Continuity and Change in FRUS's Cold War

Both the historians who produced Foreign Relations of the United States volumes and the U.S. Government officials who decided whether classified documents selected for publication should be released confronted daunting challenges adapting the series for the Cold War era. For the historians who edited volumes, the growing breadth and complexity of the national security state yielded analogous changes to the records they used, inside the State Department and beyond. State Department historians reaffirmed their fundamental mission of documenting the foreign policy decision-making process according to contemporary standards of historical objectivity while embracing new approaches to research, selection, annotation, and editorial oversight. The editorial story of FRUS during the Cold War was marked by continuity amidst continual disruption.

The clearance story was more fraught. As Department historians pursued the records needed to document decision-making processes across agency lines, a wider range of policymakers participated in the clearance process to determine what information could be released or needed to be withheld in the interest of national security. Declassification disputes surrounding “controversial” FRUS volumes embodied conflicting perspectives and priorities that could take years – in one case decades – to resolve, but, until the 1980s, they usually satisfied transparency advocates. However, when State Department historians in the late 1970s and 1980s began to prepare the volumes covering the 1950s -- the “coldest phase of the Cold War” -- secrecy prevailed.

The FRUS series manifested the same tensions between openness and security that confronted the U.S. Government overall in the decades following World War II. From a comparative perspective, FRUS made the United States more transparent about historical foreign policy decision-making than other major international powers. At the same time, national security institution-building within the U.S. Government empowered decisionmakers who displayed increasing reluctance to take risks to promote greater understanding of the past.