Feds at Work: Helping make presidential records accessible to the public
By Katie Koziara
When President Obama leaves office in January, researchers, graduate students and the media will rush to get access to his documents. That’s where John Laster, director of the Presidential Materials Division at the National Archives and Records Administration, steps in.
The Presidential Records Act of 1978 charged the National Archives with finding homes for presidential records, which become public property the day after the inauguration unless the archivist of the United States, the incumbent president or the appropriate former president requests the records be kept private.
Laster and his team work with the nonprofit foundations former presidents set up to raise money and build presidential libraries that house the printed, audio and visual material from the White House.
“It’s phenomenal to me to step back and think that on January 21, we have the records of the former president in our legal custody and they could literally have been created three days ago,” Laster said.
Before presidential records are made accessible to the public, they have to be documented and reviewed. This process takes place in temporary facilities that the National Archives outfits with temperature and humidity control and proper security.
“It’s humbling to know that we protect the documents that are key to understanding the history of this country.” ~John Laster, National Archives and Records Administration
In years past, memos from the Oval Office have been stored in retrofitted bowling alleys, used car dealerships, a spaghetti factory and even a Chinese restaurant, while construction continued on presidential libraries and museums. This year, tens of thousands of gifts and 15,000 to 20,000 boxes filled with presidential documents and photos will wait classification in an empty furniture store 30 miles west of Chicago before they find their permanent home in the city’s Jackson Park neighborhood.
In 1996 when Laster took his first job with the National Archives, he found himself walking into one of these interim sites on day one.
“My professor said, ‘You know there’s this new George H.W. Bush Library,’ ” Laster said. Laster applied for a position, was hired and soon headed to a strip mall in College Station, Texas, where he unpacked, reviewed and then repacked countless documents.
After the National Archives staff spent four years getting the permanent library set up, moving the records into the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum “was like going from a shack to the Taj Mahal.”
After completing work on the library, Laster moved to Washington and has been with the National Archives ever since.
“He worked his way up and he just has a huge amount of experience with both the laws and the process,” said Gary Stern, general counsel at the agency. “He is amazingly good at his job.”
This expertise comes in handy, as the lengthy process of setting up presidential libraries requires coordination across government. The General Services Administration, for example, identifies the temporary and permanent sites for the presidential libraries, and the Department of Defense provides the workers and transportation for the hundreds of thousands of documents.
In late 2008, Laster and his team were moving boxes out of the Washington, D.C., area when a judge presiding over a case involving the President George W. Bush administration placed a hold on some of the boxes containing emails.
Challenges like these are always popping up for Laster and his team. “It’s a rare day when only the expected happens” at the presidential materials division, he said.
“We found out that one of those boxes was on a pallet at Andrews [Air Force Base],” Laster said. It took a team of soldiers all night to break down a pallet of 180 boxes to find the one box the judge requested. Once they identified the documents that needed to stay in Washington, they had to rebuild the pallet so it could go back on a plane that was flying out at dawn.
Others might view setbacks like these as a hindrance. Laster said they reinforce the camaraderie of his team. And while he conceded that most children dream of making history when they grow up, he said preserving it is just as imperative.
“There are times when I’m crossing Pennsylvania Avenue that I look up at the National Archives building and remember the enormity of the mission of this agency,” he said. “It’s humbling to know that we protect the documents that are key to understanding the history of this country.”
