News Archive - Mar 2007
Sunshine Week 2007: March 11-17
Mar 13, 2007: This week, March 11-17, is Sunshine Week, a "national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information," sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. See www.sunshineweek.org. The National Security Archive has been reporting less-than-ideal compliance with open records laws, including a Knight Open Government Survey on mandated electronic access to government records, and in a story entitled "The Presidential Records Act in Crisis."
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Dies at 89
Mar 1, 2007: Historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. died last night at the age of 89. See stories in the Washington Post and New York Times. Schlesinger was the author of A Thousand Days, about JFK's presidency, and Robert Kennedy and His Times, as well as many other books, twice winning the Pulitzer Prize. Schlesinger served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, during World War II, and then went on to teach at Harvard. A staunch anti-Communist, we was also an unabashed liberal, and worked as a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson. He joined the Kennedy administration in early 1961 as a special assistant, and later worked for the ill-fated presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy. In Robert Kennedy and His Times, Schlesinger said this of the two brothers: "John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist." Regarding their assassinations, Schlesinger said little, but he did write the following on the dust jacket of Anthony Summers' Conspiracy: "One does not have to accept Mr. Summers' conclusions to recognize the significance of the questions raised in this careful and disquieting analysis of the mysteries of Dallas."