THE JOURNALIST'S ARCHIVE:
WHERE MEGALOMANIA IS A GIFT TO THE AGES
Exploring a personal archive is an attempt to understand and animate the past
-- a past that is entombed in paper. Layer after layer of contradictions and
complexities materialize in long- forgotten diary entries, in block letters
printed on dog-eared report cards, and in yellowed but still-breathless love
letters. Each manila folder reveals another plane of personality, and before
long a pulse materializes in all the paper -- a faint but insistent echo of
life. A researcher, who is part scholar, part voyeur, begins to relive that
life and ultimately is claimed by it. Again and again during the more than
four hundred hours I spent reading the correspondence, diaries, notebooks, and
manuscripts in Theodore H. White's archives at Harvard University and the
smaller collection of his papers at the John F. Kennedy Library, a single,
embarrassingly prosaic question intruded in my thoughts: "Why did he save all
this stuff?" White's correspondence with eight American presidents certainly
has obvious historic value. His World War II-era jottings about encounters with
Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Sun Yat-sen are likely to intrigue China scholars.[1]
And those letters from Jackie Onassis may someday titillate one of her many
biographers.[2] But why, I repeatedly wondered, would White, who died in 1986,
save those excruciatingly explicit notes about the workings of his digestive
system? Does his widow know that detailed accounts of their increasingly
frequent marital spats are preserved for posterity at Harvard? And what ever
possessed him to keep copies of those complaint letters to Sears Roebuck and
Company about the heating element in his electric blanket?
Those questions haunted me long after my labors in the White archives had
concluded. Their persistence led to further questions, all of which speak to
issues about the quality of information that will be available to future
scholars and researchers whose interests center on journalism of the late
twentieth century: Do all journalists and non-fiction writers "save all this
stuff?" What sort of material will the next generation of researchers find in
the archives of contemporary journalists? Do these writers ever use the
material they so laboriously save? Are they bothered by the thought of who
might see it and how it might be interpreted in decades to come? How do they
decide where it will go after their deaths? Why do libraries want these
collections? Why is this material so carefully preserved, often at considerable
cost? Those questions carried me into the world of archival collections and
into an exploration of how the records are preserved for those who will analyze
and interpret both the individual journalists and the journalism of our age.
Fortunately perhaps for those scholars and graduate students who will explore
the lives of contemporary journalists, most writers seem to share White's
compulsion to collect -- or at least his inability to discard -- even those
seemingly inane letters to Sears Roebuck. The two extremes in archival
collections are perhaps best represented in the collections of Barbara Tuchman
and Margaret Bourke-White. Tuchman, who died in 1989, left a comparatively
slender archive to Yale University, but she carefully cleansed that material of
all personal information. Although she herself had used that same material to
abundant advantage, particularly in Stilwell and the American Experience in
China, Tuchman insisted that she didn't want "some graduate student" prowling
through her private affairs after her death. Besides, she once insisted, her
own life -- unlike that of General Joseph Stilwell and the other important
historic figures in her books -- was of no historic consequence.[3]
Photographer Margaret Bourke-White, whose voluminous archive at Syracuse
University incorporates the papers of her husband, the novelist Erskine
Caldwell, includes the grease-stained receipts for their take-out orders from
Manhattan delis. Although many contemporary writers would like to fit the
Tuchman mold, they confess -- often with considerable embarrassment -- that they
are closer to the Bourke-White model.
John McPhee, for example, finds comfort in the presence of more than one
hundred file boxes in his Princeton basement. Never mind the marital friction
they occasionally cause. Like Art Buchwald and William Manchester, who are
unable to part with a shred of paper, McPhee is likely to rank as a researcher's
dream. Yes, all three writers are concerned with potentially embarrassing
information in their massive files and want to sort through it before it's
donated to some library, yet each one concedes he is unlikely to get around to
sorting through his "stuff." Other writers like David Halberstam and Frances
FitzGerald insist that their archives contain only their working material and
nothing personal, so they have no concerns about what future researchers might
uncover. But woe to the graduate student who targets his research on Calvin
Trillin. He appears to be one of those rare writers who occasionally finds the
courage to "toss it all out."
The files of these non-fiction writers possess none of the cachet and
collectibility usually associated with the archives of fiction writers, whose
papers often reveal the roots of their creative impulses. Literary archives are
collected much in the way that paintings and works of visual art are collected
-- as the output of an artist which possesses both an aesthetic and an intrinsic
value. On the other hand, the personal archives of journalists and historians
lack any intrinsic value and are acquired instead for the significance of the
information they contain. For archival librarians, these archives are the raw
material of scholarship which brings prestige to the institutions that possess
them and function as a magnet that will draw generations of researchers and
scholars. Like White, the journalist and self-proclaimed story teller who
changed American political reportage with his trend-setting Making of the
President chronicles of the 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1980 presidential
elections, these librarians are committed to the idea that an awareness of the
future is best insured by preserving a record of the past.
John McPhee has been fretting for more than a year about what to do with his
papers. Tempted though he is, McPhee says he cannot bring himself to get a
Dumpster and "pitch it all out." Those boxes in his basement are a personal
reference library to his own work and contain a trove of arcane snippets -- the
sort that writers like to know they can quickly get their hands on. But, like
Barbara Tuchman, the thought of some graduate student rummaging through his
papers years from now offends his sense of privacy, even though the material
deals almost exclusively with his work rather than his personal life. Like many
writers, McPhee wants his books to stand alone. His writing, he insists, speaks
for itself and he's dismayed by the thought that his books might be interpreted
in the context of some information gleaned from those boxes of his personal
papers.[4]
And yet, after concluding each one of those books, McPhee says he gathered up
"a great big wad of stuff," usually in two large boxes, and shipped it off for
storage in Princeton University's Firestone Library. As a faculty member and
Princeton alumnus, loyalty induced McPhee to agree many years ago to deposit his
working files in the library. But in 1995, library officials notified McPhee
that space was fast diminishing and proposed that he weed out the collection
which had grown to sixty boxes. Finding himself unable to face that daunting
chore, McPhee accepted an option that library staffers proposed and had those
sixty boxes returned to his basement -- where they were stacked alongside more
than forty others and have become, he says, "a source of contention around
here."
Despite his wife's discontent and his own sporadic fantasies about pitching it
all out, McPhee is loathe to part with the material. McPhee was, for example,
driven to the basement on Thanksgiving eve to unearth a box of maps, packed more
than a decade ago, so he could verify the spelling of a Pennsylvania site called
Fryingpan Gap. That's why he saves what he calls "the stuff," and that's why he
is unlikely ever to rent that Dumpster. Art Buchwald is similarly unable to
part with a shred of paper, even though he quickly acknowledges that "I don't
have the same reason Teddy White did for saving stuff." So why is Buchwald such
a pack rat when his work requires so little in the way of resource material?
"Why?" he says with characteristic Buchwaldian incredulity, stretching the
single syllable word into at least four. "I just save everything, I don't throw
out. There is no conscious decision," he explains. "Writers don't think about
it, or they wouldn't be writers." He donated some of his material to the
University of Wisconsin years ago and now the University of Southern California
is trying to stake a claim to the remainder. And while he'd rather not have all
the family secrets exposed by some researcher, getting around to sorting his
papers is a daunting matter. "I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to," he wails, when
asked whether he intends to purge his papers of embarrassing material. If
someone else would undertake the chore and discard the material, Buchwald says
that would be just fine -- as long as he doesn't know what is happening. "My
wife used to do that. But if she asked me if it was okay, I'd say, 'are you
crazy?'"[5]
Calvin Trillin, by contrast, is one of the few writers who does toss -- but not
often. "Clean-up pressures," as Trillin calls them, periodically compel him to
confront the mounds of unsorted material he accumulates in the course of his
work. Those "pressures" have arisen twice in the past decade -- in 1990 when The
New Yorker moved its offices from 25 West 43rd Street across the street to 20
West 43rd, and more recently when he undertook a renovation project in his
Greenwich Village townhouse.[6]
Speaking of the first purge, Trillin said he never quite knew why he saved all
those bulging envelopes filled with research notes and rough drafts of his many
New Yorker articles. Like other reporters, he feels honor bound to respect any
off-the-record commitments made with his interview subjects, "even if no one
really cares." Respecting those commitments in the context of one's files could
require a monumental investment of time. "Am I really going to go through all
this stuff?" Trillin recalls asking himself. The very thought "just seemed to
make me sigh." So he took possession of one of the many wheeled canvas carts
that floated around The New Yorker offices weeks before the move, then "took a
big gulp and threw out most of it." If the Internal Revenue Service ever
reinstated the tax deductions that writers were once allowed to claim for the
donation of a personal archive, Trillin says, "I wouldn't even know where to
begin looking for my files. I'd have to go crawling about the landfill under a
strata of coffee grinds." Saving this "stuff" carries with it the presumption
that the material has some value, a notion that strikes Trillin as "vaguely
pretentious."
Historian and author William Manchester is Trillin's polar opposite.
Manchester says "a streak of megalomania" renders most writers -- himself
included -- unable to discard even a scrap of memorabilia. His archive contains
not only a fair share of Sears-Roebuck-type letters, but also file folders full
of warranties for appliances that were thrown out decades ago. "Why?" he asks
incredulously. "Don't ask me why."[7]
Manchester's "megalomania" created an embarrassing predicament at Wesleyan
University, where he has been a faculty member for forty years. Although it had
long been understood that his archive would be housed in the university library,
the volume of material he had accumulated in the course of writing eighteen
books was beginning to outstrip the library's capacity to house it. So when
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg wrote to Manchester suggesting that, given his long
association with the Kennedy family, the Kennedy Library was an appropriate home
for the Manchester archive, both the author and Wesleyan found a solution to
accommodate the one hundred cubic feet of material he has accumulated.
"I've always been a saver and a keeper," Manchester confesses. "Even as a boy
I kept diaries and records," he says, recalling that the diary he kept
throughout 1937 records the lyrics to popular songs and the names of girls he
dated at age fourteen. Later, as a U.S. Marine during World War II, he kept a
diary during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Those rain-and-blood-stained pages
are part of his archive, and so is the casualty tag that a medic pinned to his
chest after he was wounded.
H.L. Mencken, about whom Manchester wrote his doctoral dissertation, was his
role model as a collector. On a visit to Baltimore in 1947, Manchester recalls,
Mencken took him to the Baltimore Public Library, where he showed Manchester his
papers.
"So I decided to do the same," Manchester explains. "You never know what is
going to be important, so you keep everything." On rare occasions, Manchester
wonders how some future researcher might interpret this material that he has so
painstakingly assembled. "The thought does cross your mind," Manchester says.
"But you never let yourself ask that question. If you do, you are lost. You
can't stop to think about the repercussions; if you do, you have compromised
yourself."
All these collectors are the darlings of the Library of Congress and various
presidential and university libraries across the country whose directors of
"special collections" compete with charm and occasionally with dollars for the
possession of personal archives. The Library of Congress, with its 11,000
collections is America's archival library nonpareil. The papers of 23 American
presidents, including those of Thomas Jefferson -- a prime mover in the creation
of the national library in 1800 -- help to distinguish it as the world's leading
research library. While the annual acquisitions budget is a mere $60,000, the
library's eminence is an allure that easily offsets what it lacks in funds. The
nation's ten presidential libraries, as a matter of policy, never pay for
collections. They offer instead the distinction of an association with an
American president, whose papers, according to the terms of the Presidential
Records Act of 1978, remain the property of the government.
By contrast, a handful of university libraries have spent sizable sums in
recent years to acquire the papers of living notables. As a general rule,
archival collections of fiction writers are purchased, but libraries rarely
disclose their cost -- as if any discussion of money might taint some newly
acquired treasure. The prevailing logic on the money issue is, according to
William Joyce at Princeton University's Firestone Library, that any discussion
of money "creates a false impression....this approach focuses institutional
attention on the purchase rather than the acquisition."[8] In the absence of
any similar market for the collections of nonfiction writers, those papers are
most often donated rather than sold to libraries.
The burgeoning demand for archival collections resulted from a convergence in
the late 1950s and early 1960s of an unprecedented growth in higher education
and the availability of federal funds for library construction. With more
universities across the country offering doctoral programs, institutions needed
these raw materials of scholarship to better attract students pursuing Ph.Ds.
In acquiring an archive with some historic or literary gravity, a university
burnishes its reputation.
Dr. Howard C. Gotlieb, curator of special collections at Boston University's
Mugar Memorial Library, is viewed by some colleagues as a pacesetter whose ideas
set new standards for what is collectible. Gotlieb became one of the most
aggressive players in the personal archives business after he was named director
of special collections by Boston University in 1963. Decades ago, only death
and the patina of time established whether an individual's papers were worthy of
preservation. So when Gotlieb set about wooing historians, journalists, and
Hollywood stars, he was ridiculed by some librarians who considered his mission
a fool's errand. Ignoring that disdain, Gotlieb began "begging,
kneeling and groveling" for the papers of anyone whose work he believed would
have lasting gravity.[9]
When Calvin Trillin received one of Gotlieb's early solicitation letters more
than a quarter of a century ago, he observed that Boston University "sends out
requests for writers' papers with the same precision that Procter & Gamble sends
out coupons for new detergents."[10] The fruits of Gotlieb's labors now include
Dan Rather's Emmys, Dame Alicia Markova's pink tutu, Bette Davis' scrapbooks,
Fred Astair's dancing shoes, drafts of Dr. Martin Luther King's doctoral
dissertation, and the portable typewriter used by Alistair Cooke as a student at
Oxford.
David Halberstam was also one of Gotlieb's earliest targets. He first
approached Halberstam in 1964, soon after the reporter returned from a two-year
assignment as The New York Times correspondent in Saigon. "At first I thought
it was a joke, it seemed quite bizarre," says Halberstam.[11] However, Gotlieb
convinced him that there was historic significance in all the cable traffic he
had lugged back from assignments in the Belgian Congo and Vietnam. Slowly, the
idea began to make sense to Halberstam, whose Manhattan apartment could hardly
accommodate all those bulging file boxes. Finally, when Gotlieb apprised
Halberstam of certain tax advantages, he was convinced. Ever since, usually
twice a year, Halberstam -- who has just completed his fifteenth book -- packs
up boxes his research material and ships it off to Boston. As with the
collections of most living writers, Halberstam's permission is required to use
the material. "It has been a great boon to my life," he says, "and to my wife's
life."
Frances FitzGerald found Gotlieb's proposal similarly irresistible when he
first approached her soon after the publication in 1972 of Fire in the Lake, her
award-winning study of how America's policies in Vietnam were destroying that
nation's culture and its soul. Like her friend David Halberstam, FitzGerald too
has found that storing her working files in Boston leaves her with significantly
more space in her New York apartment.[12] Both FitzGerald and Halberstam say
their archives are devoid of any personal material. As a result, they say they
are unconcerned about what future generations of researchers might uncover in
their Boston University files.
Halberstam is mindful that America's war in Vietnam during the Kennedy and
Johnson presidencies gave his papers much of whatever value they possessed.
Ironically, however, it was Johnson's own excessive use of tax deductions for
his Congressional archives that later made Halberstam's papers -- and those of
other writers -- worth next to nothing. Until 1969, the tax laws were a bonanza
for Gotlieb and the few other librarians who pursued special collections.
Writers and public officials could donate their papers and take the fair market
value as a tax deduction. Theodore White, for example, took a $60,000 deduction
in the late 1960s when he donated to the JFK Library the notes of his historic
1963 interview with Jacqueline Kennedy one week after the assassination. Their
long conversation on a rainy night in Hyannisport became the basis of the Life
magazine essay that first likened the Kennedy presidency to the mythical realm
of Camelot.
But as President Johnson prepared to leave the White House early in 1969,
members of the U. S. House of Representatives, angered by the enormous tax
deductions Johnson had taken several years earlier for his Congressional papers,
voted to amend the tax law. As a result, writers, historians, and others
scrambled to unload their papers that year. Under revised tax law, White could
deduct only the cost of the paper and pens used in taking and transcribing the
notes he made of his rare interview with the president's widow. However, had
White bequeathed that same material to his heirs, they could have donated it to
a library and taken a tax deduction for its fair market value.[13]
So since 1969, Gotlieb and other librarians who pursue personal archives have
had to rely more on their own ingenuity than on IRS blessings to entice donors.
The University of Texas at Austin, where three different libraries are committed
to amassing personal archives, has long been the envy of directors of special
collections. The state's vast wealth and the willingness of its oilmen to share
their personal riches gave the Austin libraries an edge that few institutions
could rival -- at least until the late 1980s. The university's Humanities
Resource Center has on occasion paid huge sums for extraordinary collections,
according to its director, Thomas Stahley.[14] However, falling oil prices have
changed all that.
Donald Carleton, director of the University's Center for American History,
reminisces almost wistfully about that era of expensive acquisitions. "That was
back in the good old days, he says, "back when oil was $40 a barrel."[15] With
oil now selling for a little more than half that amount, the oil money has all
but disappeared from the libraries' budgets.
So Carleton has been engaged in the same technique of "begging and kneeling and
groveling" that Gotlieb has used to near- perfection for more than thirty years.
Like most directors of special collections, Carleton has a carefully developed
acquisitions policy, one that sets a focus on a few specialized fields rather
than on scattershot efforts to snatch up the most desirable collections
available. The raison d'etre of the collecting that Carleton directs at the
Center for American History is based on its overarching mission to document --
above all -- the history of Texas, the history of the South and the Southwest
and history of American journalism. One of Carleton's most noteworthy recent
acquisitions is the New York Herald Tribune's morgue files which were donated to
the Center by the New York Post. The thousands of clip-filled envelopes used by
generations of Tribune employees arrived in Austin in three tractor trailers.
The files, Carleton explains, are a logical complement to the center's sizeable
holdings in the history of journalism and news broadcasting, a collection that
includes the clip files from William Randolph Hearst's New York
Journal-American, the Walter Cronkite archive, and the papers of the syndicated
columnist Molly Ivins.
Despite that carefully mapped acquisition strategy, something of a hodgepodge
has materialized, as it inevitably does in many collections, thanks in part to
serendipity and to the vagaries of institutional politics. The Ernest Hemingway
archive, for example, seems like an odd fit at the John F. Kennedy Library --
where the emphasis is on politics, the presidency, and contemporary history
rather than 20th century fiction. The Kennedys and the Hemingways, however,
shared both a mutual admiration and a close friend, William Walton. Walton, a
Time magazine correspondent who had first met Hemingway during World War II in
Europe, was later instrumental in persuading Fidel Castro to allow the contents
of Hemingway's home in Cuba to be returned to the author after the Cuban
Revolution. Following the assassination, according to a library official,
Walton convinced his good friend Mary Hemingway that "It would be so nice to
have Ernie's papers in Jack's library."[16] So it is, even in the largest
research universities, that acquisitions are seldom guided solely by what the
professionals believe is worthy. "There are sometimes alumni who want to donate
some collection to you, and because they've given the university big bucks, the
president doesn't want you to insult them," explains Carleton. "You can't say,
'We don't collect that stuff,' because the president will say, 'Oh yes, we
do.'"[17]
Perhaps no archive in America appears to be a bigger hodgepodge than the one
Gene Gressley assembled at the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center
in Laramie. Gressley, however, describes the nearly 15,000 individual
collections he helped to amass as "eclectic" and insists his collecting always
had a focus even though his critics claim otherwise. When Gressley, an Indiana
native with a Ph.D. in economic history, arrived in Laramie in 1956 -- even
before Gotlieb began setting new standards in modern collecting in Boston -- the
university's Western History Archives Department (renamed the American Heritage
Center in 1975) had a mere 284 collections, most of which were agricultural and
geological records. Over the next thirty-two years, Gressley helped to
transform an academic backwater in a remote cattle and oil town into one of
America's major university archives.
In archival circles, Gressley is alternately admired for the sheer moxie and
ingenuity he brought to his work and derided for sweeping the landscape like a
vacuum cleaner, snapping up collections before any potential rival had
considered their value. In a derisive summary of Gressley's labors, one
indignant librarian at Yale University's Beinecke Library recounted how "a
notorious university in the West acquired hundreds of collections through some
professor on the staff who just wrote to people and asked for their papers," she
said, apparently determined not to endow him with any dignity by disclosing his
name. So papers that might have been acquired by East Coast schools ended up in
a warehouse in Wyoming."[18]
Gressley, who retired in 1988, laughs off the characterization of his
university as "notorious," the center he helped build as "a warehouse," and
himself as "some professor." But the allegation that he simply wrote to
prospective donors really rankles him. He did, of course, write thousands of
letters, but he visited all his prospective donors, too. "Personal contact," he
insists, sounding more like a salesman than a scholar, "is the only way to build
a collection. You let people know you care."[19] And in the heyday of his
collecting Gressley says he courted between 8,000 and 10,000 prospective donors
at a time.
Numbered among his many successes are journalists and historians such as Ada
Louise Huxtable, Bruce Catton, Brooks Atkinson, Milton Friedman, Leonard Silk,
and Arco Coal Company, which donated the fifty six-ton Anaconda Minerals Archive
-- valued at $10 million and considered the most extensive record of mining
in the world.
Gressley likes to say that he learned about collecting early in life -- passing
the plate in the Congregationalist church where his father preached on Sunday
mornings. Those Protestant roots probably gave him both the missionary zeal he
brought to his acquisitions work and his keen understanding of the sin of
vanity. Collecting became a calling. Thousands of times over he stared a
prospective donor in the eye and posed weighty metaphysical questions: "Is what
you're doing worthwhile?" he would ask with all the earnestness of a preacher.
Is your life worthwhile?" Most people would feign modesty and insist their work
wasn't really all that important. But Gressley knew otherwise. "They really
didn't believe it." If what you're doing is indeed important, "how can you just
throw it out?" Gressley would argue, shrewdly transmuting the record of
accomplishment into accomplishment itself. In destroying the former, he
implied, the person would risk also destroying the latter. Gressley understood
that he was offering a gift of sorts -- one that most people find irresistible:
immortality. That's what writers get when their papers end up in an archive.
They have, in a sense, made a gift to the ages.
And that is what Teddy White has done. His gift to the ages fills 249 pale
gray, acid-free archival boxes at Harvard University and twenty cubic feet of
shelf space at the John F. Kennedy Library. In this collection of letters he
wrote and received over a half a century, in notes he took as a reporter for
five decades, in his diary entries, in the typescripts and galley proofs of his
ten books, and, yes, even in those letters to Sears and Roebuck, White reveals
himself as a man who both understood and revered history. He saw his life as
part of a continuum, as part of the patchwork that is American history, and he
entrusted his memory to whatever judgment that history might make -- even if it
resulted in some less-than-flattering conclusions.
In his own writing, White was a master of detail. His books are replete with
seemingly insignificant particulars the result of which creates a whole that is
far more than a simple sum of disparate parts: A fifteen-second commercial for
Maybelline's waterproof mascara had immediately preceded that first and most
decisive presidential debate of the 1960 race; on the two days that preceded the
election, Vice President Richard Nixon had traveled 7,170 miles from Los Angeles
to Alaska, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois; John F. Kennedy's hands, out of
camera range, trembled beneath the podium at the Hyannis National Guard Armory
during his first speech as President-elect.[20] White perceived the essential
quality of history as the record of human behavior, and apparently was unafraid
to have his own personal behavior subjected to scrutiny.
White, like Heroditus, that original master of the historian's guild in ancient
Greece, understood that history -- a knowledge of the past -- has the power to
enlarge human experience. White's chronicles of American presidential
elections, like Heroditus's account of the Persian War, help us understand that
history flows like the current of an endless river in which mankind is forever
immersed. To have "saved all this stuff" as Theodore White did -- so carefully
shipping it across oceans and continents, sheltering it through war and the
ravages of a flooded basement -- distinguishes him as a man of enormous courage.
Heroditus probably offers us the best explanation of White's motives: He wanted
to insure "that the things men have done might not in time be forgotten."[21]
APPENDIX
Where the Archives are:
Boston University
Mugar Library
Elie Abel
Stewart Alsop
Max Ascoli
Alistair Cooke
Gloria Emerson
Oriana Fallaci
Ralph Ingersoll
Dan Rather
Richard Tregaskis
Syracuse University, George Arent Library
Samuel H. Adams
Robert Considine
Judith Crist
Roscoe Drummond
Marguerite Higgins
Fulton Lewis
Eleanor Medill Paterson
Drew Pearson
Westbook Pegler
Vermont Royster
John W. Tebbell
Dorothy Thompson
Mike Wallace
Margaret Bourke-White
State Historical Society of Wisconsin
Division of Archives and Research
Associated Press Managing Editors Association
Association for Education in Journalism
Creed Black
Art Buchwald
Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle
Marquis Childs
Robert Estabrook
Roland Evans and Robert D. Novak
Walter Kerr
King Features Syndicate
Look
J. Anthony Lukas
Clark Mollenhoff
John Newhouse
John B. Oakes
Anne McCormick O'Hare
The Progressive
Victor Riesel
Richard Rovere
Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance
Leland Stowe
James Wechsler
Earl Wilson
Helen Zotos
Yale University
Beinicke Library
William Buckley
Walter Lippmann
Barbara Tuchman
University of Texas at Austin
The Center for American History
Walter Cronkite
Molly Ivins
New York Herald Tribune
New York Journal American
University of Wyoming
The American Heritage Center
Shana Alexander
Brooks Atkinson
Frank Blair
Erma Bombeck
Heywood Hale Broun
Drew Middleton
Leonard Silk
Leland Stowe
Richard Tregaskis
United Press International
Ada Louise Huxtable
Leonard Silk
Library of Congress
Joseph and Stewart Alsop
Janet Flanner
Horace Greeley
Henry and Clare Booth Luce
Jules Peiffer
Whitlaw Reid
Eric Severaid
Neil Sheehan
Hedrick Smith
Lawrence Spivak
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Loewenberg, Bert J. American History in American Thought: Christopher Columbus
to Henry Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.
Trillin, Calvin. "What Emormous Problems a Man Can Cause
by Answering His Mail." The New York Times Magazine. May 2, 1971, 31.
White, Theodore H. The Making of the President 1960. New York: Atheneum
Books, 1961.
Personal and telephone interviews with:
Art Buchwald
Donald Carleton
Gene Gressley
Frances FitzGerald
Howard Gotlieb
David Halberstam
William Johnson
William Joyce
Marvin Kranz
William Manchester
John McPhee
Judith Schiff
Thomas Stahley
Calvin Trillin
Barbara Tuchman
THE WHO, WHAT WHERE, AND WHY
OF
JOURNALISTS' ARCHIVES
This paper explores the reasons journalists amass their personal archives.
These collections, the object of genteel but spirited competition among research
libraries, are the raw materials of scholarship for future generations. In
folders filled with long-forgotten letters, yellowed manuscripts, and private
diaries, researchers will find insights into the journalists and journalism of
the late twentieth century. Decades ago, only death and the patina of time gave
an archive value. But the vision of a few librarians changed that in the early
1960s. And because most journalists are incorrigible savers, an abundance of
material awaits researchers.
THE WHO, WHAT, WHERE, AND WHY
OF
JOURNALISTS' ARCHIVES
This paper explores the reasons journalists amass their personal archives.
These collections, the object of genteel but spirited competition among research
libraries, are the raw materials of scholarship for future generations. In
folders filled with long-forgotten letters, yellowed manuscripts, and private
diaries, researchers will find insights into the journalists and journalism of
the late twentieth century. Decades ago, only death and the patina of time gave
an archive value. But the vision of a few librarians changed that in the early
1960s. The genesis of this study was the writer's own dissertation research in
the Theodore H. White Archives where a peculiar blend of monumental and mundane
material kindled an insistent, but all-too prosaic question: "Why did he save
all this stuff?" White's streak of megalomania, it appears, is shared by many
writers. Art Buchwald, William Manchester, and John McPhee, for example, all
confess to being compulsive savers while Calvin Trillin is one of those rare
writers who occasionally brings himself to "chuck it all out."
[1] Theodore H. White, letter to Annalee Jacoby, May 3, 1943, Theodore H. White
Archive, Box 4, Folder 21, Harvard University Archive, Cambridge. The Archive
is hereinafter cited at TWA and White is cited as THW.
[2] Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, various letters to THW, TWA, Box 49, Folder 7.
[3] Barbara Tuchman, personal interview, July 8, 1989.
[4] John McPhee, telephone interview, November 27, 1996.
[5] Art Buchwald, telephone interview, June 6, 1995.
[6] Calvin Trillin, personal interview, January 1, 1997.
[7] William Manchester, telephone interview, June 23, 1995.
[8] William Joyce, telephone interview, July 21, 1995.
[9] Howard Gotlieb, telephone interview, July 12, 1995.
[10] Calvin Trillin, "What Enormous Problems a Man Can Cause By Answering His
Mail," The New York Times Magazine, January 1, 1997.
[11] David Halberstam, telephone interview, July 19, 1995.
[12] Frances FitzGerald, telephone interview, June 18, 1995.
[13] William Johnson, telephone interview, June 22, 1995.
[14] Thomas Stahley, telephone interview, January 12, 1996.
[15] Donald Carleton, telephone interview, January 14, 1996.
[16] William Johnson, telephone interview, June 22, 1995.
[17] Carleton, January 14, 1996.
[18] Judith Schiff, telephone interview, June, 22, 1995.
[19] Gene Gressley, telephone interview, March 12, 1996.
[20] Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960, 279, 317, 348.
[21] Bert J. Loewenberg, Historical Writing in America, 12.
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