The Foreign Service Journal, June 2016

38 JUNE 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL DIPLOMATIC HISTORY LESSONS: A Model of Government Transparency Tracy Whittington is a Foreign Service officer currently working in the Office of the Historian. She has previous- ly served in the Director General’s Policy Coordination Office, the Operations Center, La Paz, Montreal and Kinshasa. She is a member of the FSJ Editorial Board. I n a restored Navy hospital dormitory on the hill across from the Harry S Truman building more than 40 Ph.D. historians are at work on the largest and most productive documentary history program in the world. They and their predecessors stretching back to 1861 have compiled 562 volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, provid - ing half a million pages of declassified government documents to Congress, scholars and the general public. Today the Historian’s Office serves vital policymaking needs within the department, providing just-in-time history to bureaus and officers around the world, in addition to making available to the broader public a treasure-trove of declassified documents and historical diplomatic information of record in the form of the FRUS volumes, as well as extensive digital resources at the office’s website, history.state.gov. With the Foreign Relations of the United States series, the State Department Office of the Historian provides policymakers and the public a thorough record of American foreign policy. BY TRACY WH I TT I NGTON The office’s mandate is significant: to provide a “thorough, accurate, reliable” official record of U.S. foreign policy. Although many countries have some process for documenting govern- ment foreign policy decisions, the FRUS program is the gold standard—the oldest, most comprehensive and most formal- ized. Indeed, FRUS provides a model of responsible government transparency and accessibility that has endured through more than 150 years of political change, hot and cold wars, and not infrequent institutional or partisan efforts to interfere with it. Policy Accountability: A Brief History Decades before the Bureau of Public Affairs and the Bureau of Legislative Affairs were a twinkling in the eye of the Secretary of State, the department’s annual bound submission to Con- gress of the previous year’s foreign policy documents fulfilled both bureaus’ missions. As per its constitutional obligation (Article II, Section 3), the country’s executive branch informed the legislative branch of its foreign policy actions. FRUS also informed the general public. Until the early 1900s, newspapers from the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin to The New York Times covered this release to Congress of contem- porary sensitive diplomatic cables, department instructions to the field and even documents originating from foreign govern- FEATURE