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

Stephanie Reynolds: All right. Okay. So welcome back. This is part three of an oral history with John Constance. Today is September 7th. It's a Thursday, 2023. And I just want to recap before we get started what we covered in our last session here. We talked about NARA’s separation from GSA and then your position as the Director of Policy and Program Analysis and also the creation of directives and procedural manuals that kind of helped further down the line in your other positions learning about the agency. And we talked about the establishment or sort of, I guess, NARA's first inspector general and the infamous GAO report, and then the appointment of Trudy Peterson as Acting Archivist of the United States. Then we covered your appointment as the Director of Congressional and Public Affairs and NARA's budget, and that's kind of where we left off last time. Was there anything that you wanted to follow up on in terms of any of those topics?

John Constance: No. I don't think so. I mean—under Trudy, we separated out congressional affairs, and later on, under John Carlin, we added public affairs to congressional affairs. And I had the umbrella responsibility for both of them. So there was a progression there where, initially, it was just congressional affairs. And then later, I took over public affairs as well. So anyway. But no, I mean, that pretty much sums it up. That's great.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. Well, I'm glad you brought that up, though, about the two sides, because I was curious about that, because normally I feel like they are separate. And so I was wondering if it was always like that or at what point—so it sounds like this was just shortly before you took over that position or just after you took over that position?

John Constance: Yeah, public affairs or communications had been something that we had a separate responsibility for when we were under GSA. Obviously, they had a communication shop. We had a communication shop, and there was some coordination there. They never really allowed us to have our own congressional affairs operation when we were under GSA. All of our congressional affairs really flowed through them. And so when we became independent, we then had a congressional affairs shop. I had a predecessor to my role there. And then I moved into that. And then, eventually, we put them together. There are a lot of precedents for that in the federal government. Oftentimes, they will put congressional affairs and public affairs together under a kind of an external affairs responsibility where, you know, it's based on the fact, I think, that a lot of the skill sets associated with the communications part of it are the same. And you want it to be coordinated. You want what you're saying to the public about your policies and your positions on things, the same as you're saying to Congress. So there's kind of a natural symmetry between the two and there's a need to really have the two together, plus the fact there's a strategic reason to have the two together. I mean, if you are trying to promote the interest of the agency, oftentimes you're working with the press to try to do that. And a lot of times, particularly when there are issues that come up that are controversial, you're getting basically the same questions from Capitol Hill as you are from the press. And so having that coordinated through the same office is kind of an important marriage. So I think that's the reason a lot of agencies do it that way and the reason, really, under John Carlin's tenure as the Archivist that we combined the two together. When I took over responsibility for Public Affairs, Susan Cooper was still the head of that office and, really, I’d say that shop darn near ran itself by virtue of her expertise, background, and long tenure with the National Archives. She was a very independent player and rightly so. Great judgment and complete commitment. She reported to me, however, and I had kind of umbrella responsibility for both areas. They also then added to my responsibilities the website. Public affairs had not had the website as their responsibility. So I got that as well when we did that reorganization. So I had both the press office, which I'll equate to that part of public affairs, and I also had our whole web operation and was involved in the redesign of that and really as our growing public face, you know, obviously was through that. So . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay, interesting. So the website, this was strictly for public affairs? This is what you were kind of reimagining what it would look like and what information would be available there?

John Constance: Exactly. And I want to divide that between the public affairs nature of the website and the research nature of the website. I had nothing to do with the research online, the records online. All of that was separate. But when I say the website, it was essentially the public-facing website that had to do with all of our public affairs operations. Okay.

Stephanie Reynolds: All right. Yeah, I was going to ask about that, too. So you've already preempted me there. So thank you for thinking ahead. [LAUGHS].

John Constance: There you go.

Stephanie Reynolds: Also, I think during that time—and correct me if I'm wrong—I think NARA's Archives II facility was opened in College Park?

John Constance: Yes, that’s right.

Stephanie Reynolds: Did you have any part in getting appropriations for that, or how did that work? What were your responsibilities there?

John Constance: I did. One of the things that was very, very unique about the construction of Archives II and the financing of that is that, you know—and again, others can answer these questions probably better than I—but in addition to an appropriation for construction, we literally got an authorization from Congress to sell bonds for the construction of Archives II. The only other building in Washington that had ever been financed that way was the Thurgood Marshall Building. That was the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington that had been financed that same way. And it was done on the bond market in New York, where we were authorized to go out and, essentially, sell Archives II bonds for cash flow purposes. And Congress then backed them up with the full faith and credit of the federal government. And those investors that invested in those bonds were then paid back on a 30-year bond schedule. So it was pretty unique. Most of my involvement in Archives II were along the lines of, kind of, where Archives II was going to be and how much support we were going to get for the placement of Archives II. I would say that Steny Hoyer, who was the head of our appropriations subcommittee at the time, really became the godfather of the National Archives, largely associated with the construction of Archives II. He was our go-to person in order to negotiate this bond arrangement with the Congress. He was our go-to person who, in turn, went to the Governor of Maryland, William Donald Shaeffer, his alma mater the University of Maryland—which was also in his district in College Park—to see whether there was land available on the University of Maryland campus to place Archives II and whether that was possible. Schaefer, a very close associate of Steny Hoyer, as well as Louis Goldstein, who was the head of public works for the State of Maryland, which was a pretty powerful position at the time—you know, they were the driving force with the University of Maryland administration to see that we were allocated that piece of land for, as I recall, if I'm correct, it was a rent-free renewable lease for 50 years or 100 years or whatever it was. The details of that escape me at the moment. But the land was provided, and Steny Hoyer was really the one that arranged both the land acquisition as well as the financing package. And I was closely associated with him in that regard and worked with his office as well as our budget folks in order to see all that through. Jim Megronigle, who was the Assistant Archivist for Administration in those years, was kind of the genius behind a lot of this and also did a lot of the negotiation and the work with the bond sellers and the bonding agency that really did that portion of the work. So it was a collaboration between a lot of us at the Archives.

Stephanie Reynolds: Do you know why they went for selling bonds for creating. . .?

John Constance: Well, it was going to be a very, very big number. And again, the challenge for the National Archives has always been when you look at our annual appropriation, and you look at projects of the size of Archives II, there's this huge imbalance between the amount of money that we were going to need and the amount of money that our annual appropriation came in at. So I don't remember offhand what the total tab was for the construction of Archives II, over $250 million as I recall. Suffice it to say, it was a big number, a very big number. And so the way to finesse that was working with Congress to see that the out-of-pocket or the above-the-board appropriation amount that was shown in any particular appropriation year was lower by virtue of financing the building the way we financed it. And that worked to Congressman Hoyer's benefit in order not to have to try to represent a doubling of our appropriation in any one year, which would have been a bridge too far, but at the same time have the money available to build a 1.8 million square-foot facility, half the size of the Pentagon, you know, for the National Archives. So I do remember all the statistics: 555 miles of shelving that, if you put it end to end, would go from College Park to Ann Arbor, Michigan. I mean [LAUGHS], all those numbers are still in my mind that, you know, were factoids that we were presenting to Congress in terms of what our needs were. The largest movable shelving installation that had ever been done in the world was done there. And so all of those things cost a whole lot of money and, consequently, creative financing was the order of the day.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. Interesting. In terms of, I guess, getting appropriations and not even just for building that facility, but in general, more broad terms—I know we talked about this a little bit last time. I didn't know if you had anything more that you wanted to add about there being that perception among some staff that we were more flush with money back then compared to what we are today. Was there anything else you wanted to add about that?

John Constance: Yeah. Three things during my tenure that were the driving force for our appropriations— and we were anything but flush in any of these three areas—but the three areas were first, certainly the Electronic Records Archives, or ERA. The ERA initiative, during my tenure, was going to be a big number. It was going to be a half-a-billion dollars that we looked at over a period of years and knew that that was going to be a very heavy lift. When we got the initial contracting with Lockheed Martin, Lockheed was then able to help me with the lobbying, if you will, for the funding going forward. They had, clearly, a corporate incentive to assist with that. I was not supposed to use the word "lobbying." I was not a lobbyist, although I damn sure was. But there was a big problem with Congress with that term. So, I was working with them hand- in-hand going forward to bring that money in. So that was a big priority. The second priority was the ongoing priority of the National Archives for preservation, whether it was going to be through digitization or physical preservation of the records or just the sheer fact that those records no matter what we were doing were, you know, deteriorating. I mean, Ken Harris, as he might have mentioned earlier, said to me on a drive up to Capitol Hill one day, "You know, John, it's all eventually going to rot anyway." And I said, "Don't say that. Don't say that, Ken. You know, let's not. . ." And he says, "No." He said, "You know, it's a fact." He says, "Even if you keep this stuff under very, very good environmental conditions, there's a degradation of these records over a period of time that's inevitable." So you're constantly trying to preserve the records, have the best environment, transfer them to another medium, whether it be, you know, back in the day it was microfilm so that the records wouldn't have to be physically handled or used. And then it's digitization, which preserves the records and also allows you to distribute them more widely to the public. But it was that preservation number that was always one that we always felt we were behind on and working on. One of the things that happened in that world is when Ancestry.com was able to monetize the distribution of records for genealogical purposes. Then they came in, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting that, frankly, the Mormon Church had done before in terms of taking our microfilm and digitizing it and basically getting that out there. So the Archives suddenly was in partnership with some outside entities that had the financial means and also the profit-making incentive to be able to do a lot of that work. So that preservation area was a big deal. And the third area, closely related to preservation was buildings, whether it be the renovation of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, the construction of Archives II in College Park, the maintenance of Presidential Libraries, or the building and maintenance of regional archives and records centers. With all of that property, leaking roofs, sinking cornerstones, and all the many things that happen as buildings age, we were constantly working with Congress to address those issues. The method that I used on the buildings side of appropriations was visits in town and road trips across the country. I took our appropriators to the George H. W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and Simi Valley, California to see the Reagan Library. And in addition to traveling our appropriations committee staff to those off-site locations, we brought the members of Congress who were associated with those states, the members of Congress who were associated with those locations—to those facilities as well. Hillary Clinton, when she was a Senator from New York, we brought her to the Roosevelt Library for an event, and those kinds of things where we got both the staff of the appropriations committees and the members of Congress to visit and put their eyeballs on these locations. And if we had a physical need for renovation or something new, we had the opportunity to get them there and actually show them the site, which was very important to get them informed and excited about what we were doing.

Stephanie Reynolds: Interesting. So it sounds like there was a combination of large-ticket items that were all coming together at the same time that we needed money for. But it wasn't just telling the appropriations committee that, "Hey, we're great. We need money for these things." You were actually showing them. Do they still do that today?

John Constance: Yeah, they do. Yeah. John Hamilton definitely does that. And again, both the show-and- tell with the records—whether it be in regional archives or downtown at the National Archives or at the Personnel Records Center—and putting people back in those stacks and walking those halls and seeing just the scope of what our responsibility is, is really important. I mean, you can tell somebody about your needs or whatever. But when they, for example, visit the caves in Missouri and actually go underground and see what we've done and the environmental advantages of limestone caves, I mean, you can describe that, but when you take somebody underground into space where tractor-trailer trucks are driving around in what were once caverns, it is pretty amazing stuff. And that's the a-ha moment that you get from these people to say, "Oh my God." When we developed the Kansas City site and the sites out there, one of the amazing things we would do is you drive by on the interstate and you'd say, "See over there? We've got x millions of cubic feet of records space over there, and you didn't even see it. You know, it's underground.” So from the standpoint of being a good neighbor to local communities, you could put a huge amount of storage in very innovative spaces. And to take members of the appropriations committee there and to show it to them, and with the turnover of the young appropriations staff . . . I know John has done this on a regular basis. This is where in appropriations you feel like you're in the training business, because you've got one person that really has in their mind what a Presidential Library is, what it looks like, what its purpose is, how important it is, you know, and they get a job with a law firm on K Street. Boom, they're gone. And you've got somebody new, 25 years old, who's coming in behind them, and you're saying, "Okay, let's see. We need to get you up to speed with this as well." So that's the cyclical nature of that business as well, where you're always trying to show a new person or a new group of people, you know, kind of what we do. But that's really the fun part of the job, the show-and-tell, and the show-and-tell with a purpose. But, depending on what they see, it can complicate your life. I will never forget. We took a group of appropriators to the George H. W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, before it opened to the public. It was just kind of in its opening stages. And we wanted to show them what a Presidential Library looked like, and I took the appropriators into the building. There is this endless hallway of skids with shrink-wrapped objects as far as you can see down this one hallway. And so I'm getting a tour from the local folks there at the library, and I said, "So what's all this?" And they said, "They're Presidential gifts." And the appropriators looked at it, and said, "Oh, Presidential gifts? What do you mean? Like gifts from heads of state or whatever?" They said, "No. No, I mean, those are in the vaults over here. These are some of the Presidential gifts with less intrinsic value." And the folks said, "Well, what do you mean by less intrinsic value?" And they said, "Well, when a school class does a craft project, and they send it to the President, or when somebody makes a handmade piece of jewelry without really a lot of intrinsic value, all that comes to the White House, and then the White House sends it to the National Archives in Washington for courtesy storage. And then when the Presidential Library opens up or when the President leaves office, we store all of that in a warehouse along with all the records. And then when the library opens up, we transfer all of those non- intrinsically-valued gifts to the library." And these guys looked at each other and they said, "You mean to tell me we take up storage space and air conditioning and shelving and all of that for macaroni art from Mrs. Taylor's class in PS-29 in Brooklyn, New York?" And we said, "Yeah." I said, "Technically, those were at one time the property of the President, and then now, with the Presidential Records Act, the property of the country." And they looked at each other and said, "Damn, this is a lot more complicated than we thought." It was like, well, that's the law, and we're carrying out the law and these, you know, one-hundred skid loads of stuff down this hallway . . . yeah, and it's all. . . . So anyway, they get to see how complicated the implementation of the laws are that they, at one point say, "Oh yeah, all the gifts that the President gets . . ." So . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: That's really interesting. [LAUGHS]

John Constance: Yeah. Oh, my God. [SHAKES HEAD]

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, you can tell them one thing, but then, yeah, for them to actually see that, it kind of makes that light bulb go off. [LAUGHS]

John Constance: Yeah. And the fact that we'll never have, in a Presidential Library, enough space to exhibit all of the gifts from any one President. . . . Those are always rotated. The Archives gathered all of them at one point in Washington—I say all of them, not all of them, but a sampling of them from various Presidential Libraries for an exhibit in Washington that was called Tokens and Treasures. And the reason for that name for the exhibit is that there are some things that are just, you know, tokens, knickknacks and tchotchkes kind of stuff. And then they're treasures that come from the Shah of Iran to the President or whatever that are of incredible value. There was a portion of that exhibit that also exhibited things that were sent to the President as a Presidential gift that were sent to make a political point. And I will never forget. We had a real spinout with the Johnson family over the fact that in the exhibit case, where we had some of the gifts that had been sent to President Johnson, to LBJ, we had a shovel. The shovel had an inscription on it that had to do with "use this to bury our sons who you sent to Southeast Asia to die for no purpose."

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow.

John Constance: While it was a real, real statement of the nature of some of the things that are sent to the White House, and it was very illustrative of protest gifts, the President's daughter and the President's son-in-law were special guests that night of the National Archives. They left very angry that we had that on display. So it's a very good example of where our historical integrity at the National Archives sometimes has a head-on collision with ongoing political families, the Johnson family being one that really had an ongoing legacy. Chuck Robb was a United States Senator at the time, and the son-in-law of LBJ. And so you were on a tightrope sometimes, and sometimes you fell off the tightrope. That night was one that I'll never forget. We were definitely off the tightrope that night, though there was no better exhibit of an artifact than that shovel. The curator of the exhibit absolutely did the right thing by putting it in there. But we had some fallout.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Well, that's the thing with history though. You should show all different sides, right? Not just one. So it was important that that was there.

John Constance: Well, and LBJ was one of the people themselves that we kind of quoted back to the family very gingerly. LBJ was the one that said, "I want my library to show the history with the bark off," was his Texas phrase. "I want to see it with the bark off. I want to see the real thing." And boy, that was history with the bark off for damn sure, and we lost a little of our own bark that night as a result of it. But it's the way it goes.

Stephanie Reynolds: You brought up the caves. I was just at Lenexa last week, and that was the very first time that I'd ever been in the caves. I'd heard about them, but going along with what you were saying, you don't really understand it until you're actually in there and see how large they are. We got lost in the cave, so . . .

John Constance: Oh, yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. So your point of [CROSS-TALKING].

John Constance: Just the scope of a space like that where you literally have tractor-trailer trucks that drive down in there and drive around, and the extra benefit of the dry environment, the cool environment. . . . And one of the other things that we were able to display to the world was the number of environmental awards that we got that we were able to, you know, preserve all those records down there with a very minimal use of HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] equipment, because it was all naturally air conditioned, because it was underground. It was cool—summer and winter were the same.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. [LAUGHS]

John Constance: [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: So you mentioned President Johnson's family. Do you have any other stories from other Presidential families that you had to work with?

John Constance: The one Presidential family that I had the most exposure to was the Kennedy family. And Senator Ted Kennedy was a very important United States Senator during all of my tenure. And he was, by virtue of the death of JFK [John F. Kennedy] and Robert Kennedy, he was the last one holding kind of the torch for the family and felt a really strong obligation to both history and certainly to the Kennedy Library itself. So his stewardship of the Kennedy legacy and the Kennedy Library were very important. And given the fact that we held all of the assassination records from the Warren Commission and then the Kennedy Assassination Records Act, that involved the review and release of all those records, we were ground zero for the memory of that day in Dallas that impacted the country, the world, and certainly the Kennedy family. And so for that reason, whenever we were going to do anything associated with those records, if there was going to be a new release of records, if there was going to be a controversial new fact that was going to come out, if there was going to be anything associated with that, there were a succession of Archivists that I worked for—John Carlin, Dr. Weinstein, you know—again, they understood the sensitivity of that to the Kennedy family and the sensitivity of it to Senator Ted Kennedy. And we never, ever, ever wanted him to be surprised. So consequently, I had the job of going up and briefing, usually the staff—on one particular occasion that I'll never forget, actually briefing the Senator on some matters—but he had some long-time staff that he relied on for some of the more sensitive matters. And so I typically was briefing staff and not the Senator, but we always were very, very careful in that regard. I'll give you two examples of some interest. One was during the Clinton administration. Technology had moved forward with the ability to detect DNA and also do DNA tracing. And there were some people out there in the history and science world that petitioned Janet Reno, who was the Attorney General, to try to reopen the matter of some of the things that the Warren Commission had looked at as far as the bullets and the analysis of the actual bullets from the Kennedy assassination, basically to—there were three shots fired that day. One of them hit a curb stone that missed the car entirely. One went straight through Kennedy and hit Governor Connally, who was sitting in the limousine in front of him. And the third shot was the one that was the fatal shot that killed the President. That hit him in the head. The one that went through Kennedy and wound up in Governor Connally was always referred to as the "magic bullet." And there was never total agreement. While the Warren Commission, in trying to figure out how these three bullets kind of were involved, and the three shots that were heard in Dealey Plaza were involved, they always referred to that one that went all the way through as the "magic bullet." Well, the interest was, is there DNA on that bullet—both Kennedy's DNA as well as Connally's DNA? That was an opportunity to analyze that bullet in a way that had never been analyzed before. And so with the new DNA technology, Janet Reno was petitioned. She felt that it was worth reopening it in order to settle that once and for all. And so it came from the Justice Department to the Archivist at that time, to John Carlin, to carry out that review. And so there were a group of experts that were assembled. And I won't get them all, but it was from the Academy of Sciences and from, you know, forensics experts and a variety of people were brought together in order to do that. And because of the sensitive nature of it, their very first meeting where they all got together and, as a group, examined the exhibits from the assassination, that was going to be done at Archives II in a conference room under the observation of some staff who were custodians of those records and basically could be observers of everything that was going to be done that day in order to start this process. They had a microscope that they had at the front of the room. They had a panel of the experts. Steve Tilley, who had the responsibility as the archivist that was involved in all of the Kennedy assassination records, was the Archives guy there that day, and they brought in the evidence. Well, before this happened, I went to Capitol Hill and met with Senator Kennedy's staff to say it's going to happen, you know. The Justice Department—thank God it was a Democratic President, because honestly, you don't want politics involved in this. But the fact that it was Bill Clinton who appointed Janet Reno, who turned this matter over to an Archivist of the United States, who had been appointed by President Clinton, and I'm going to Capitol Hill to brief the most powerful Democratic Senator in the Senate at the time. It, at least, was all in the same lane. I'm not saying it would have been different otherwise. I'm just saying it was easier, because I was able to go up there and say, "This is the chain of command that thinks this is necessary and has to be done," because the position of the Kennedy family was always to leave well enough alone. I mean, that was always their go-to default position. And every time I ever went up there on a matter associated with the records, that was always the first reaction. So I went up, briefed the staff. And the one thing that Melody Miller, the long-time confidential assistant to Senator Kennedy, said to me that day was, "Okay, here's the deal, John. We're briefed. I'll let the Senator know, but I can tell you from past experience what the Senator is going to say, and that is, ‘Are you, John, going to be in the room when this all happens so that you can come back and give us an eyewitness report of what went on?'" And I said, "Well, I don't know that I have a need to know, but I will go back and report that to my boss, the Archivist, and let them know that that's your desire." So that's what I did. I went back and told Carlin, and he said, "Well, if they want you in the room, you're going to be in the room." So anyway, I was in the room when the exhibits were opened up and examined—I mean, I can't tell you what it was like to look at the blood-stained clothes and the, you know, all the things and the bullets associated with an event that had changed the world when I was 13 years old. They had one evidence box, one box for the President's suit and tie, and then a separate box for Connally's suit that had been donated by the Connally family to the National Archives and to the Warren Commission. It never really was a big deal or a part of the Warren Commission, but they felt it necessary to have all those things together. And so, the Connally family donated that suit to the Archives. So it's in an evidence box. The two boxes were identical. Well, we all sat down—there were probably 15 people in the room that observed this that day. Steve opened up the box showing the President's suit and tie and shirt and those things associated with that. It might have been more than one box. I can't recall. But when we moved on to the Connally suit, and they opened that box, all of the scientists that were there started laughing. And I thought, "Well, that’s certainly an inappropriate reaction.” These not-to-be- named scientists, you know, are all chuckling. Well, when I looked over their shoulder, what I realized was, Mrs. Connelly, bless her heart, before she donated the suit, she sent it to the dry cleaners. And so it was still in a dry cleaners bag. And the smell of carbon tetrachloride, you know, wafted off this suit into the room. The scientists knew what the rest of us had no idea of, and that is, had that suit been exposed to carbon tetrachloride and gone through dry cleaning, there's no way they were going to be able to find any DNA in that fabric. So they're kind of throwing up their hands and chuckling about, "Well, okay, the party's over as far as us being able to find any DNA off that suit. That's not going to happen." They knew then that it was going to all have to be from the DNA on the bullet fragments that they were going to have to rely on. And as it turned out, one of the things that we learned, that I went back and reported on the day to the Kennedy staff, is that while today modern handling of fragments and things at the scene of a crime involves people coming in wearing gloves, back in 1963, where DNA wasn't a big deal, blood was a big deal and blood analysis was a big deal, but not DNA. All of the detectives and everybody involved in law enforcement were touching all those bullet fragments over the years with their bare hands. So the amount of DNA that was on those bullet fragments was legion. And that created an inability to single out the DNA of the two individuals they were trying to trace. So, the sum and substance of it, when finally the scientists went away, it just wasn't determined that day in that room. They went away, you know, basically did their work and then came back with a combined report. And they were still unable to absolutely confirm using DNA the "magic bullet" theory. And so that was that.

Stephanie Reynolds: That must have been something to be in that room when they're getting those artifacts out.

John Constance: I'll never forget it. And one of the things about the integrity of the National Archives and the integrity of the National Archives process that I've certainly thought about recently regarding a previous President and his handling of records, is the integrity within the National Archives, even within the professional integrity of the Archives, of only looking at records on a need-to-know basis. You can imagine the number of people in the National Archives Building who would have been very interested in those exhibits, in that locked vault, and in those gray boxes, being examined and handled by their friends, who they were eating lunch with every day and were their colleagues and never ever saw any of that, because they did not personally have a need to know within the profession. And so consequently, that was a special day for me in that, first of all, I'm a non-archivist. And second of all, I knew that there were archivists in that room that day that had absolutely never seen those materials because of the integrity of the process within the Archives with national security information, with sensitive information, with very, very sensitive information such as the Warren Commission, that you didn't have a need to know. There was no way that anybody was going to even see any of those records, let alone handle them or be involved in them. And, I mean, I think that's one of the great things about the profession. Another occasion I can recount, I was involved in a briefing specifically with the Senator, Senator Kennedy, that was a matter of Jacqueline Kennedy's suit that she wore the day of the assassination, the famous pink suit that she had on and wore in the motorcade and that was covered in a significant amount of the President's blood. And the Kennedy family, obviously, never wanted that to be displayed. They knew its historic value, but they wanted to get it someplace that would hold it and hold it in trust, but not display it. I think they certainly knew that all they needed to do was walk up the street to Ford's Theater and see the derringer that John Wilkes Booth used, and the blood-stained pillow that had been recovered from the President's bed at the Petersen House across the street from Ford's Theater, where he was carried after he was shot and where he eventually died. Those are display items today at the Ford's Theater, many years later. While they never articulated this, I think they knew that at some point, in the distant future, there will be the public interest to display some of the JFK assassination artifacts, when not associated with the emotional pain that family members of the Kennedys or individuals who experienced that day and are still alive, would suffer. So the Archives has had, for some years, Jacqueline Kennedy's suit. But we never had a deed of gift for it. And so from the perspective of the National Archives, here we were kind of holding on to something that made us very nervous, because we did not have: A) paperwork or B) the interest or the desires of the donor written down. So, getting into the details of the deed of gift, which—because I know I'll leave something out and I don't want to do that—the deed of gift is the deed of gift, and it's in the holdings now of the National Archives, as is Jacqueline Kennedy's suit. We had a problem where the last remaining heir of Jacqueline Kennedy was—I guess her son, John Kennedy Jr., had passed away at that point—Caroline was the closest surviving relative. And of course, Ted Kennedy is a relation by marriage, but not a blood relation. But he had taken over kind of handling the family matters. Well, we needed the signature of Caroline Kennedy on this deed of gift, which had been around for months and had been a very difficult matter to deal with by virtue of the fact that we had sent all this forward and nothing had happened on it. So one of our tasks that day, in addition to talking about some appropriations matters, some improvements regarding the Kennedy Library, was to also talk about what Edward Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, was going to do with his records. He kind of wanted a center for the study of the United States Senate on the grounds up there adjacent to the Kennedy Library, which has since, in fact, been created and is now in place. It was the first discussion of that that we had that day. It was also a very difficult job for Governor Carlin, the Archivist, to bring up the deed of gift. And he did that, and I'll remember that Senator Kennedy said, "Well, you can appreciate how sensitive a matter this is for the family. We understand the . . ." I think he used "historic." He said, "We understand the historic nature of this, but we also never want it to be displayed in the lifetime of any of the children or any of the nieces or nephews or whatever." And when you have a family the size of the Kennedy family, I mean, that was going to be a long time. So, he said he would take it up with Caroline, and the deed would, in fact, be signed. And I think within a month of that meeting, it was in fact signed and returned to the Archives. So that matter was taken care of. So it was things of that kind of sensitivity that, you know, we needed to talk directly to the Senator. And we never ever asked him for anything associated with the Archives or the libraries or anything that he did not help a great deal with to the extent that he could in terms of that. And that was an important, important thing. I also had a wonderful voicemail when I retired from the National Archives and moved over to the Legal Services Corporation as their lobbyist. My first week on the job, I came back to the office from lunch, and I punched in my messages on my phone, and this familiar voice said, "John, this is Senator Ted Kennedy." And he said, "I understand you've retired from the Archives. I want to just tell you how much your work at the Archives and what you have done for our family means to me and to Caroline and to the Kennedy family, and how much we appreciate your service. And I just wanted to give you a call and leave you that message. So thanks very much." Click. So I saved that message for a long time, and whenever I was having a bad day at my new job, I would punch in that message and listen to it again.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. What a great message to have, you know? [LAUGHS]

John Constance: Yeah. Exactly.

Stephanie Reynolds: Huh. Did you have any other high-profile cases, I'll say, during your time in that position?

John Constance: Well, I did a lot of personal work with people that were in our leadership. I mean, Congressman Hoyer and I spent a lot of time together and got to know each other. Former members of Congress like—there were former members that we used for—Lindy Boggs, you know, was a great example. I mean, she was an icon of the appropriations world on Capitol Hill and was a very important and very high-profile member of Congress and somebody that we really enjoyed a great relationship with and was kind of our—if Steny Hoyer was our godfather, Lindy Boggs was our godmother for many years, even after she left Congress. And the leadership, I mean, Senator McConnell, who's heavily in the news these days, I had a lot of work in dealing with him over the years. Some members, like McConnell, had their own personal records. He collected writs of manumission from post–Civil War America, and he was interested in advice on how to preserve them or how to keep them from fading away. And so we had a personal visit with him on more than one occasion to, you know, talk about that and help him out in that regard. And Congressman, and then Senator, Roy Blunt, who was an important part of the leadership, we did a lot of work with him. So yeah, there were a number of members that came and went. One of the things that I would say that my theory always was that, when a member of Congress was out of power, when a member of Congress was in the minority and not the majority, they had a lot more time on their hands. They were not the chairman of a committee or a subcommittee. They were not, you know, in the leadership kind of creating the budget or creating the agenda. They were really reacting to what the majority was bringing, in those regards. So when you're in the minority on the Hill, you've got more time on your hands. You also have less power. My theory was that's the time we can get them and their family down to the National Archives for a tour. That's the time we can get them to spend time with us, because they've got more time on their hands at that time and are, frankly, just free more often than chairmen and people in power. And second of all, eventually, they will be in power. And when they got to that position, we wanted them to know us and love us and understand what we did for a living. And so we had a pretty regular stream of members of Congress that we would invite down for what we call vault tours. Cindy Fox was a wonderful, wonderful hostess in the—for lack of a better term—in our treasure vaults associated with State Department records treaties and those kinds of things. Other archivists, like Milt Gufstason that we worked with through the years, were just great at opening the vaults up to their tours. Mike Gillette and then Richard Hunt were wonderful in opening up the records of Congress to show members the kind of records that were associated with their branch of government. So we used those opportunities to really showcase the records. And so I always kind of felt like I was in the travel business part of my time—scheduling and all that, bringing the members in, greeting them, and getting the Archivist to tailor tours to the local interest of a member of Congress. What records do we have from their home, their district, their state? We wanted to show them that the records that we preserve in the National Archives are federal, they originate from, you know, a member's district. So when a member thinks of the National Archives, and so that's where the laws go, that's where the Declaration of Independence is and the Constitution. Well, yes, but it's also where things that happened in your district are documented through photographs, maps, court records, and other transactional information. That's where all that's from as well. And so to make them understand how local the history is, I'll never forget. I mean, one of the sets of records that we did a lot of very good things with were the records associated with the Mormon Church, you know, when they created the state of Utah. One of the things in the birth records of the state of Utah were Joseph Smith's diaries and Joseph Smith's records that really became the creating records for statehood. Well, when you bring a Mormon into those vaults, and you hand them records showing Joseph Smith's actual handwriting, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, they've never seen Joseph Smith's handwriting. They've never seen that before. And you put that in front of them, you really—I mean, they have a moment. And there were a number of very important members of Congress through the years, Majority Leader Harry Reid among others, that would see that, and that was a bonding moment for us with them. So that was important. That was an important part of what we did. And one of the things that's interesting in terms of the longevity of that, when you now go into the main public exhibit at the National Archives, the main exhibit is called the Public Vaults. And that tagline came from the fact that it was the vault tours that we used to do for members of Congress and key guests that we used to introduce people to the National Archives. And that was back in the day that all we had was the Rotunda. When I came to the National Archives, the sum and substance of exhibit space for the National Archives was the Rotunda. And those exhibit cases that surrounded the Rotunda were the only space we had for rotating exhibits. So when the public vaults were created and the museum was created, and then the Lawrence O'Brien Gallery and the O'Brien contribution to that, and basically what it is today, that was all brand new. And so a lot of this concept came out of what Mike Gillette and Richard Hunt and Cindy Fox and Milt Gufstason had done through the years of opening the vaults up, which has kind of a mysterious vibe to it, you know. It wasn't the stacks. We went down the list of things that we could open up to the public. The stacks, you know, not so much. But the vaults, oh oh oh. There you are talking about something that's [LAUGHS] sexy. You know, you want to see behind that door.

Stephanie Reynolds: [LAUGHS]

John Constance: So, a lot of that kind of came out of that over the years. We also, when members of Congress—and we had to be careful about this, but we did it, and we did it a lot—when members of Congress would bring key constituents—I mean, there are constituents that are going to the doors of Congress on Capitol Hill every single day. You know, they're knocking on the door. They're going in. They're stating their case and, you know, they're lobbyists that are doing that every day. But there are a certain number of people back in the home district or the home state of a Senator or the home district of a Congressman, that are, shall we say, constituents of high value, meaning that they are the people that write the checks. They are the people that are the financial backing for members of Congress to run for reelection. With the internet age, that's a much broader group of people than it was back in the day. Back in the day, it was a very relatively small—comparative to today—a relatively small number of check writers, and members of Congress would invite those people to come for a special week or a special weekend or a special visit to see them in their office on Capitol Hill, to be toured around the United States Capitol by the member of Congress. This was before, again, the Capitol Visitor Center opened. And it was all, kind of, personal tours and things back in those days. And they were always looking for things for those people to do in the course of their time in Washington. Well, John Constance [WAVES HAND] had an idea what those people could do. They could come down and get a very special tour of the National Archives, usually accompanied by either the member of Congress or the Senator or the member's spouse. That would be their tour guide or person kind of taking them around. The White House would typically be opened up to them through a special tour. The diplomatic rooms of the State Department would be opened up to them for a special tour, and the Smithsonian, obviously, would do things for them. But the National Archives was a big deal as part of that visit.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah.

John Constance: We would often start in the Rotunda before the public came in and be there when the Charters—back in those days, they would come up from the vaults. I can't tell you. It's top secret now how they get onto the display now. But back in the day, they came out of the vaults that had been produced by the Mosler Safe Company, up on scissor jacks. And they would appear in the encasements. Well, it was pretty damn cool to be there in the morning with nobody else in the Rotunda except you and your special guests and turn to the guard and say, "Raise the Charters." And the guard would push the button, and the Charters would come up out of the vault, and you'd see the Declaration of Independence appear and the Constitution appear and the Bill of Rights appear. So that was a big deal. And so for these special guests, that's the way their morning would start. And then we would take them into the vaults to see some other records and, after an hour or so, would send them on their way. And the next time I would see that member on Capitol Hill, they would say, "Thank you, John. That was the nicest thing that anybody has ever done in Washington for my people. And they will be talking about it for the rest of their lives and wonderful and . . ." And, again, so it was like, "Remember the National Archives. [LAUGHS AND WAVES HAND] Remember the National Archives." So, I mean, that was all part of the deal, and the things that I—you know, it wasn't rocket science, but it was very enjoyable. And it relied on a very capable group of archivists who knew their records and knew how to present them and tell the story of the records and tell the local story that might be of interest to an individual member. Milt Gustafson knew the records of the Supreme Court. He knew the diplomatic records. And these people, when they would come to the Archives for a tour, it wasn't always at a convenient time of the day. They would come sometimes at 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. at night. And I always remember one night holding Milt over until about 7:30 at night waiting for a member to come off the floor so he could come with his staff and his family. And, you know, I never forgot it in terms of what Milt did for me that day. And this member of Congress never forgot it either, and for 20 years, was a friend of the Archives on Capitol Hill. So, you know, it works. It works. Doing things for people works.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, it sounds like. I mean, you're essentially marketing. Yeah, you're essentially marketing the National Archives to members of Congress and to the appropriations committee, then constituents and that sort of thing. I think it's really interesting, like you're giving them essentially a personal touch, you know, whether you're having them on hand to see the Charters of Freedom come up into the Rotunda or if you are personalizing tours. So, you know, you're having items available for them to view that are from their own district or something like that. So you're really showing them the value firsthand of what the Archives is all about and making it important to them.

John Constance: Exactly. I mean, I think a lot of lobbying. Can you still hear me?

Stephanie Reynolds: Yes.

John Constance: My AirPods are getting low, I think.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

John Constance: One of the things that I would say about lobbying as a profession is that you better be telling the truth. Okay, let's start with truth-telling. You know, lobbyists who have a very short shelf-life are the ones that go to Capitol Hill for the cotton industry or oil or you name it, and don't tell the truth. Those are the guys that you call former lobbyists, because they don't last very long. All you gotta do is say something to a member of Congress that isn't true and have them go to the floor of the House or the Senate and repeat that on the floor of the House or the Senate, and then find out what they're saying is not true. You're toast. So, first of all, you’re a truth teller. The main thing that all lobbyists do is provide information. You are channeling and targeting information to a member of Congress to help them make a decision. And, you know, whether they were going to add to our appropriation or subtract from our appropriation or leave our appropriation level to the next year, I at least wanted to have the confidence in myself that they knew what we were doing, that they knew what we would do with that money if they gave it to us. If they have to make a decision that another agency is going to get that money and we're not, so okay, we're going to live to fight again next year and we're going to go after that money again. But the first goal was to have them understand what the National Archives is, what we do, how important it is, how complex it is, and meet the people who are making those decisions every day. And all you need to do is meet an archivist who lives in these records and loves these records and understands that, wow, I mean, this is the real deal. I mean, these people are not doing this for, you know, for an hourly wage. These people are doing it because they love it. That was a big part of that communication, that we always wanted to keep going with them, that they got us.

Stephanie Reynolds: So, I'm looking at the clock. We've got about, I think, seven minutes or so left for today. There were other things I wanted to talk about in terms of—again, when you were in congressional and public affairs—in terms of topics that you might have run into in that position in terms of theft of national treasures, preservation of electronic records, access to Presidential records, if you were kind of a point person on issues that would come into the media, you know, if someone was found to use personal email to do government business and things like that. I don't know if you want to start to talk about any of those things or if you want to hold it for the next time?

John Constance: Yeah, let's hold that for the next time, if you will, and I'll think about it. I can also kind of make a list of happy stories and scandals that I can lay out. Scandals is too pejorative a term. I mean, more often than not, it was something that would happen that we had a story to tell. And I was there to get the story out. Happy to chat about that and to go into that.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

John Constance: And every one of those controversies was also an opportunity to, through the press, explain to people what we did. And so a lot of that was kind of taking a . . . you know, and turning something around from a negative to a positive. That was certainly a goal and maybe an interesting one to put down on tape. So . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. Yeah, kind of that educating the Congress and the public on really what our mission is and what we actually do, it sounds like.

John Constance: Yeah, that was a part of it. And that then moved over into the whole web. The world of the World Wide Web in terms of trying to figure out how to do that most effectively through the electronic means, which we can talk about as well.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Okay. Wonderful. Well, let me go ahead and stop the recording. Just hang on just a second here.

John Constance: Okay.