The "Foreign Relations of the United States" (FRUS) series is a government publication that most of us have probably seen on library shelves or possibly used for a school paper. But since its inception in 1861 in the Lincoln administration, it has been a vital source of access to information for both the general public and scholars around the world. It constitutes the State Department’s official documentary historical record.
PL 102-138 mandates that the series provide "a thorough, accurate, and reliable record of U.S. foreign policy within 30 years of the events therein recorded". The process involves assembling mountains of both public and classified information and carefully analyzing and selecting what will be used to actually write the history that we find in the books or online.
The schedule of publication found in the law has rarely been met. "In fact, in the years that the 1991 law has been in effect, no presidential administration has seen all relevant FRUS volumes published within the 30-year deadline." But more recently internal problems and mismanagement have created greater challenges to FRUS meeting its legal mandate and the expectations of scholars worldwide.
The May 2009 State Dept. Inspector General's recent report on this situation, "Management Review of the Office of the Historian Bureau of Public Affairs U.S. Department of State", details the problems that have been affecting the production of FRUS and provides many recommendations to improve the process. The primary recommendation was reassignment of the office’s director, Marc J. Susser after years of complaints from 75% of his employees. Recommendations for improved hiring practices, re-alignment of resources , along with several internal organizational changes were also made.
The seriousness of the challenges facing the timely production of the FRUS was underlined by the comment by the OIG that " It may be that the 30-year deadline is inherently unachievable and should be changed (necessitating a change in legislation, which would bring along with it another set of challenges)."
Yet the attention being paid to what for many of us is a rather obscure government document, is merited, for as as the Inspector General states in his report, "While other countries publish series similar in nature, the FRUS has been widely regarded as the “gold standard” of such efforts, a testament to the principle of transparency in government and a vehicle for easy public access to previously classified information about foreign policy."
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