Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Stephanie Reynolds
Interviewee(s): John Constance

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. I've got the recording going. Welcome back. This is part two of an oral history with John Constance. And today is Thursday, August 24, 2023. And I just want to do a quick recap here of what we spoke about last time. We covered your internship with the Deputy Archivist, Herb Angel; your work and experiences with the National Audiovisual Center; the acquisition and marketing of films; a detail that you took with OMB and the Department of Education; and, of course, your run-ins with the rich and famous: Elizabeth Taylor and Clint Eastwood as well as several Supreme Court Justices. So that's what we went over last time. Did you think of anything that you wanted to add or clarify from last time?

John Constance: No, but I think, and I might have mentioned this, I had the benefit early in my career of some excellent bosses and mentors. And as I look back over my career, that really made a big difference. So for that, I am very grateful.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, sometimes it takes having some mentors or some really bright people to help you along and get you into those right places, right, who know your skills and where your best fit would be.

John Constance: Exactly. And I've tried to emulate that since then and even in retirement. I'm always looking for folks that need a hand or need some advice, and I continue to find that very gratifying.

Stephanie Reynolds: I'm sure everyone appreciates that you've helped out. Okay. So kind of leading off where we were last time, we were just starting to get into when NARA became an independent agency from GSA. Do you remember anything from this time? Maybe some of the changes that were happening?

John Constance: Yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: What was involved in this sort of transformation?

John Constance: I followed the independence movement kind of from afar. I was still working for the National Audiovisual Center, but I had an awful lot of excellent contacts downtown with people that I had worked with through the years, and through that and through those contacts, continued to kind of stay abreast of what was going on in the independence movement, given the fact that a lot of that was coming out of Congress. And that was certainly a first love for me. I was following from that perspective. I guess the Archives Act was actually passed in October of 1984—that was when the act was actually passed and it was not going to become effective, and the Archives was not going to actually be independent until April 1, 1985. Thus, the emblem of the National Archives and Records Administration has 1985 down there as the effective date on the seal. You know, as soon as the bill passed, my mind started kind of spinning towards where I could be next in my career that would be logical for me and also kind of fulfill what I hoped it would be. And that was not just to be part of a satellite of the National Archives at the Audiovisual Center, but actually be downtown and kind of directly in the mix. So I remember at some point in the winter between 1984 and 1985, I made it my business to come downtown and see Adrienne Thomas. And Adrienne Thomas, at that point, was really moving into the role of policy and program management under the new independent agency. She was going to be the head of policy, and she was going to report to Jim Megronigle, who was going to be the Deputy Executive Director reporting to Claudine Weiher, who was going to be the new Executive Director. There might have been some other fancy titles there about Assistant Archivist for Administration is maybe what Claudine's title was going to be. But in that chain of command, it was clear to me that, number one, I had the most long-term contact in that chain with Adrienne. I had worked with Adrienne literally from the time I was an intern at the Archives. So I came down to see her. The only thing I remember about that day was that it was snowing in Washington and a number of people had not shown up. So it was rather quiet in the building. And I went to see Adrienne, and I just said, “You know, let me just lay it out. I'd really like to be a part of the new independent National Archives, and I'd love to have a role down here.” And she was very encouraging from the get-go. And that made me feel very, very good, and she said, “Let me see what we can work out.” Well for the second time in my career, I had pictured a position of some authority, just as I had when I went from intern to a permanent job and was asked, could I type? Well, it wasn't quite that austere, but what they had available for me was a program analyst job, not supervisory. I would come down to work for Michael Kurtz, who was going to be head of program analysis. Well, I didn't know too much about program analysis, but they knew me well enough to know that my head kind of worked that way and that I would basically be able to learn on the job. And I came down in the spring of '85 to work for Michael. And a couple of things I do remember about that—I remember about this uncertainty every day coming into the office. What in the heck am I doing? And do I really know how to do this? And Michael was very good. He was a very good teacher his whole life. And he was quite helpful to me in that role. So, you know, I can't remember how many months. I mean, it wasn't a lot of months that I was in that job when one of the other supervisors who was on the same level as Michael kind of crashed and burned. His name was John Kelly. And I can't remember what he did or what he said or what happened that kind of spun him out of favor, but the next thing I know, I'm sitting in front of Adrienne Thomas again and she's saying, "We need your help in running the Directives Management Branch." Okay, so here we are in something else that I don't know a whole heck of a lot about, but I had written procedures manuals for the National Audiovisual Center and the Department of Education and had a lot of on-the-job training. I went to a bunch of classes. I did a lot of practicums, and I learned how to write procedures—not the most exciting writing in the world, but once again, it works kind of the way my head works, kind of one step at a time, and what's the logical next thing to do and what are your choices and in which direction should this flowchart go? Et cetera. Et cetera. So I took over as head of Directives Management. Well, the significant thing about that for the National Archives at that moment in time is that here we are a small portion of GSA, and now we are our own independent agency. So all of the reports through the years that have been generated by GSA on our behalf, that we were just a feeder to GAO and the Congress and you name it, all of a sudden, all those reports were our responsibility. Second of all, we had no procedures on how to do anything from procurement to finance to property management. You know, you name it in terms of what you would have to do to run an organization. We didn't have any of those procedures. So it was going to be the responsibility of this Directives Management Branch to, first of all, establish a system for directives. Second of all, basically start writing this gargantuan, massive volume of how the agency was going to operate and do it quickly, because we were doing all those things on a daily basis but didn't really have any directives or policy to point to as to what we were doing. We certainly had some of GSA's material. We had picked up some employees from GSA in the transition. None of them were happy. None of them. You know, again, just picture GSA, who is all ticked off about the fact that the Archives was breaking off and being this independent entity. They weren't exactly going to give us the cream of the crop, shall we say, when transition occurred. In fact, they were going to take the opportunity to dump a number of folks that had not been the best. And now there were exceptions, but the people that I had reporting to me were not a chapter in the best and the brightest. So consequently, I had a big job to do and I had some people who were retired in place. And then I had a bunch of old loyal National Archives folks who I knew that I could rely on to do an awful lot of the work, and a portion of the writing I was going to do myself. I picked up along the way Shelby Bale, who had been a long-time editor for the National Archives. He certainly did not see himself as a directives writer, but he basically knew how to write. But, you know, he was suddenly going from being the guy who edited Prologue and edited scholarly articles to writing an article on how to buy toilet paper and how to control real property. He wasn't very happy. So again, my recollection is that it was a challenging time. But just like any elephant that you have to eat, we cut it into very, very small pieces. We attacked it. We established a system of goals and accountability and timeframes. And within, I think, 18 months, we had ourselves a procedures manual, at least one that was going to serve us until something else or something better came along. So, as I look back at my career at the National Archives, having been involved in writing that manual, there was nothing that we did at the National Archives for the rest of my career that I didn't at least know something about. I was there when, due to some pretty high-profile thefts of records from our research room, we developed what we coined as the "clean search room" or the clean research room policy, where people were no longer going to be able to bring briefcases in. We set up a system of lockers. Gentlemen had to put their jackets away. Women couldn't bring large purses. You couldn't bring your own note material. And we provided paper and pencils. Et cetera. Et cetera. And so, in terms of writing procedures and writing directives, everything from basic administrative jobs in the agency to things as important as serving records to researchers, I was involved. So from then on in my career, when I went up the chain in the policy group and eventually ran the policy organization, I pretty much knew all the policies. And when I moved on from there later on to Congressional Affairs and I had to go on the Hill and talk about what the National Archives did, I was always doing it from the basis of something that, once again, when I looked at it initially, I said, "You want me to do what?" to something that when I look back on it in my career, it was a foundational skill and experience that I had that I really didn't appreciate. The other thing that it did, it taught me how to supervise difficult people. When you've got a staff of people and I had, I guess, 12 people that were reporting to me and at least 4 or 5 of them, the GSA folks, didn't want to be there. You know, they didn't like me, didn't like being shoveled over to the National Archives. They certainly knew why they were there. We knew why they were there. And so consequently, it did teach me a lot about supervising people who are hard to supervise, and that was a valuable experience as well. There were times when I was in the middle of it that I thought, oh, my God, you know, another day of this, and I'm going to climb up there where the eagles are on the corners of the building and jump into Seventh Street. But anyway, it was all quite an interesting endeavor, shall we say.

Stephanie Reynolds: Do you have any lessons learned from having to supervise difficult people?

John Constance: You know, one of the things about that was I did a lot of listening and they needed somebody to vent to, which I figured out later on they were angry. They felt like they had been betrayed by their former agency that they had put a lot of time into. And everybody has different abilities. Everybody has different skills. And there had not been a lot of attention given to the skills that these people had. When these transitions were made, they just kind of wanted them out and we got them. So listening—and not just listening, but actually hearing what people say to you, I found to be important. And also, the silk glove along with the hammer—I mean, we had to discipline at least two of those people because of lateness, absenteeism, and insubordination. And so you listen, you listen, you listen, and you try to adjust things, but at the end of the day, it was starting to affect the morale of everybody in the organization that these folks aren't showing up. And when they are showing up, they're not working. So again, I was writing the manual on disciplinary actions, so I didn't have to go too far to find practical examples as we were writing those manuals as to what to do and what works and what doesn't work. And, you know, first letter, second letter, and three strikes you're out kind of thing. So anyway, it was interesting. And I can't say that I was or ever became friends with any of those individuals, but several of them did produce and did help with what the eventual goals were for the office. So anyway.

Stephanie Reynolds: For these, the manual and all of these policies and procedures that you were helping to create, where did you get the information from? Were you completely starting from scratch or were you starting with GSA's policies and then creating it or gearing it toward NARA? Or how did you go about creating those?

John Constance: For the general administrative functions, I started out looking at what GSA had. They were a big organization, and they were an organization that was not known for their efficiency. So first of all, we had to scale a lot of their policies to something that was more reasonable for an organization our size. One of the things that I still think back on from time to time and laugh about—I had a couple of people that worked for me that came up with a catalog of all of the reports that independent agencies are required to submit each year to go to Congress, to all these other regulatory agencies, and there are literally hundreds and hundreds of these reports that are required every year. And I looked at that list of reports and in talking to our staff, I said, “We don't have the staff to do those reports in a million years.” And I said, “You know what? Why don't we do this? Let's not submit any of those reports the first year and see what happens.” And that's what we did. And about, I would say of the hundreds and hundreds of reports, maybe for 40 of them the responsible agency followed up with us and said, "Hey, where's your report?" And for those 40, we said, "Oh, okay, fine. We're working on it right here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." But, you know, we didn't know what they were talking about. We would say, "Could you send us GSA's report from last year?" And they said, "Sure, we'll send that to you." So through that means, we kind of worked our way through. But there were like literally 500 reports that we looked at [LAUGHS]. This is the lovely grind in Washington, DC, that laws are written, regulations are written from laws, responsibilities of the night watchman in terms of taking care of all these numbers, and does anybody ever read them and does anybody ever care? We found out that in the vast majority of cases, no, but we pared it down through one year of mismanagement. We pared it down to those that were important. So there you go.

Stephanie Reynolds: So NARA didn't get in trouble for not submitting some of these reports?

John Constance: No, no. And you know, I always thought there was probably some guy on the end of a bunch of those reports saying to himself, "Boy, thank God, I only got ten of these this year." [LAUGHS] So anyway.

Stephanie Reynolds: So then you were the Director of Policy and Program Analysis, right?

John Constance: Exactly. And I had a couple of people. Then I had, you know, folks that reported to me who ran directives and who ran program analysis. And that was fun. I mean, I enjoyed that job a great deal until I got into Congressional Affairs. I think I enjoyed that job as much as any job because I just had three branches reporting to me. It was a small number of people. I guess our total staff contingent was probably 25 at the top. And everybody worked together. Well, I mean, I can still say that the folks that were my branch chiefs in those years were good people who worked hard, and they really did a good job and so that was enjoyable. And it really started to lead me in the direction of Congressional Affairs. There was an interesting dual track that also came out of independence. Some of which were good, and some of them were not so good. And the dual track was this—there were some people who came over from GSA or who we received some pretty strong direction to hire, that the top echelon of the agency did not think were the right choices. And I won't go into names here, but we did have an individual that came over as head of Congressional Affairs. Claudine Weiher and, I guess, Bob Warner and then Don Wilson did not feel that they were the right choice. And it was really a big matter of trust because the sensitivity of congressional affairs is such that since it's where all of your appropriations come from, it's where you're enabling law came from. It's where amendments to that law are vitally important for your long-term existence as an agency. The first element that you've got to have in that relationship between Congressional Affairs and whoever's on top is trust. And that trust wasn't there. So here's the dual track. I became kind of the shadow Director of Congressional Affairs long before I had the title. I was called in and asked by Claudine Weiher and Don Wilson to do things like track legislation that would be of importance to the National Archives and to identify laws on the Hill that we really needed to know about and really needed to weigh in on, things that had to do with the Government Printing Office, things that had to do with possible mission creep along the lines of the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian or whomever else that would start to pinch our toes, given the fact that we were the new kid on the block. And there was a lot of concern that, in these early stages of the existence of the National Archives, we would be taken advantage of in the legislative process and end up not having either the responsibilities or the money for those responsibilities that we would have. So I set up a system and, basically, it was a subscription system that you could get in the very, very early stages of database scanning based on keywords that would pop things up that we would be interested in. And very quietly, when things would pop up along those lines, I would go to the front office and talk to them about what was going on, what we thought we would establish, some strategies about what to do about it. And I would quietly, you know, make contact with folks and kind of move those things ahead. While at the same time, the person who was technically the head of Congressional Affairs was going through the day-to-day routine of guests coming to the Archives and showing people around and the mundane kind of day-to-day track with our finance people about our appropriations and those kinds of things. And it wasn't a great surprise to them that there was more going on than just what was coming out of their office. But anyway, I chose not to spend a lot of time thinking about the rightness or wrongness of this and more along the lines of what I was learning and what I was gaining and how much I liked that process. And at one point, actually, when the individual and the other office kind of moved on, there was some esoteric term, and I can't even remember what it was, but we changed the name of my office to basically include legislative affairs. I think we might have called it Legislative Affairs. I can't remember. I remember arguing with Claudine in particular about what we were going to call it. But before Congressional Affairs was a separate and independent office, it was eventually kind of officially combined with my job in policy and program analysis. But I do remember that in those years, they did not want me to have the whole job because they also, I think, valued my work that I was doing in policy. So I was kind of doing both. But once again, you know, it was a good place to do both given the fact that I was working on the day-to-day policies. At the same time, I was on the Hill trying to explain to people what we did, how we did it, and why we did it the way we did it. So that was kind of a cool transition.

Stephanie Reynolds: Now this was all before you officially were in Congressional Affairs?

John Constance: Right. And let me tell you, if I could. One of the big mistakes that I've always thought that the agency made in the upper echelons, in coming out of independence—and it took a number of years for the chickens to come home to roost in terms of what caused the agency such upheaval. But it eventually happened, and when it happened, that’s how I got the independent job of Congressional Affairs. You know, there was a lot of hubris, for lack of a better term, involved in becoming an independent agency. There were a lot of victory celebrations. There was a lot of beating our breasts and, you know, and Huzzah! Huzzah! We have slain the dragon. We have broken out from our bondage. And, in fact, the buttons that were created as part of independence said, "Free at Last."

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow.

John Constance: So there was a sense in the agency that this had been a generational battle within the Archives. The shoes didn't fit from day one in terms of being part of GSA—they were the guys that took care of the buildings and grounds and bought the cars. They were the administrative arm of the federal government. And I think the Archives spent an awful lot of time with a great deal of anger about that, and when those chains were finally broken—and they were broken by the most modest of individuals, Bob Warner, who was the Archivist that deserves all the credit. He was the most mild-mannered, kind individual. And he did it with basically his own negotiation skills and his ability to bring people together. He had a cadre of people working for him who were, shall we say, the guerrilla warfare team. And I was kind of on the edge of that after we became independent. But that hubris to say, "We've done this and we're, you know . . ." Unfortunately, in some respects, we just kept on fighting. GSA had been the enemy, and then suddenly Congress and our oversight committees became the enemy. GSA had been telling us what to do since 1949, and I think suddenly there was a sense that, hell, now Congress is telling us what to do. Who do they think they are? Huh? And that got us in trouble. A couple of the guys really, really had been the behind-the-scenes heroes on Capitol Hill, staff people, very powerful staff, people who had done an awful lot on a day-to-day basis to see that we were going to become independent. Two of them in particular: Ed Gleiman. Ed was with the House Government Operations Committee. And in all those years, he eventually became staff director and chief counsel of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs. He reported to David Pryor of Arkansas. Ed put an awful lot of blood, sweat, and tears into independence. He was one of the behind-the-scenes guys who really believed in independence, but he realized that the National Archives had not been the best managed place with or without GSA over the years, but thought that Bob Warner was the right man at the right time and could really, really lead us into a very good place and worked very hard behind-the-scenes, along with a cabal of people from the history world and the federal history world that were kind of behind-the-scenes. And Ed did a lot of that work. The other guy that did a lot of that work was a guy named Bob Gellman. Gellman, I think, spent his whole career with the Government Operations Committee, again, our oversight committee in Congress—GSA's oversight committee—and then, of course, our oversight committee. And the first thing that we did when we became independent is, I think, we forgot to thank those guys. We had a party. We had pictures taken. We had them up there at the front for all the celebrations. And I remember Ed Meese, who had been a very important part of the President's team in shepherding this independent legislation through for President Reagan. They were all up there, and they all made the picture. I think it was also John Daniels, whose wife Maygene had been a GSA intern with me and who eventually worked for NARA. John was another behind the scenes staffer that enabled independence. Anyway, they were up there in the phalanx of the photograph, and they all got thanked on that day. But in the days that followed, not only were they no longer thanked, but I think in the minds of a lot of people in the Archives, they became the enemy. They were once again, all of a sudden, "Oh, my God, we're out from under GSA, and now we've got these oversight committees that are all over us in terms of what we're going to do and how we're going to do it." And so a lot of resentment, well, it built over a period of time. And this is months and years, but it built over a period of time. And finally the last critical mistake was when John Glenn became the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. John Glenn was our oversight chairman. And John Glenn's baby was the inspector general legislation. You know, all of the Cabinet agencies had inspectors general for a number of years. The State Department, the . . . you know. And I don't know what the origin year was. I'm going to say, I think it was sometime in the late 1970s that all of those folks, you know, received IGs. But anyway, John Glenn wanted all of the independent agencies—not just the Cabinet agencies that already had IGs—he wanted all of the independent agencies to have inspectors general also in order to be the internal watchdogs within the agency. Well, this was his legislation. He loved it. He felt very proud of it. He got it passed, and it was signed into law in 1988. And then he turned to all the agencies to implement it. Well, I was not at the other agencies. I don't know how the other agencies responded or reacted. I was just at the National Archives, and I can tell you how our upper management responded and our upper management responded in a most negative manner, and with the singular determination that we might just go through the motions. We might look like we were doing this, but I think our top management had no intention of hiring an independent junkyard dog, as these guys affectionately refer to themselves, to walk the halls of the National Archives and be our internal auditor, an honest-to-God auditor. So, it's kind of difficult when Governmental Affairs was our oversight committee, okay? John Glenn was our oversight chairman. So whereas maybe an independent agency that was outside of his jurisdiction or someplace else in the government, it wasn't going to be as evident that we were basically playing rope-a-dope here and just going through the motions. The National Archives had a very well-educated workforce. What that gives you are several things. Number one, if channeled in the right direction, it can really, really make you the best. And I think an awful lot of what has been done at the National Archives has been the best. On the other hand, it also gives you a lot of people with more than an average amount of opinion as to how the agency should be run. There was an ownership in terms of the professional community in the National Archives and, through that ownership, there was always an opinion about the Archivist of the United States, and an opinion about how we were doing our job or not doing our job. There was always an opinion about what we were asking for in terms of funding, what we weren't asking for. And these people were smart enough and sophisticated enough, is probably the more appropriate word, to establish their own channels on Capitol Hill. The Archives had whistleblowers before I think they even coined the term. We were a hotbed of whistleblowers. And so consequently, when we would do things that weren't really to the letter of the law or with the intention for which Congress had wanted things to be done, there always seemed to be someone within the Archives who would pick up the phone or go to Capitol Hill or whatever, and tell the people who are interested in those kinds of things, the things we were doing wrong. Well, at some point, in the run-up to implementation of the new IG Act, it was clearly reported from some of our whistleblowers to the Hill what we were doing, that we were playing fast and loose with the implementation of this, and we were not looking for a junkyard dog, but a lap dog—someone in the agency that we could repurpose into our walking, talking mannequin of an IG. And we took a couple of different approaches. I won't go into all the details, but suffice it to say it was really clear that we weren't playing straight with the committee on this implementation, and we named someone as our first IG that didn't really meet the test of what was expected on Capitol Hill. And we paid for it. We paid for it dearly. Senator Glenn had a staff guy by the name of Steve Katz. And Steve was very sharp. And one of the things you find out about Senate staff—the United States Senate has 100 senators. They're dealing with the same number of issues, with the same amount of complexity that’s being dealt with by 435 Representatives in the House. So if you have 100 people doing the same policy work, legislative work, that you have 435 people doing over on the other side, by necessity, senators typically delegate a lot more authority to their staff. There are big exceptions, particularly in the appropriations world, Armed Services, you know, over in the House. But typically, boy, there were and are some very powerful staff people in the Senate. And Steve Katz was one of those powerful staff guys. And he knew that we were messing with him. And he was going to see that we were hurt by that attempt, so he developed a request from Senator Glenn to GAO—then the Government Accounting Office, now Accountability or something, whatever they're called now—but GAO to basically do a review of the National Archives and our implementation of the IG Act. And they came in. They had done some of their own work, but I think Steve really was way down the road in terms of what he thought and also knew had happened in this implementation. And he got them to do this report. I was sitting at my desk. [LAUGHS] One of the things is that when you're the parent agency of the Federal Register, you're also part of the publishing wing of the federal government. The Federal Register and the Government Printing Office (GPO) are kind of joined in a very close working relationship. So the guys at the Federal Register would see things long before anybody else would see them because if something had to do with the National Archives, they had folks at GPO that would say, "Hey, do you know about this?" Well, I get a phone call from somebody, I can't remember who now, at the Federal Register and they say, "Hey, John, do you know about this GAO report?" And I said, “Well, I know that they've done a review of us and a review of our IG implementation. And this person said, "Stay right there. I’ve got something to send you." So I said, “Okay.” So back in those days, he didn't turn to the computer. I mean, he handed staff this blue-covered GAO report and said, "Run this down the street to John Constance at the main building. He needs to see this, because it's about to be published this afternoon." I will never forget receiving that report in my office and looking down at the boldface headline that read, "Mismanagement at the National Archives and Records Administration." That was the headline. And I thought, oh, man. So I ran down the hall and saw Claudine and Don Wilson and Jim Megronigle and everybody and their brother and said, "Here it is. We’ve got a problem." So not to lay out all the details, but the explosion was loud. I was still only the legislation guy in the policy office and not officially congressional or public affairs, but I worked together with the press office for what was a pretty miserable couple of weeks. I took Don Wilson into a hornets nest of a meeting with Glenn’s staff. We were heading towards a public hearing, but Don Wilson preempted the bloody next steps by resigning as Archivist of the United States and taking a job with the foundation for the Bush Library in Texas, the George H. W. Bush Library in Texas. I learned more in one month than I had learned in my whole career about congressional affairs.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

John Constance: And so that was pretty horrible. Claudine Weiher resigned also. I think she went on a long period of administrative leave, and Trudy Peterson became the Acting Archivist of the United States.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

John Constance: The theme there is, I always thought that it really grew out of the post-independence celebration and then hubris about, boy, you know, here we are with somebody else telling us what to do. And unfortunately, that really is the way things work. And had we continued to befriend Ed Gleiman and Bob Gellman and others, had I—and I will send this out there as a personal failing—had I convinced our upper echelon that I didn’t think I had the leverage in those early days that I eventually had, but if I'd convinced them that we’ve got to get the bad news up there with the good news, it would have really truncated a lot of whistleblowing and really helped us in what was a difficult time—I mean, becoming an independent agency, particularly when it's all you really wanted for Christmas for a long time, and suddenly you got it and, wow, it was a lot more complicated, I think, politically, small P, capital P, both, than the agency thought it was going to be. So there you have it.

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow. So you think by not continuing to really thank them for their efforts and then us kind of giving the appearance of not following through the IG Act, those were some of the big mistakes that we had made?

John Constance: Yeah, I would say they were critical and close to fatal. I mean, there were some moments that I think a lot of the people that had assisted us in becoming independent were very disappointed. I mean, people in the history community, there were a lot of people that were very, very disappointed in that. What came out of it were several things. One, Trudy Peterson was named the Acting Archivist. When Bill Clinton became President of the United States, he decided that he was going to get hold of the executive branch of government in a rather creative way. He put White House liaisons in all of the independent agencies, certainly. I mean, given the fact that all of the Cabinet agencies had both his appointees at the top, as well as individuals down through the echelon who were Schedule Cs and political appointees, he pretty much knew how he was going to get a hold of the Cabinet agencies. The independent agencies, particularly one like the National Archives who did not have a political appointee at the top as such, our legislation made it very clear that you were not to be appointed Archivist of the United States for political reasons, that it was going to be basically your professional background that led to your appointment. That has been followed in some following years, not followed in some following years. And that's a whole different discussion for a different day. But the way Clinton decided he was going to handle this for the National Archives, he was going to park a White House liaison at the National Archives. Our White House liaison was a young woman by the name of Maryanne Smith. And Maryanne came in with a pretty clear portfolio that she made clear to us, that she wanted to be in on everything. She wanted to be in on every decision, every discussion, everything, and she expected to be. One of the fortunate things that happened to me in my career in those years is I hit it off pretty well with Maryanne Smith. My colleague, Mike Gillette, who was head of congressional archives, also hit it off quite well with Maryanne, and he made it known to her that I was competent, had a good heart and was somebody that she could count on (and that the White House could count on) to be a straight shooter. I already had a good relationship with Trudy Peterson. I worked with Trudy off and on for a number of years, and she trusted me. And she also felt that she didn't know anything about Capitol Hill and was more than willing to take my direction. She had watched me work with Don Wilson and Claudine and everybody in the spin-out from the GAO report and felt that the advice that I had given was good advice. Had they listened to some of the advice that I had given, things would have worked out better. But nevertheless, she knew the mistakes that I had made and that I had admitted to. She knew that the direction that I had suggested was generally true North. And so I already had a good relationship with her. Well, Maryanne Smith told Trudy at one point, “You know, one thing you absolutely need to do is have a Congressional Affairs Director and a Congressional Affairs Office and not have it part of your policy staff. John Constance needs to be a separate entity as head of Congressional Affairs for the Archives. He needs a separate office. He needs staff. He needs basically to concentrate all of his time on congressional affairs and not do both that and policy.” Well, that was absolute music to my ears. Trudy talked to me about it, and she said, "What do you think?" And I said, "Oh, my gosh," you know, I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven, because that's really what I had wanted for a long time. And whether it was that Claudine and the Archivist totally trusted me or wanted me to be busy enough in a variety of different pursuits or, you know, they didn't see—I mean, not understanding what the job could be and what the office could be for the agency. They always kind of held it back from being an independent office. So anyway, Trudy was kind enough to then, obviously, turn to me. I wrote all reorganizations or my staff wrote all reorganizations. So she said, "Write me a reorganization that basically blasts this out of policy, makes it separate and has it reporting directly to the Archivist of the United States."

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow.

John Constance: Because Maryanne said that's the only way this will work. “When this guy goes to Capitol Hill, when he opens his mouth, they're going to think that it's the Archivist talking. Well, hell, it might as well be, if they're going to think that anyway. And so let's create an organization chart that shows that that's true.” So that's what we did. We wrote that, and I got an administrative assistant and a legislative affairs person who worked for me and then eventually two. And we were on our way. And those are the moments in my career that I thought, wow, it's all been worth it. I mean, I'd always been a political guy. I grew up in a political family, loved politics, loved a lot of things about it. In recent years I've had second thoughts about that! [LAUGHS] But anyway, I still love things about it, not everything about it anymore. But, I thought, boy, this is going to be fun. And it was. It really was. That was when I started getting up every morning and saying to myself, they are actually paying me to go and represent the National Archives on Capitol Hill, and to try to advance our mission and try to advance our budget and try to explain the inexplicable, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And, I mean, that was great. I mean, that's the portion of my career I feel the most fortunate to have had. So. . .

Stephanie Reynolds: That's no small feat. . .

John Constance: Yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: . . . to explain our mission, and you were talking about the budget. Do you have thoughts on our budget over time? It seems like back then we were kind of, I don't know, flush with money and today it seems not so much. Do you have any thoughts on the budget— and what were your skills to get us more money?

John Constance: Let me suggest this. Let me look, you know, because it would be an interesting story. And I might be one of the few people that can tell you about what that budget history really has been, because I think there is an impression at the Archives now that is reflected in what you said, and that is that we were flush back then. I think that, yes, by virtue of the creation of the Archives, we had an awful lot of good evidence as to what we needed to do, how we needed to do it, what we needed in the way of consolidation and new buildings and whatever. But the National Archives, as you well know—the record-generating federal government had a big head start on the National Archives. And so back in those days—and I don't know what the number is now that we quote—but back in those days, it was 5 billion pieces of paper. And so, yes, we had some good appropriation years back then. But the imbalance between the money and the mission has always been stark for the National Archives, in my opinion. If you look at the preservation of all these records and then the expectation of the digitization of all these records, throw in the declassification of all these records and the enormous tsunami of records that are out there, it's always been difficult to rectify our mission with our resources. And time and time again I heard people look across the table at me on Capitol Hill and say, “You know, I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying, but we don't have all those resources to give you. You're a small agency. Yes, you have a big mission, but this government can't afford to do what probably needs to be done.” Every time in the history of the Archives that we have had a gargantuan task, we have figured out some other way to do it other than through appropriations. Let me give you one example. When the Pentagon Papers were released by The New York Times and, suddenly, there was this huge scandal involving the Vietnam War and the fact that the source for an awful lot of Daniel Ellsberg's writing associated with the Pentagon Papers came from records that were still classified. And so suddenly—this was in the Nixon administration when I was still, you know, a young lad—but I was there when Herb Angel, and a young Bert Rhoads and a couple of other people were musing about where in the world were we going to find the manpower to do this gargantuan job of declassifying all these records? This was like '70—I guess it was in the summer of '71. And I'll never forget, Herb Angel spun around in his big judge's chair, and he looked out at what was the park that was across the street from the Archives, which is now where the Navy Memorial is, and that was a big park with a statue of, I don't know, General Hancock or somebody. And Kann’s department store was behind there. And it was a pretty well-known hangout for the relatively small number of homeless people that were in Washington, DC, in those days. And I always remember, Herb looked over into that park and said, "Well, we can start recruiting right there," and got a big laugh in the room. But what they eventually did is that they went to, I don't know whether it was Fort Meade or someplace, and they got military reserves who were doing summer duty. And they brought these guys in, literally, by the busload at no expense to the Archives. I mean, they went to the Department of the Army. We said we need a lot of people that can read documents. We need a lot of people. We can give them the guidelines. They don't have to have a great deal of skill. But if they're Army officers, first and second lieutenants or whatever, chances are they've got the educational background or the experience that we need. And I can't remember how many of these people they brought in, but it was busloads. And that's how they started that declassification project that summer under the gun from Congress who had set up some mandates, but not a lot of money for the agency to do it. So once again, it was a classic case of here's the mission and here's the money. So that's been the Archives problem for years and years. I'd like to think that when I was there—and that's one of the reasons I don't want to get my mouth out over my memory here— but I do think that in the years that I was there and the years that I left, I mean, I think it was kind of the high-water mark of appropriations, at least in that era. We had a wonderful relationship with the appropriators in those years—Mark Hatfield and Ted Stevens and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Pete Domenici. They were people who really did understand and appreciate what our mission was and were more than willing to help fund that mission. Stevens in particular, about the digital. Mark Hatfield, being a scholar himself, had just written a book about the Vice Presidency and used the Archives for that. Pete Domenici was a brilliant guy and loved the National Archives. David Price of North Carolina was an appropriator on the House side and a guy who had been a college professor, wrote books about the Congress, and had used the Archives extensively. So we had a very, very good relationship and a good run with a lot of great, great people in those years. And then politics and necessity and the big cutting government waste, fraud, and abuse, and all the horrible things that happened under that aegis in some of the later years, and through no fault of the succession of Archivists of the United States we had or the person I helped hire to be the head of Congressional Affairs, John Hamilton, who is still the head. These guys did a wonderful job over the years. But it is the ebb and flow of Washington politics that either helps you or hurts you when you're an agency the size of the National Archives. So . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. So we don't understand all of the intricacies of it, I guess. Yeah.

John Constance: Well, again, I'd be happy—again, not to prolong this in one of the next sessions—but we're at the stage of these interviews that I can start telling some war stories that may be entertaining. But I think that in terms of laying down a little bit more of the history that really is worth laying down, I'd be more than happy to do a little looking at the appropriations profile and make some comments along the way about that. I think John Hamilton is going to be the guy that can tell the real story of the last however many years. That also might be, looking at the old clock on the wall, this might be a good transition point, as they say.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

John Constance: And between now and the next time, I will once again see what I can do about making this computer work. The sound works so that I don't have to continually have this ceiling fan growing out of my head when we talk. [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: Yes. That is not a problem at all. [LAUGHS] In fact, my internet went out halfway through our talk, but I've been recording you on my phone. We've got the whole text message from the internet provider and everything saying there’s a power outage in the entire area. So . . . [LAUGHS]

John Constance: Oh, my God. Well, again, your smiling face, as still as it was, was still projecting on my phone. So, I mean, one of the ways I worked my way through college was as a radio announcer. And one of the things that radio announcers try to do is make each other laugh when they're on the air, and they do some outrageous things to each other. And I am very adept at just keeping on talking and hoping someone's listening. And so when you went from your video to your still, I thought, okay, here we go. I'm just going to keep on talking and see if I can hear her breathing on the other end. [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: That was another reason why I kept saying, “Oh yeah.” “Wow.” “Okay.” “Yeah.” Just so that you knew I was still here. So again, technology. It's great when it works.

John Constance: Absolutely. Well, thank you again for your time. And send me some dates when you get a chance. We'll figure out what works.

Stephanie Reynolds: Wonderful. Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you again for today and enjoy your time. I think you were meeting a friend or something, so enjoy your time.

John Constance: Well, I'm still in the fundraising business for one thing or the other. And I'm going with a friend and someone who he thinks might be interested in one of the causes I'm working on. So anyway, we'll see.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay, well, good luck with that. But yeah, I'll send you an email with some more dates and we'll get something set up here.

John Constance: Great. Thanks so much.

Stephanie Reynolds: Thank you. Have a good day.

John Constance: Thank you, Stephanie.

Stephanie Reynolds: Bye-bye.