would only put pressure on us for earlier and more full publication despite contrary foreign policy effects.” Over the previous year, Noble had secured support from Robert Murphy, the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs as well as officials in the Public Affairs, Administration, and Legal Affairs Bureaus by claiming that “the advice of eminent private scholars who use the Foreign Relations volumes would be of real use to the Historical Division” in answering increasingly thorny questions of the proper scope and organization of the series. He also anticipated that an advisory committee would “provide an excellent liaison between the Department’s historical functions and the scholarly world” and become a “valuable asset from the point of view of the Department’s public relations.” Though Dulles was less sanguine about the Committee’s potential value to the Department, he recognized that the Department “could not backtrack on the decision to utilize an advisory committee.” Participants at Dulles’s October 30, 1957 staff meeting concluded that the challenge facing HD and the Department as a whole was to “explore” the “nature of its activities” and “steer” the new HAC in “the most constructive direction.”80

Before the December 6 meeting, Richard Leopold, a Northwestern University diplomatic historian selected to serve on the HAC, consulted with George F. Kennan, the celebrated U.S. diplomat and former Director of the Policy Planning Staff, about the future of the series. Leopold expressed concern that the Department was poorly equipped to broaden the scope of documentation beyond its own records or protect itself from “charge[s] of selectivity and intentional distortion or suppression.” He wondered if “the time has come to take the compilation of the Foreign Relations series out of the hands of the Department of State and make it the responsibility of some inter-departmental agency.” Kennan, in turn, sought advice from British historian and diplomatic documentary editor Llewellyn Woodward and future philanthropic administrator Gerald Freund. After corresponding with these colleagues, Kennan agreed that the scope of FRUS had to be broadened beyond Department of State records to provide an “adequate” account of U.S. foreign policy. To achieve this, he suggested that the Department hand the project over to a “semi-private academic unit” that would limit coverage to “subjects or episodes of major importance.” Kennan also urged that “special precautions” be taken “to assure the high scholarly capability, wisdom, and integrity . . . of those to whom this really great responsibility would be given.” Major academic organizations like the American Historical Association and the Council of Learned Societies, he concluded, should determine “who would be entrusted with this work.”81 Although Leopold did not cite Kennan’s advice at the 1957 HAC meeting, their exchange illustrated the wide range of possibilities that a diverse array of stakeholders considered for reforming the series after the Yalta Papers incident.

The first meeting of the HAC,82 held in December 1957, focused on improving existing FRUS production processes. HD staffers and Department officials briefed the seven assembled historians, political scientists, and international law scholars on the FRUS production process. They explained the new challenges that had arisen as FRUS historians sought access to significant documents outside Department files and clearance for such material to be published in the series. They also asked for guidance about the preferences of FRUS’s academic consumers. Participants at this meeting—as they would at HAC meetings throughout the ensuing decades—struggled to reconcile competing priorities. Scholars wanted complete volumes, but comprehensiveness entailed significant delays for access and clearance. Despite his skepticism about the Committee, Dulles stopped by to thank them for assisting the Department in dealing with problems “of very, very great difficulty.”83

In 1959, HD historians began the practice of employing HAC criticism of excessive delays or extensive excisions in the declassification process as “ammunition for dealing with the geographic bureaus [of the Department of State].”84 In the short term, Department historians regarded the HAC as a source of cover from partisan pressures, of guidance for adapting the series to a new Cold War era, and of leverage in bureaucratic battles over declassification.

The formation of the HAC confirmed FRUS’s shift from 19th century practices that linked the series to Congress toward a 20th century historical transparency regime reflecting scholarly expectations for comprehensive disclosure. Over time, the HAC gained significant institutional power. During the Cold War, the Committee helped to shape the Foreign Relations series and regulate the balance between national security and governmental transparency. Over the following decades, the HAC joined policymakers and Department of State historians as they struggled to renegotiate responsible historical transparency and to accelerate the production of Foreign Relations volumes amidst resource and security constraints.