For History's Sake, Nothing Like a Paper Trail

Moreover, the wartime climate in the post-9/11 era has created a muscular presidency at the head of a powerful security state, which has given this White House, until quite recently, a kind of impervious standing in Washington. The broader operational culture of the Bush team has been one of exceptional discipline and control -- with an extraordinary confidence in its ability to shape the course of modern politics. This is a White House that has, for better and worse, been largely free of the constraints that bound its immediate predecessors.

Is it possible, then, that the current occupants of the White House have felt somewhat immune from the incursions that bedeviled their predecessors, and thus free to record their detailed inner workings? Maybe so. According to a New York Times report, Libby kept notes of a conversation indicating that Cheney sought information about Plame from the CIA and then told Libby about her.

Unfortunately, given the probable delays in accessing presidential records -- delays this White House extended with an executive order in 2001 -- it will be a very long time before we can know with certainty whether today's written record is more expansive, and thus ultimately more illuminating, than others.

But at least for now, presidential historians have been given some hope that the documentary archive may be more revealing than we dared imagine. Which is why our reaction to the news from the leak investigation has been slightly different from that of those shocked by it: Thank goodness, somebody actually wrote it down.

Author's e-mail: rlr2p@virginia.edu

Russell Riley is a research professor in the Presidential Oral History Program of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.