THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2026 45 LET: How do you hope students or the public will use these volumes? JGW: I hope that students will use FRUS volumes to write good papers. I don’t just mean an “A” paper—though I certainly think FRUS provides an avenue toward achieving that. I mean that they will empathize with the humans who appear throughout the pages of FRUS volumes, and grapple with the dilemmas and trade-offs they face. How would you do it better? That question endures beyond grading. “Go to the sources” is the mantra I learned in college. LET: How do you hope policymakers will use these volumes? Asked another way, what role do you think historians play in strengthening diplomacy? JGW: I hope that readers actively working on national security and diplomacy will take consolation from FRUS. There’s an evocative passage from a speech that then Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave at the Harvard Club in New York City in June 1946: “The problems that bedevil American foreign policy are not like headaches. With those, you take a powder and they are gone. Instead, they are like the pain of earning a living. They will stay with us until death.” That still resonates today, 250 years into American history. Policymakers sometimes presume that they are the first to encounter a particular set of challenges. They are not. Just peruse FRUS, and you will see that no one is the first. Nor did the so-called “Wise Men” of the early Cold War have it all figured out. LET: What do you wish more people understood about your work? JGW: It sometimes amuses me—though does not upset me—when people presume that FRUS volumes consist only of State Department documents. The proportion of agency documents varies based on the topic. For instance, in a volume I worked on that focuses heavily on nuclear strategy, National Security Policy 1977–1980, we included no more than a small handful of State Department documents. The documents are mostly from the National Security Council [NSC] and Department of Defense—with a smattering from the Central Intelligence Agency. Also, if an NSC staffer sends a handful of papers to the national security adviser or the president, and one of them is from the State Department, and the staffer has written, “the State Department paper is bad,” we print all that. We do not sanitize anything to put the State Department in a better or worse light. We include the material we think is most important. Redactions result from efforts to protect national security information, not because something might embarrass a particular U.S. agency. LET: How has technology changed the way you do your job compared to earlier generations of compilers? JGW: Technology has made certain things—such as the retrieval of basic factual information—easier. For end users of FRUS, you can use the filters and keyword searches on the website to isolate particular episodes, for example the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can see everything else that happens in October 1962, including the war that breaks out between China and India. In compiling the volumes, we are limited by the fact that we have an immense number of historical documents, and we need to abide by whatever classification they were given 40 years ago. That makes it difficult to scan everything into one repository that we can access from our desks. Still, we are doing our level best to incorporate generative AI into various parts of the production cycle to accelerate outputs. But our “thorough, accurate, and reliable” mandate prohibits any margin of error. We can’t have 99 percent Optical Character Recognition [OCR] accuracy of a PDF; we need 100 percent. We can’t allow a single line of text or code that reveals classified information. So, here and everywhere else, we need to maintain constant human vigilance. LET: Any closing thoughts? JGW: START I doesn’t offer a blueprint for every future endeavor, but it does show what sustained, serious diplomacy can achieve under real pressure. If the volumes help students, citizens, and policymakers see that more clearly, then all those hours in the archives were worth it. n Redactions result from efforts to protect national security information, not because something might embarrass a particular U.S. agency.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=