History as a Period Piece

What are we to make of contemporary history published twenty-one years after it was completed? Written and printed as an internal history in 1971, volume 6 of the History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff series was ultimately declassified and published in 1992, with “minor editorial revisions and a few deletions required by security considerations” (p. v). The delay seems particularly excessive given that volume 5 of the series, completed in 1970, took only sixteen years to publish. Because each volume took at least five years to write, these histories of the first four years of the Eisenhower administration were actually compiled in the late 1960s. The citations in the volume under review clearly reflect its date of compilation. Except for the inclusion of documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States and the reference to four monographs published in the last decade, no attempt was made to update the few secondary sources mentioned in the endnotes to reflect the current state of scholarship. At first glance, the citations of primary sources seem to cover the records of several agencies, but the twenty-three pages of citations were drawn almost exclusively from the records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Other documents, such as those from the Department of Defense or the National Security Council, are cited because copies ended up in the JCS files. Citations to collections of military records are especially vital to historians seeking to use specific records from the lengthy list of subdivisions in the Department of Defense. Although these citations to the JCS records now in the National Archives are valuable in themselves, they would have been even more useful if this volume had been released a dozen years earlier. Citations of classified records can serve as a finding aid for individual documents that could probably be released under FOIA or Mandatory Review. (Perhaps that is why books and documents are usually released at approximately the same time.)

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