What Hillary Clinton’s E-mails Really Reveal

[Commentary] How will history judge a generation of leaders who don’t preserve the historical record?

The revelation that Hillary Rodham Clinton used only a personal e-mail account when she was secretary of state and did not preserve her e-mails on departmental servers seems to reflect a troubling indifference to saving the history she was living. Clearly, archivists, and Clinton, need new technology to process electronic records, as lawyers realized when they began relying on e-discovery methods. But we need more radical measures, too. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, officials hoard secrets because they are the currency of power, but too many secrets debase that currency. Officials should not be able to “mint” new secrets until they declassify an equivalent number of old secrets. Wrongly withholding information from the public should be treated with the same severity as an unauthorized disclosure. And if the executive branch cannot reform itself, Congress should create an independent authority to control official secrecy and safeguard the public record.

The government is producing more classified documents than it knows what to do with. The National Archives is buckling under the strain, and could collapse under an avalanche of electronic records. If it does, America’s commitment to transparent governance will become a thing of the past, because the past itself will be impossible to recover.

[Connelly is a professor of history at Columbia University. Immerman, a professor of history at Temple University, is chairman of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee]