- Historic Sites The Paper Trust April 1971 | Volume 22, Issue 3
If the President exerts his right to put his papers in a marble
monument built by hometown friends in a location far from
traditional seats of learning, the conscientious archivist has
no choice but to follow them there, care for them, and display
them under whatever conditions are allowed. If he is a truly
hard-working archivist—as all the Presidential library directors
are—he will urge the President’s co-workers also to deposit
their papers there. He is not likely to get such deposits
without being able to give assurances that the public will not
soon be let into the donor’s inner life; as the mediator between
the future historian and the gun-shy subjects of history, his
first rule of operation is to get the material preserved. The
Presidential libraries have actually hastened a policy of
accumulation that would ordinarily have taken generations. The
papers of the First Ladies, too, are an important source of
history hitherto ignored, before t