Hillary’s Emails and the Historical Record
But I also feel that a Secretary of State who deals in foreign policy should have some privacy in her work emails. Emails are not crafted like official correspondence. No one had them in Roosevelt’s day. A lot of emails are probably to a staff person saying to arrange her next flight. A lot of really serious diplomacy takes place in person or over the phone. We need to give cabinet ministers like the head of the Defense Dept, etc., some freedom of expression in the workplace without worrying that everything they ever shot off in an email is going to be archived and read. Should we start taping all their phone calls and meetings as part of an historical record? That seems absurd. Yet more real business gets done in them. Historians want all this, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin, but people should be able to serve in government without having everyone pore over their off-the-cuff comments for eternity. In the old days, when you wrote a letter, you had time to reread it and have others read it before it was mailed. Then it became part of an official record.