THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2026 43 however, U.S. diplomats as well as anyone else with access to a computer can now draw on the decision-making and negotiating record of a treaty that reduced strategic offensive arms. Covering 1982–1991, the two START I FRUS volumes include 584 documents totaling 2,705 pages—a small fraction of the 310,000 documents available at https://history.state.gov/. Following the book’s release, I sat down with the compiler, James Graham Wilson, to learn how these volumes came together, why this work matters, and the surprising discoveries that can turn up in the archives. —Lynette Evans-Tiernan Lynette Evans-Tiernan: For readers who may not know the Foreign Relations of the United States series, what is it, and what exactly does a compiler do? James Graham Wilson: Most people have never heard of FRUS, which is a shame because it’s one of the biggest and most significant transparency projects the U.S. government has ever undertaken. We’ve been publishing FRUS since 1861, starting with the Lincoln administration, and today it runs to hundreds of volumes covering every presidency since, as well as a book on its own history. Anyone can read the series for free at https://history.state.gov. It takes a lot of work to produce a volume. We have statutory access to official government records that are 20 years and older, meaning we look through hundreds of thousands of documents on a particular topic—in this case, internal U.S. deliberations and U.S.-Soviet negotiations on strategic offensive arms from 1989 to 1991. We go through unprocessed, still-classified records from not only the Department of State but also the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and Presidential Records including the National Security Council. We select a few hundred of them, then annotate them as a volume in the appropriate presidential subseries within the broader FRUS series. The draft volume then undergoes an internal peer review process to ensure it meets the series’ stylistic guidelines and the accuracy and completeness standards required by law. We also have to send each volume out for declassification review by every government agency that has equities in the documents included in it. Declassification can take years; add on another year or two for editing, proofreading, and prepping for publication, and you can see that it takes a host of people and a great deal of time to prepare the series. Our mission is laid out in Section 198 of Public Law 102138, which President George H.W. Bush signed on October 28, 1991: FRUS should be “a thorough, accurate, and reliable record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant U.S. diplomatic activity.” The origins of the mission lie in congressional requests to the executive branch for information, which by 1800 had become an established procedure, with allowances made for reservations to balance the public’s right to know with the government’s duty to protect. LET: Why does this work matter right now, as we mark 250 years of U.S. history? JGW: FRUS is an institution you can trust. And as Ronald Reagan would say, “Trust, but verify.” We lay out in the preface to each volume the sources we consulted and our logic for crafting the volume or chapters. We also describe the stages of review and quality assurance. If we cannot locate a document, we say so in the annotations. If interagency declassification partners protect three lines of a document, we write: “three lines not declassified.” LET: What’s the most challenging part of compiling a volume like START I? JGW: I think the fundamental challenge is trying to tell a coherent story while being judicious and fair to the individuals who lived it. I hope that the 584 documents in the START I volumes add up to more than the sum of their parts. We have a strict page limit, and it’s hard to leave things out! Longtime State Department nuclear expert Ed Ifft led the State Department’s declassification review of this volume. He had been an important member of the U.S. delegation in Geneva during the period 1989–1991, and I think the fundamental challenge is trying to tell a coherent story while being judicious and fair to the individuals who lived it.
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