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April 1971
To begin with, the Presidential libraries do not look like what they are. Each one is, in fact, a miniature Office of Public Records. And scholars who frequent such offices know that they are found in capital cities, in buildings that are heavy, ornamented, slowly discoloring monuments to bureaucrats dead and gone. The National Archives of the United States—America's public records—are, to give one example, housed in an oversized Greek temple near the intersection of Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues in Washington, D.C.
But the six libraries for Presidential papers, which are administered by the National Archives and Records Service ( NARS ) of the General Services Administration, are something else. The Herbert Hoover Library modestly hugs the flat ground of West Branch, Iowa, calculatedly as unpretentious as Hoover's nearby birthplace or the well-preserved blacksmith shop of his father, where he learned by observation the value of hard work and austerity. Franklin D. Roosevelt's is in a building that blends neatly into the surroundings of a Hudson River gentleman's estate at Hyde Park, New York. Harry S. Truman's spreads itself on a grassy knoll not far from an expressway in Independence, Missouri, once the gateway to the limitless West, now a suburb of Kansas City. A tendency toward expansion becomes visible in Abilene, Kansas. There, in the Eisenhower Center, a library of Kansas limestone and imported marble faces a museum across an open court, flanked by a Place of Meditation (the word chapel being carefully avoided) and a set of monumental pylons presented by the Kansas Daughters of the American Revolution and the Soroptomist Clubs of Kansas. On the campus of the University of Texas at Austin a rectangular, flat-capped tower of pinkish travertine rises from what landscaping will turn into a spacious plaza. To be opened in May, 1971, it will contain the Lyndon B. Johnson Library; an adjoining, lower structure will house the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Both are the architectural creation of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the firm that has designed many of the steel-and-glass temples of industry on New York's Park Avenue. Fiscal and other uncertainties have delayed the construction of the John F. Kennedy Library, but eventually an oval-shaped cluster of buildings and malls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will contain the library itself, the Harvard-affiliated Kennedy School of Government, and possibly a third "related facilities" building.
These are a long way from the attics in which Presidents of a simpler day stored their papers; the contents of these libraries, too, are of a magnitude and complexity that stretch the imagination. First of all, there are the actual papers of the Executive Office—row on row, shelf after shelf, of the memoranda, letters, reports, studies, schedules, briefs, minutes, tables, abstracts, lists, projections, drafts, forms, authorizations, and all the infinite variety of documents through which Executive power somewhat soggily asserts itself. Next, there are the truly personal papers—the records of the human beings who briefly occupied the White House and of many members of their administrations. These comprise an incredible miscellany of mail, including thousands of letters from ordinary citizens who reach out to touch the majesty of office in revealing notes that beg, cajole, flatter, and often obscenely condemn the President. In addition there are clippings, photographs, tape recordings, reprints, motion-picture films, sketches, and such minor social records as greetings, invitations, acknowledgments, and farewells. Finally, there is a third category of material, housed in the museum that is part of each Presidential library- the objects accumulated by a President in office: paintings of (and sometimes by) the Chief Executive, statuettes, stamps, ship models, miniature weapons and vehicles, fishing tackle, stuffed animals, dishes, silverware, mugs and goblets, clothing for the First Lady, toys for the First Children, souvenirs of historic occasions, books, cartoons, prints and musical scores autographed by their creators, rugs, tapestries, plaques—the gifts of ordinary citizens and heads of state alike to the representative of the American people.
These unscholarly items have, in some cases, achieved a kind of immortality in their own right—the collar of Roosevelt's famous Scottie, Fala; the sign on Truman's desk, T HE B UCK S TOPS H ERE ; John Kennedy's rocking chair. They arc the items that, when displayed, bring in the tourists by thousands. While the historians, sitting shirt-sleeved in the research rooms and peering quizzically at the documents, may take little interest in the public thronging through the museum displays, the directors of the libraries do not scorn the sightseers. They reason that among the crowds of children in Snoopy T-shirts, Sears jeans, and Keds sneakers, smelling of Howard Johnson's peppermint gum and Good and Plenty licorice, peering at the cases through Rexall sunglasses, there may be future Morisons and Schlesingers. (The tourists and the researchers do not see each other, but in the Johnson Library the sightseers will be able to see what the archivists are working on. The architect has made the stacks visible from the museum through a glass wall and has decreed that the papers be kept in eye-catching scarlet boxes.)
The libraries are the creations of an unusual collaboration. Each has been built by private subscription among the friends of a President (except for the Johnson Library, which Texas will pay for and own as part of its state university campus). The President so honored, on his retirement, deposits his papers in the library, and both building and contents become a gift to the people of the United States. The federal government then puts archivists to work in the role of whitecollar monks, guarding the precious manuscripts against the ravages of time, weather, chance, and desperate men.
With each succeeding Presidency the sheer volume of material has increased. It is estimated that George Washington wrote perhaps twenty-five thousand letters all told. By Franklin Roosevelt's time the President's own letters, plus the other documents he had collected during his public life, were measured in the linear feet of space they occupied when boxed and shelved. The total was nearly 2,500 feet—almost half a mile of such records. The Roosevelt Library did not confine itself simply to preserving the papers taken from the White House after Roosevelt's death. Like the Presidential libraries that followed, it sought and accepted the manuscripts of the President's coworkers and associates throughout his career in government. As a result the Roosevelt Library now has over twentyone million pages of manuscript on paper, after a quarter-century of growth. But the Kennedy Library, not yet open in its permanent quarters, already has more than seventeen million pages on paper, plus two and a half million on microfilm, representing an administration that lasted less than three years—in addition to a million and a half feet of motion-picture film and more than fifteen hundred sound recordings (both discs and tapes). The Johnson Library has thirty million pages on paper, 5,500,000 on microfilm, half a million photographs (compared to 93,052 in the Roosevelt Library, the nearest competitor in this field), 2,010,420 feet of motion-picture film, and 3,025 sound recordings for the ears of the future.
It is estimated that President Nixon's records, even if he were to serve but one term, will exceed Johnson's in volume. What the cost of a Nixon Library (already in the planning stages) will be is uncertain, but since the Roosevelt Library cost $367,000 to build, as against the several millions that the John F. Kennedy Library will require, it may be guessed that the amount will not be small. The expense of maintaining the six institutions—including the two not yet complete—in fiscal 1970 was approximately 1.8 million dollars in appropriated funds, which allowed for a personnel of 146. Certainly it seems a modest sum, nowadays, to care for donated buildings and lands worth many millions, and for papers whose value to history is presumed to be incalculable.
But are the treasures of the Presidential libraries actually priceless? There are some who doubt it, who fear that, if only because of their stupefying massiveness, the Presidential papers will not yield up the shape of the past to future historians in the way that fossil bones deliver the outlines of prehistoric giant lizards to knowledgeable paleontologists. Scattered widely over the country, some argue, the libraries will be visited only by pilgrims who are seeking the relics in the museums and by a handful of scholars who appear seasonally like wildfowl (at every academic vacation) to scrabble for the materials of dissertations. Will the Presidential libraries, in fact, become—in Columbia historian Henry Graff's speculative phrase—the pyramids of our time? Or will they, as their staffs hope, help in the critical task of preserving the nation's records so that it may learn wisdom by a searching look at all its yesterdays?
To answer that question demands a review of the nature and history of Presidential papers and a survey of the current limitations on their use. The picture is sometimes discouraging. To begin with, a skeptical American may be pardoned if he believes that gratitude is uncalledfor when a President makes a "gift" of his papers to the public. Why should the people be thankful, he reasons, for being given what is theirs in the first place? For is it not true that the President's correspondence is a part of the official record of the government? And does it not therefore belong to the taxpayers fully as much as anything else created or purchased with government monies?
Astonishingly, the answer is No. Ordinary civil servants—even Cabinet members—are obliged by law to keep account of their doings, and in so doing to create the fallout of official documents that keeps archivists in prosperity. They may not destroy or remove whatever may be needful for a competent authority later to review their public performance. But the President of the United States is himself an independent government agency. In a sense he is accountable only to God, the Constitution, and the electorate. What comes into his office during his tenure is his alone.
George Washington, who set so many Presidential precedents, simply took his papers—including all the written matter he had exchanged with members of his official family—back to Mount Vernon with him, presumably to nestle alongside his old plantation account books, and no one was disposed to challenge him. John Adams followed suit because, according to one scholar, he did not want his thenhated successor, Thomas Jefferson, nosing among his letters. When Jefferson himself did the same in 1809, the precedent had hardened. It was not challenged until 1886, when the Senate made bold to ask for certain papers belonging to Grover Cleveland, which were then not even in the White House but on file in the office of the Attorney General. Cleveland characteristically rapped the Senate's knuckles. "I regard the papers and documents … intended for my use and action," he wrote, "purely unofficial and private, not infrequently confidential, and having reference to the performance of a duty exclusively mine. … I suppose if I desired to take them into my custody I might do so with entire propriety, and if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain. …" The senators did not press the matter further.
Presidents came and went. They took their papers with them and did things to make archivists shudder. The precious documents were dumped in attics; rummaged by heirs for autographs and souvenirs to bestow on friends; winnowed of "improper" material by worshipful widows, executors, and official biographers; and scrawled on by playful children. Some were burnt by accident—many of Andrew Jackson's, for example—and some perished in flames by design, like those of Millard Fillmore (by the deathbed command of his son) and, reputedly, those of Martin Van Buren and Ulysses Grant, who were either indifferent to, or wary of, the curiosity of posterity.
Some, of course, were sold to libraries (often by heirs in need of cash) whose directors sensed the vital importance of the neglected records to historical research. The Library of Congress worked hard at getting a complete Presidential collection and up to 1940 had spent $170,000 in purchases of ex-Presidents' papers. Universities and state and local historical societies acquired fragments of individual Presidents' papers.
There were shining exceptions. The family of Rutherford B. Hayes presented his carefully kept papers, as well as the family estate, to the state of Ohio, which built a memorial library on the site. Opened in 1916, it has since become an important center for the study of the Reconstruction era. The bulk of the papers of the Presidents from James A. Garfield through Calvin Coolidge—with the exception of Warren Harding, whose papers are at the Ohio Historical Society, in Columbus—were given to the Library of Congress. Herbert Hoover deposited his in a special library, now known as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, on the campus of Stanford University; there they joined the materials he had accumulated in a world-ranging career as engineer and famine relief administrator (but as it turned out later, they did not stay there). When Franklin Roosevelt began to think about leaving the White House, he might have followed what has been called the Library of Congress model. But he regarded himself as having a special problem, and, characteristically, he looked for a precedentbreaking way to solve it.
In February, 1938, Roosevelt wrote to his fellow sailing enthusiast and Harvard alumnus Samuel Eliot Morison, asking for advice on the "somewhat ambitious thought" of creating a repository for materials "relating to this period of our national history." Without a special effort they would be scattered throughout libraries and collections across the entire country. "For example," Roosevelt noted, "my own papers should, under the old method, be divided among the Navy Department, the Library of Congress, the New York State Historical Division in Albany, the New York City Historical Society, Harvard University, and various members of my family." Morison quickly replied. He thought that a separate New Deal archive would not be a good idea. But the President's own papers might well be kept together somewhere—it did not matter where, "as long as the repository is fireproof and the guardians faithful." In conclusion Morison urged: "But, whatever you do Mr. President, don't break up the collection, giving some to your children, others to Harvard, etc! Although alma mater would profit, such dispersion offends all my professorial principles."
Yet even the modest goal of preserving the Roosevelt records, instead of a complete New Deal archive, posed a problem. For one thing, the volume of White House business had mushroomed enormously. As a single instance, F.D.R.'s ability to communicate directly with the public—"My Friends"—had stimulated floods of letters to him: where Hoover had received about four hundred a day, the Roosevelt daily average in 1940 came to over four thousand. Moreover, Roosevelt was a pack rat. "I have destroyed practically nothing," he told guests at a dinner. "As a result, we have a mine for which future historians will curse me as well as praise me. It is a mine which will need to have the dross sifted from the gold."
Roosevelt's decision on how and where to locate his mine was announced after a luncheon on December 10, 1938, to which he had invited the Archivist of the United States, Robert D. W. Connor; the historian of New York State; two university presidents; the president of the League of Women Voters; such assorted literary and journalistic figures as Stuart Chase, Ernest Lindley, and Archibald MacLeish; and such past and present university professors as William E. Dodd, Frederic L. Paxson, Charles A. Beard, Helen Taft Manning, Felix Frankfurter, and Morison. The President emerged from the dining room to tell waiting reporters that after "consultation" with these luminaries, he had decided to place all of his collected papers, books, and other materials in a building to be erected, at private cost, on a portion of his Hyde Park estate that he would donate to the United States. (Eventually, he added, the entire estate would go to the federal government "to be maintained for the benefit of the public"—as in fact it has.) Within a short period of time a fund-raising corporation was established, and with a speed that later builders of Presidential libraries may well envy, the money was raised (some twenty-eight thousand individuals contributed), the building was constructed, and title was granted to the United States in mid-1940.
Roosevelt's dream of retiring to putter among his collections was never fulfilled, of course. (In typical fashion, he had jauntily refused at the December, 1938, press conference to say when he proposed to settle down in Hyde Park, leaving his possible third-term intentions as unclear as ever.) But the Roosevelt pattern was destined to endure. This was probably due to Truman's decision to follow his predecessor's model; it is the second man in a sequence who turns idiosyncrasy into tradition. One of Truman's administrative assistants worked with Tom L. Evans, a Kansas City businessman, to raise contributions for the building; the city of Independence gave thirteen acres for a site near Truman's home; and on July 6, 1957, the Truman Library was dedicated.
The man from Independence immediately took a hand in making it a working institution. He had an office for himself, which he occupied faithfully from nine to five, six days a week, while working on his memoirs. (To the distress of historians he sequestered large bodies of his papers for this purpose, and they have not yet been released for general use.) From time to time, according to the present assistant director of the library, he would bounce out to chat with the librarians, secretaries, and researchers at work amid the file cabinets and would often address visiting classes of schoolchildren in the library's auditorium for film displays. The staff also got accustomed to the sight of Truman leading distinguished old friends, visitors from all over the world, through his library with proprietary gusto.
By that time President Dwight Eisenhower had agreed to deposit his papers in a library-and-museum complex at Abilene. Herbert Hoover's friends, after an eightieth birthday party for him in West Branch, had launched a drive to build the Hoover Library, to which the papers of his Cabinet and Presidential years would be transferred from Stanford. And in 1955 Congress—which had allowed the government to accept the Roosevelt Library by special joint resolution—passed a general Presidential Libraries Act. Under it, the Administrator of General Services (the business arm of the federal government) could accept the papers of any President or former President, as well as "any land, buildings, and equipment offered as a gift to the United States for the purposes of creating a Presidential archival depository," and could likewise, if need be, agree to operate such a depository even if title to the property remained with some state, political subdivision, foundation, or institution.
Even before the tragically abrupt end of the Kennedy administration, plans were afoot for the Kennedy Library, and the subject of where to locate the Johnson Library was also on the White House staff agenda long before 1968. Both Presidents had initiated record-keeping and record-compiling programs within Executive agencies, the first rough sketches for the historical portraits of their periods of tenure.
A foundation was set up in 1969 to select a site for a library for President Nixon in southern California. The exact location (which the President will have to approve) is a matter not only of local pride but of dollars and cents. For like all the other libraries this one will bring tourists, motels and restaurants to shelter and nourish them, and bulldozers leaving ribbons of concrete highway trailing behind them—all developments of much interest to real-estate promoters. And on some date in 1973 or 1977 the Nixon papers, like those of every President before him since Franklin Roosevelt, will be truckloaded (at government expense) to the waiting library or to a federal warehouse if the library is not yet completed. The haul will include not only the tiny percentage of papers actually originated by the President and signed by him, but all others in his files. Carbon copies of most of them will be available in the agencies that sent the originals—but it is conceivable that the President might, wittingly or not, take with him the lone copy of some document vitally needed by his successor. [See "How Harding Saved the Versailles Treaty" in the December, 1968, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE .]
For several years thereafter, government-paid archivists will sort, label, catalogue, index, and otherwise tame the paper wilderness and provide it with signposts and pathways for historical explorers. Meanwhile, the Nixon Library —and other Presidential libraries which may have been set up by then—will continue to grow by accession. Its director will, like his colleagues in charge of the existing libraries, want to make his library a center for study of the entire era of "his" President. He will try to collect papers—and at least tape-recorded oral history interviews—from members of the Cabinet, heads of Executive agencies (like the FCC or OEO ), unofficial but major advisers and close friends, party committeemen, deputy and assistant-deputy officials, key legislators, journalists, associates of pre-Presidential years, and so on down the line to minor types, the water-bucket carriers and rubdown specialists of the Presidential team.
Finally the Nixon Library will be a mature, fully functioning archive, like the six that precede it in time—and, perhaps, like those to come after it, if post-Nixon Presidents do not return to the casual records-disposal practices of an earlier day.
At that point, it would appear, the historians should have cause to rejoice. The key American records—manuscripts, films, and tapes—of the central decades of the twentieth century will be neatly on file in protected surroundings, instead of laid up in attics "where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through." This year, presumably, the Roosevelt and Truman libraries (respectively in their third and second decades of use) are already helping to unravel such mysteries as what happened at Yalta and Potsdam, how much influence brain trusters and cronies had in domestic policies, and who planted the seeds of "containment." By 1981, therefore, the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson libraries may be expected to make an open book of equally gnarled questions: the U -2 flights, the Bay of Pigs affair, and Vietnam. And so the Presidential-library system will stand vindicated and blessed by scholarship.
Alas, as even the directors of the libraries themselves are aware, the scenario does not read so smoothly. For there are severe limitations on the use of the Presidential papers now, and unless they are overcome, they may leave tomorrow's historians, despite the archival machinery at their disposal, even more frustrated than yesterday's, who had to grope their uncertain way to long-lost trunks full of mildewing papers.
First of all, since the outbreak of World War II, a vast proportion of the White House files originating in the State Department and the War and Navy (and later Defense) departments have been classified to protect national security. Ten, twenty, and even thirty years after the events with which they deal, their SECRET and TOP SECRET stamps remain as binding as ever. Until they are officially reviewed and declassified—a process compared to which glaciers sprint—they are either entirely closed to scholars or can be studied only under severe reservations. The user must be fingerprinted and his security checked; he must swear that he does not belong to any of a list of subversive organizations; his notes and manuscript must be reviewed by State and/or Defense officials, a process that may take months. Nor is there any court of appeal.
Although the entire classification system (except for Atomic Energy Commission materials, which are classified by statute) rests on Executive Order, a retired President may not disclose the contents of secret papers—even those that he himself wrote. Lyndon Johnson, it is known, had a special team of Defense Department specialists examine his files after he left office, in the hope that they might authorize the speedy release of information that he believes is necessary to understand his actions. Their almost predictable answer was No.
In addition to the papers closed for security reasons, there is another substantial body of material kept from researchers in the libraries. This comprises the communications that, in the language of an official NARS handout for researchers, contain statements "which may be used to injure, embarrass or harass any living person," or which were "obviously made in confidence," or which "relate strictly to a person's private, family or business affairs." The reason for the policy is clear. Many of the papers received by the President and his associates unsparingly discuss—often on the basis of rumor and gossip—the private fragilities of public men. NARS believes that the neuroses, divorces, diseases, and private financial pressures of key legislators or potential appointees to office are not public matters unless there is clear proof that they affect public performance. Moreover, thousands of letters to the President come from ordinary citizens who pour out their personal agonies in detail to an unknown man whom they see as a superfather. A blackmailer could function briskly simply by frequenting the libraries and using these files.
It is thus a custom for the library staffs to review incoming collections and "close" materials that fall within these categories. Periodically they go over them anew, with a list of recent obituaries at hand, and "open" those items dealing with individuals whom death has put beyond the sting of scandal. (Donors may, however, require that their papers be closed for long periods of time after their death or that of people mentioned in them.) At best, this practice is a compromise between the public's right to know and the individual's right to privacy. And like any compromise it yields incomplete satisfaction to both parties.
Yet no scholar can reasonably complain about protecting the human rights of those who serve the nation in government posts and those who correspond with them. Nor are scholars unwilling to help protect the nation from harm through premature revelations: private agreements with heads of foreign powers, reports on the military preparedness of allies, intelligence estimates that name the source of their information. But many responsible historians do resent what James MacGregor Burns, a distinguished biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, calls "the absurd overkill of the present restrictions." Burns knows whereof he speaks. He has had to run the gauntlet of security clearance in order to see documents that are now twenty-five years old at a minimum.
Furthermore, the restrictive tendency of the classifying authorities appears to be increasing with time. The State Department used to publish its volumes of diplomatic documents, entitled Foreign Relations of the United States , some fifteen years after the events they recorded. The time lag is now nearing thirty years. Perhaps the reason lies not only in secrecy but in the volume of the materials and in staff and budget limitations. But whatever the reason, a middle-aged historian of recent foreign affairs cannot entertain much hope of getting a wholly accurate story in his lifetime. Critics of the security policy also say that it reflects bureaucratic caution as much as it does prudence. The "secrets" themselves are rarely very potent. Many have been revealed in memoirs. Most date rather quickly. The total classified record, Burns notes, "consists of millions of items, none very crucial in itself." The need for secrecy "after a span of a few years," he concludes, "is largely a myth."
Other historians who deal in primary sources are disturbed at excessive respect for the confidentiality of personal interchanges among the mighty. First, they argue, there is always the possibility that a personal matter—the actual illness of Woodrow Wilson in 1919; the possible illness of Franklin D. Roosevelt in early 1945; the approaching madness of James Forrestal, first Secretary of Defense, in 1949—may be the urgently needed key to comprehending a historical development. Furthermore, the current policy places a tremendous burden on the discretion of the library officials. They must comb the materials and, when a letter contains both public and private materials, make the tricky judgment of which element predominates. They may become overcautious. Or one of them may, through long association with a given President's history, tend toward becoming a keeper of the flame, unwilling to jeopardize "his" man's reputation by putting materials in the hands of a known critic.
Moreover, historians do not get an equal shot at the record. It does not remain totally veiled during the years when it is officially closed. Presidents, generals, Cabinet members, White House aides, and staff members often rush to their typewriters to write reminiscences that will make themselves presentable in the history books. They send assistants and clerks ruffling through their papers, often still in official files. They give inside accounts to favored book-writing reporters. In addition, the State and Defense departments (as well as other federal agencies) have official historians who have the insider's clear track, not only to files but, more importantly, to frequent, familiar, and confidential interviews with the historical actors themselves. The viewpoints that dominate these official histories become in essence those of the commissioning agencies.
Piecemeal, therefore, a version of the recent past, tailored to official and individual vanity, emerges. But the independent historian or journalist, who is most likely to have the training and the perspective to create a useful chronicle and to interpret it objectively, remains shut out from this favored group until a generation has passed. The long-run cost, argue Burns and Herbert Feis, the diplomatic historian, is great. If knowledge of history is to be helpful to people and their leaders, it must be timely. Against the need for security and privacy there stand the claims of the nation, which cannot afford to make its archives, Feis says, like those of totalitarian states —"mortuaries which only licensed embalmers … are allowed to enter." And, too, he adds, the world has a claim on the keepers of the record. In this era of tragic national behavior, "greater openness, by all governments, might improve the health of the international community by nurturing it on the whole truth, even if it tastes bitter." Burns and Feis do not argue that restrictions should be abandoned, but only that the record should be opened much more quickly- Burns suggests about eight years after it is made. The Presidential libraries are not specifically blamed for "privileged history" but for involuntarily sharing in the system that creates it.
To such remonstrances the various directors of the Presidential libraries, past and present, have a variety of answers. The first is that they must work within the "givens" of the system. One of these is that, while Presidents may willingly deposit their records in special libraries built to house them, in the foreseeable future there is no likelihood of compelling former Chief Executives to relinquish the papers to public scrutiny on any terms but their own. Even if a law should be passed making the White House files public documents, a President would be within his rights in sifting out exclusively private papers for removal. If NARS officials challenged his judgment on what was purely personal matter, the resulting contests could, in the words of one of them, keep "a whole battery of lawyers busy" for a long time.
Moreover, to insist that anything in the White House's incoming mailbag ought to be given to the populace for early inspection would chill frankness. As former Truman administrative assistant David Lloyd once wrote, few men would write to a President in confidence and few Presidents would put their private thoughts on paper if the end of the term was a signal for disclosure. "And as a consequence, the ability of the President to function as an independent officer of the Government would be curtailed, if not crippled. …" It is unquestionably true that a good public servant must be allowed to suggest outrageously unpopular courses of action—if only for discussion—without being pilloried for it soon thereafter. (Contemporary public men already worry considerably in crisis conferences about indiscreet colleagues who may already have contracts for their memoirs in hand.)
If the President exerts his right to put his papers in a marble monument built by hometown friends in a location far from traditional seats of learning, the conscientious archivist has no choice but to follow them there, care for them, and display them under whatever conditions are allowed. If he is a truly hard-working archivist—as all the Presidential library directors are—he will urge the President's co-workers also to deposit their papers there. He is not likely to get such deposits without being able to give assurances that the public will not soon be let into the donor's inner life; as the mediator between the future historian and the gun-shy subjects of history, his first rule of operation is to get the material preserved. The Presidential libraries have actually hastened a policy of accumulation that would ordinarily have taken generations.
The papers of the First Ladies, too, are an important source of history hitherto ignored, before they became part of Presidential-library collections. In the case of Eleanor Roosevelt, her own independent career generated so large a collection that it is being moved into a new wing of the Roosevelt Library, to be opened in 1971 and to become in itself an important center for the study of the politics, social problems, and philanthropic work of her time.
Galling as the policy of restriction is, the library spokesmen note that a larger amount of Presidential material is open than ever before, and open to all comers, critical or not. (The only entrance test for access to unclassified material is a statement of some reasonable purpose.) One former director of the Roosevelt Library enjoyed pointing out that Roosevelt's papers were processed and opened for use in 1950, five years after the President's death. Eighty-five per cent of the material, he declared, was open to inspection. Yet only three years before, in 1947, the Library of Congress had proudly opened a large collection of Abraham Lincoln papers that had been closed until then by the desire of the donor, Lincoln's son. The papers of both Presidents Adams were not available for public use until the middle 1960's. Other Presidential papers lay hidden for decades.
The fact is that the historians are succumbing, like others in modern times, to a revolution of rising expectations. More is available to them than ever before, and their appetite grows by what it feeds on. The archivists claim that they encourage rather than deplore this hunger. Each library proudly points to the number of "researcher visits" it experiences each year (around a thousand each for the Roosevelt and Truman libraries from July 1, 1969, to June 30, 1970) and to the growing list of books, articles, and dissertations founded primarily on its materials.
The Truman Library happily cooperates with a privately created and financed nonprofit organization, the Harry S. Truman Library Institute for National and International Affairs, which aims to provide grants-in-aid to scholars using the library, to foster publications based on its materials, and to sponsor conferences on topics stemming from developments of the Truman period. This institute may be a model for other libraries. Former President Johnson is known to hope that his library will also sponsor seminars on social, environmental, and economic problems, which will draw together the experts and the documents. The museum directors, too, attempt to keep their materials on display in a manner that educates as well as attracts the public.
Such activities are a long way from the caginess and record-hugging attributed to the libraries by some critics. But, strangely, the collecting energies of the directors raise some other disturbing reflections. It is possible that the sheer glut of material may defeat historians to come. The information explosion threatens to bury them in documentation. Clicking Xerox machines, microfilm cameras, and whirling tape reels all proliferate information. In point of fact, even if all future Presidents were compelled to leave their official records in Washington, it would be necessary to build completely new repositories to hold them, simply because of the multiplying size of the Executive Department and because its officials, like those of all Washington, are pouring out a rising flood of paper. The National Archives building itself long ago became inadequate as the sole reservoir. In 1950 a program of decentralization was put in motion, designed to set up new Federal Records Centers throughout the country. There are now fifteen of them, housing 10.8 million cubic feet of records. And the torrent is not abating.
But the wrenching irony is that not all of this is gold for history. The duplicating machines immeasurably encourage the preservation of routine papers. And two other inventions—the telephone and the jet airplane—nibble away at the materials of major significance. When Abraham Lincoln wished to say something to General Grant in Virginia, he had to send a telegram or write a note. But when Lyndon Johnson felt the need to speak to General Westmoreland, he had only to pick up the telephone to Saigon—or to fly there himself, or have the General fly to Washington, in a matter of hours. And such face-to-face or over-the-wire conferences may never be recorded.
A certain amount of the crucial business of history has always been preserved only in the memory of those who transacted it. The size and importance of that "unrecorded record" is now growing. This is why contemporary Presidential libraries are undertaking extensive interview programs. The Kennedy Library, for example, already has taped and transcribed about five hundred interviews with such key Kennedy men as Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Pierre Salinger and with a host of others who knew the President—a cast of great variety, including men like U Thant, Richard Cardinal Gushing, and John Glenn. (Such transcripts are held under the same rules of confidentiality that apply to written materials.)
Oral history fills gaps in the written records. But is it possible to interpret them, with the gaps filled, or does their overpowering massiveness make them impenetrable? True, dazzling technical means of storage and retrieval of information are available. Given the investment of enough money and time, it is perfectly feasible that all Presidential or other documents can be "read" and "memorized" by computers before being microfilmed and filed. Then a historian may be able to give an electronic command to some robot Clio, such as: "Bring me all the materials on assistance programs to rural areas in Southeast Asia from 1958 to 1970." But what will he do when she faithfully beeps, rumbles, and neatly prints out fifty thousand references on the topic. Will useful synthesis then be possible?
Such a question gets to the root of what history is all about. Modern "scientific" history was born less than a century ago. It aimed to be more than—or at least different from—philosophy and literature. It rested on the happy nineteenth-century assumption that there was a discernible pattern, coherence, and direction in the affairs of humanity- discernible, that is, when the whole record was collected and scanned. The historians were like Roman soothsayers reading the entrails of a sacred beast. The beast was the past. And he who knew the past, in a sense, knew the future as well.
But what will happen when the record is so gigantic as to become an abstraction like infinity itself? Then the Presidential libraries, like all contemporary research libraries, may remain as husks without kernels, like the cathedrals after the high point of the Age of Christianity. They will be souvenirs of time past, but not the active centers of a civilization's faith.
Their long, loaded shelves may only increase the perplexity of modern man, who, even without a glut of records, is already likely to find history uncomforting and incomprehensible.


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Thank you for visiting our website. Call us at (915) 474-6300 or email us at firstname.lastname@example.com for information or assistance. Please fill out the following form to send us a message. Click on the "SUBMIT" button when you are ready to send your message. You may use this form to request more information about our products and services, and to provide feedback about this website.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Introduce your business and tell us your story: How did you decide on what to sell, and how did you source your products?
The decision to enter our business was made from a combination of spotting a rising trend and my fascination with design posters. We bought the first 50 products from an American website, then we took in the work of local artists.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Blogs have been a huge part of our marketing strategy from day one. Our first sale came through a blog, and since then blogs have contributed greatly to both sales and brand building. We are generating a lot of traffic through Instagram though we can't really measure it. Search has also become a really large channel, generating more than 25% of our traffic.
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
Mixpanel: with Mixpanel we have been able to send out follow up emails which have given us a better relationship with our customers.
Mailchimp: The Mailchimp app has made it easy to get emails into Mailchimp. This has really made a difference as we have been able to send out emails from day one.
Yotpo: Yotpo helps us automatically get product reviews which are then shown directly on product pages. This has increased the trustworthiness of our shop.
Webshippr: With Webshippr we have been able to handle our shipping with different local shipping companies.
Vendor Payout: Many of our suppliers are on a commission agreement. With Vendor Payout, the suppliers can easily go in and check how much they are selling. It makes it a lot easier for us to do the commission calculations.
Shopify POS: We have a physical store as well, so this has been a game changer. With the POS we have been able to handle inventory and selling without spending a lot of resources.
With regards to shipping and fulfillment, we've done it internally from day one. We've moved to a huge warehouse where we have the opportunity to grow and set up a professional packing center.
What are your top recommendations for new store owners?
We have benefitted from being personal in our communication and creating a story around Just Spotted. We did not want to be another generic webshop without a "soul." Having a good relationship with bloggers has helped us build our brand as they have validated us from day one. We have really focused on conversion optimization, and doubled our conversions as a result.


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Arjuna Awards 2013: Sports
Awards in India are presented by the Government of India to athletes
and sports persons for their accomplishments and outstanding
performances in the various fields of sports mostly annually. Some of
reputed and Esteemed Sports Awards 2013 in India are Arjuna Awards,
Dronacharya Award, Dhyan Chand Award and Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Awards.
Government of India has recommended the following awards for year 2013.
Double trap shooter Ronjan Sodhi has been recommended for the Rajiv
Gandhi Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour. Cricketer Virat
Kohli is one of the 15 chosen for the Arjuna Award to be presented at a
ceremony in New Delhi on August 29.
Rajeev Gandhi Khel Ratna Awards 2013:
1. Ronjan Sodhi (shooter)
2. Virat Kohli (Cricket)
Arjuna Award 2013:
1. Chekrovolu Swuro (Archery)
2. Renjith Maheshwary (Athletics)
3. PV Sindhu (Badminton)
4. Kavita Chahal (Boxing)
5. Rupesh Shah (Snooker and Billiards)
6. Virat Kohli (Cricket)
7. Abhijeet Gupta (Chess)
8. Gaganjeet Bhullar (Golf)
9. Saba Anjum (Hockey)
10. Rajkumari Rathore (Shooting)
11. Joshna Chinappa (Squash)
12. Neha Rathi (Wrestling)
13. Dharmender Dalal (Wrestling)
14. Amit Kumar Saroha (Athletics)


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Order by Phone: 626-872-5089
Art of Air's airbrush foundation conceals imperfections and evens out your skin tone for a flawless, balanced and glowing complexion. This airbrush makeup not only looks beautiful on the skin but also contains skin care benefits giving you the ultimate foundation experience every day.
Water (Aqua), Magnesium Aluminum Silicate, Cellulose Gum, Propylene Glycol, Triethanolamine, Diazolidinyl Urea, Methylparaben, Propylparaben. May Contain: Titanium Dioxide (CI 77891), Ultramarines (CI 77007), Iron Oxides, Disodium Distyrylbiphenyl Disulphonate, Mica (CI 77019), Luminescent Zinc Sulfide, Talc.


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Since OpenStack was announced, we've seen a flurry of activity in the developer community. Hundreds of people have made over a thousand contributions and we couldn't be more excited.
Today I'd like to share one of the more unconventional contributions with you. Most of the development activity in OpenStack is in the storage and compute systems, but we also have front end projects for people who use OpenStack and need an easy way to manage their cloud resources.
One of these projects is the OpenStack iPad app, which is based on the Rackspace Cloud Pro iPad app that is currently in the App Store. This app uses the OpenStack compute and storage APIs to help you manage your cloud resources, and offers a few features outside of the scope of the APIs, such as viewing RSS system status feeds, pinging your compute nodes from several locations around the world, and emailing files from OpenStack Object Storage.
Our newest feature, made possible by working with people from Opscode, is integration with Chef and the Opscode Platform. Before, when you created a compute node on the iPad, you would then need to log into the node and manually install any software, data, and configurations you may need. This could take a considerable amount of time and effort for some deployments, but not anymore. If you're a Chef user, you can configure the iPad app with your Chef or Opscode credentials to automatically run any recipes or role assignments immediately after the node is provisioned. Look ma, no shell!
Let's suppose you're running a Cassandra cluster to horizontally scale your data, and you're out of town on a business trip. Your laptop is in your hotel room, and you're stuck in a conference room across town with only your iPad. Then, your monitoring service sends you an SMS telling you that all of your Cassandra machines are running at capacity. But you were smart; you used Chef to automate your infrastructure by creating roles for all of your compute nodes. You simply log into the iPad app and provision a new node with "role[cassandra]" as your run list. The machine boots up and adds itself to your Cassandra cluster without requiring anything else from you. Awesome!
I've included a video below showing you the entire process as I bootstrap a compute node running Apache 2 and MySQL. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any questions or want to talk about contributing to the OpenStack iOS apps, get in touch with me via email at [email protected], Twitter at @greenisus, or on the phone at 901-299-9306. Even if you're new to Objective-C and Cocoa, I'll be happy to help you get started and learn everything you need to know to help make the OpenStack apps even better.


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Weather On Mars Surprisingly Warm, Curiosity Rover Finds
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is enjoying some nice, warm weather on the Red Planet — and spring hasn't even come to its landing site yet.
Curiosity's onboard weather station, which is called the Remote Environment Monitoring Station (REMS), has measured air temperatures as high as 43 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) in the afternoon. And temperatures have climbed above freezing during more than half of the Martian days, or sols, since REMS was turned on, scientists said.
These measurements are a bit unexpected, since it's still late winter at Gale Crater, the spot 4.5 degrees south of the Martian equator where Curiosity touched down on Aug. 5.
"That we are seeing temperatures this warm already during the day is a surprise and very interesting," Felipe Gómez, of the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, said in a statement. [7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars]
Curiosity's main goal is to determine if the Gale area is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life. Most researchers think present-day Mars is too dry and cold to host life as we know it, but they may have to rethink some of their assumptions if temperatures climb considerably through the spring and summer.
"If this warm trend carries on into summer, we might even be able to foresee temperatures in the 20s [Celsius], and that would be really exciting from a habitability point of view," Gómez said. "In the daytimes, we could see temperatures high enough for liquid water on a regular basis. But it's too soon to tell whether that will happen or whether these warm temperatures are just a blip."
While Curiosity's days are relatively pleasant weather-wise, the same can't be said for the rover's nights. Air temperatures drop dramatically after the sun goes down, plunging as low as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 70 Celsius) just before dawn, scientists said.
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Such big swings occur because the effects of solar heating are much more pronounced on Mars than they are on Earth. The Red Planet's surface is much drier, and its atmosphere is just 1 percent as thick as Earth's.
REMS measurements also suggest that atmospheric pressure is on the rise at Gale Crater, researchers said. This information is in line with mission scientists' expectations.
In winter, Mars gets cold enough for carbon dioxide at the poles to freeze, forming seasonal "dry ice" caps. Since carbon dioxide dominates the Red Planet's thin atmosphere, this freeze-out process causes pressures to vary from season to season.
Models and data from previous missions had predicted that Curiosity would land when pressures were around their lowest. The rover's measurements have borne this out, rising from a daily average of around 730 pascals during Curiosity's first three weeks on Mars to about 750 pascals more recently, researchers said.
"The pressure data show a very significant daily variation of pressure, following a fairly consistent cycle from sol-to-sol," said REMS principal investigator Javier Gómez-Elvira. "The minimum is near 685 pascals and the maximum near 780 pascals."
Even that maximum value is nowhere near what we're used to here on Earth. Average atmospheric pressure at sea level on our planet is 101,325 pascals — about 140 times what Curiosity is experiencing inside Gale Crater.
REMS sustained some minor damage during landing, when rocks kicked up by the engines on Curiosity's sky crane descent stage apparently knocked out wind sensors on one of the instrument's two booms.
But wind sensors on the other boom are working fine, so mission scientists don't anticipate too much of an impact.
This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.


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Cause Capitalism
*Good* for profit
I'm Olivia Khalili. I created Cause Capitalism to show you how to grow your business by incorporating a social mission.
I've worked extensively with both nonprofits and for-profits. I found that when you combine the two, you grow your profits, impassion all your stakeholders and do good in the world.
Read more.
Email me.


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NORRISTOWN, Pa. (Reuters) – Comedian Bill Cosby was convicted on Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a onetime friend in 2004, marking the first such conviction of a celebrity since the #MeToo movement that has brought down rich and powerful men for their treatment of women.
Cosby, 80, best known as the lovable father from the 1980s TV hit "The Cosby Show," faces up to 10 years in prison for each of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, 45, following a three-week trial at the Montgomery County courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
After maintaining decorum throughout the trial, Cosby exploded following the verdict when prosecutors asked the judge to take him into custody, saying he was a flight risk in part because he owned a plane.
"He doesn't have a plane, you asshole!" Cosby responded in a booming voice as he leapt to feet.
District Attorney Kevin Steele later remarked that with the outburst, "You got to see who he really was."
As the verdict was read, Cosby looked down with a sad expression. Lili Bernard, one of his many accusers, began sobbing. Constand sat stone-faced.
Judge Steven O'Neill ruled Cosby could remain out of jail on $1 million bail pending sentencing at a later date, as long as he surrendered his passport and remained at home.
Cosby then left the courthouse with his lawyers and publicist.
"The fight will go on," defence lawyer Thomas Mesereau told reporters, adding he would appeal the conviction.
Sentencing was expected within 60 to 90 days, after Cosby submits to a "sexually violent predator assessment."
Although he could get up to 10 years for each count, state sentencing guidelines suggest a term of less than 10 years.
The conviction marks the downfall of a man once celebrated as "America's Dad" but whose reputation was ruined after some 50 women accused him of similar offences going back decades.
Cosby had been a transcendent figure in show business, coming up as a black comedian during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and winning over white audiences with a clean routine.
He went on to several successful television series when African-Americans were largely absent from TV. In "The Cosby Show" from 1984 to 1992, he played the wise and witty Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, the father of an affluent black family.
All the while, his accusers say, he had been drugging and molesting women.
Only one of those cases was recent enough to be eligible for prosecution, that of Constand, a former administrator for the women's basketball team at Temple University, Cosby's alma mater. She had no comment after the verdict.
"The most important person in our team was Andrea Constand," Steele, the district attorney, told reporters. "She was the first courageous person who stood up in public and went to authorities and said, 'Bill Cosby drugged and raped me.'"
Attorney Gloria Allred, who represents 33 of the Cosby accusers, rejoiced that Cosby was found "guilty, guilty, guilty."
"We are so happy that finally we can say, women are believed, and not only on #MeToo, but in a court of law," Allred told reporters.
Other Cosby accusers celebrated the verdict with hugs, cries, and applause.
"I feel like my faith in humanity is restored," Bernard said.
The seven-man, five-woman jury reached a unanimous verdict after deliberating for 14 hours over two days.
Less than year ago, a different jury was deadlocked after six days of deliberations on the same charges, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial.
Soon after the first trial, a series of women levelled sexual assault and harassment accusations against men in media, entertainment and politics, giving rise to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements that encouraged women go public with personal stories of abuse, in some cases after years of silence.
Like many of Cosby's other accusers, Constand said she was drugged and violated while unable to defend herself.
Cosby has said any sexual encounters were consensual, and his lawyers portrayed the accusers as fabricating stories in search of wealth and fame.
"Mob rule is not due process," defence lawyer Kathleen Bliss said, referring to the #MeToo movement.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been accused by several women of sexual misconduct, including after the release during the 2016 presidential campaign of a video in which he had spoken in vulgar terms about trying to have sex with women. He later called it "locker room banter" and his campaign issued an apology to anyone who was offended.
Trump, whose inauguration and first anniversary as president were met with nationwide women's protests, denies accusations of sexual misconduct and accuses rival Democrats and the media of a smear campaign. He faces a defamation lawsuit from Summer Zervos, a contestant on his former reality show who accuses him of sexually harassing her. Trump's lawyer has said her accusations are false and politically motivated.
Constand testified she went to Cosby's house to discuss a potential career change when he gave her three blue pills he said would relax her.
She said the pills made her feel woozy, and when she was jolted awake Cosby was digitally penetrating her vagina, touching her breasts and masturbating himself with her hand.
The prosecution case was bolstered by the five additional accusers who were allowed to testify, each saying they, too, were drugged and violated. In the first trial, O'Neill allowed only one accuser besides Constand to take the witness stand.


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PAMC (Singapore)
PAMC (Singapore)
Pa-Auk Meditation Centre
In the tradition of the Pa-Auk Forest Monastery, Myanmar.
Welcome to PAMC Singapore
Where we learn the Dhamma as taught by the Buddha,
practise Samatha & Vipassanā meditation & give service together.
Learn Dhamma
Our resident teacher & visiting teachers frequently give Dhamma talks or Pāli courses. We are happy to share the Dhamma over the eDhamma page.
Some of the talks are available for download as Audio Dhamma or they can be viewd at our Vimeo site.
The Centre stocks Dhamma books for free distribution. Do bring those that you need home. You may download them from here too:
Daily meditation sessions are from 9am to 10:30am, 2pm to 5:30pm & 7:30pm to 9pm, unless otherwise stated in the calendar.
You may visit the Centre to learn meditation from our resident teacher. The good time to see the teacher is during the food offering time.
Daily offering of food to the monks begin at:
- Breakfast: 7:00am
- Lunch: 11:30am
Unless otherwise stated in calendar.
From events to daily needs, our volunteers support the propagation of Dhamma.
Frequently Asked Questions
Commonly asked questions about the centre.
Do I have to pay for anything?
Books at our centre are for free distribution. Meditation sessions and Dhamma talks are free entry. Meditation retreats outside of the centre may need some transportation costs, but also free for your participation. Do donate to support these initiatives at your own ability.
What is the meditation centre like?
We are situated at a semi-detached house, where the top floor is the living quarters of the resident teacher and other monks. The bottom floor consists of the meditation hall, office and kitchen. Our address is 15 Teo Kim Eng Road, in between Eunos and Kembangan MRT.
What should I do when I've reached the centre?
We open from 6am to 9pm daily. Feel free to come into the centre! It should be a place of peace for all of us. At the front of the house, there's the office and library. Approach the office for any assistance & do take any books that you may need; it is for free distribution.
If meditation is not in session, feel free to enter the meditation hall from the main door. If meditation is in session, you may take a path to the left & back of the house & enter the meditation hall from the kitchen. To meet the monks or resident teachers, kindly approach the staff or attendants in the centre to seek permission, as they lead a life of practice & need more solitude than laypeople.
Centre Calendar
Click below to see which Venerables are in residence.
Click here for information about meal Dāna (offering) at the Centre:
Breakfast Dāna: 7.00 am
Lunch Dāna: 11.30 am
- Give Service
If you are able to help the Centre by volunteering your service, please leave us a message.
Pa-Auk Meditation Centre © 2017


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Sleep Position Linked To Risk Of Stillbirth
LatestA New Zealand study found that if women slept on their left side on the night before they went into labor, they had a lower chance of stillbirth. The risk for those who slept on their left side was 1.96 per 1,000 births, and the rate was 3.93 per 1,000 births for all other positions. One possible explanation is that back or right side sleeping makes the fetus compress the mother's inferior vena cava, which takes blood back to the heart. This means less oxygen gets to the mother and baby's organs.
Lead author Tomasina Stacey, a midwifery lecturer at University of Auckland, tried to reduce the inevitable hysteria over sleep positions during pregnancy, saying:
"It was an observational study, not one that can show cause and effect – all it does is show an association. It would be premature to jump up and down and say that everyone has got to sleep on their left. It's a starting point for future research."
Image via Gladskikh Tatiana/Shutterstock.
0 Comments


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Updated at 3:45 p.m. ET Friday
On Wednesday, lawmakers had some tough questions for Miguel Cardona, President Biden's nominee to be the next U.S. education secretary. The Connecticut educator was asked about student loan debt forgiveness, policies for transgender students and, most critically, how he would help schools reopen as the pandemic rages.
Members of the U.S. Senate's education committee didn't have much to go on as they prepared for Cardona's hearing. That's because, along with most of the country, many of those lawmakers are just getting to know him.
In a Biden administration full of familiar faces, Cardona is relatively new to the national spotlight. His biggest job to date has been as Connecticut's education commissioner, a role he's filled for just the past year and half.
As state commissioner, he spent much of his time focused on the impact of pandemic-driven school closures. He was a fierce advocate for Connecticut's most vulnerable children — those with disabilities, children in low-income families and English language learners — as he pushed for schools to reopen, arguing that opportunity gaps are only widening.
"Yes, we're in a health pandemic, but this is also an education emergency," Cardona told The Connecticut Mirror in August. "We have to accelerate our efforts because COVID accelerated disparities. We have to really double down ... to do what's best for kids and for the community."
Under Cardona's leadership, about half of the state's districts were offering families the option to send their children back to school largely in-person, as of the third week of January.
Before his brief tenure as education commissioner, though, Cardona had spent his entire professional career as a public school educator in the city where he grew up: Meriden, Conn.
Silver City
Meriden is a microcosm of America — with deep pockets of prosperity and poverty alike. The old manufacturing town of nearly 60,000 was once known as the "Silver City" for its silverware factories, until the local industry cratered in the 1970s and early '80s. Today, it's perhaps best known as the home of Ted's steamed cheeseburgers.
While the city itself is majority white, more than half of students in its public schools are Hispanic. Three-quarters of district students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.
Cardona himself grew up in the Yale Acres public housing complex to parents who, like many in Meriden, had come from Puerto Rico. His father was a beloved, local police officer for three decades, known for his distinctive handlebar mustache. The younger Cardona attended Meriden public schools, including a trade high school where he studied automotive tech.
"This system mattered to us on a deep, deep level," says Mark Benigni, the superintendent of Meriden's schools, and also a child of Meriden. He hired Cardona in 2013 to join his small, central office team, after Cardona had spent 15 years as a district teacher and principal. "I mean, [Meriden schools] not only helped to raise us, but it's also where our own children go."
In 1997, Cardona became the first in his family to graduate college, earning a bachelor's in education from Central Connecticut State University. Later, he earned a doctorate from the University of Connecticut.
"I was fortunate to have a supportive family that encouraged my success in school," Cardona wrote in his doctoral capstone. English was his second language, and he said, "Being of Puerto Rican descent, but born in Connecticut, I have always had an awareness of my Hispanic heritage, and like many students, struggled with my identity growing up. During my later school years and into adulthood, I embraced my Hispanic-American identity and now encourage my two young children to do the same."
In December, when he accepted Biden's nomination, Cardona said of his life in Meriden: "I, being bilingual and bicultural, am as American as apple pie and rice and beans."
The Biden transition team did not respond to multiple NPR interview requests for Cardona.
Mr. Cardona
Not long after finishing college, Miguel Cardona became Mr. Cardona, landing his first teaching job in Meriden: fourth grade at Israel Putnam School. Chris Garcia was one of his first students.
"I was really struggling with school, and I wasn't really doing what I needed to do," remembers Garcia, now 31. Instead of getting frustrated with him, for not doing his homework, Cardona quietly pulled him aside. "He spoke into me. He was like, 'Chris, you're a young, Hispanic man. And do not let any obstacle stop you. Whatever you wanna do, you can do.' "
I was really struggling with school, and I wasn't really doing what I needed to do. ... He spoke into me. He was like, 'Chris, you're a young, Hispanic man. And do not let any obstacle stop you.'
Garcia says he, like Cardona, grew up in the Meriden projects, and hearing his teacher's faith in him motivated him. "He would say it in a way where it's like, 'Wow, I believe it.' "
As luck would have it, a then-reporter in Meriden, Jacqueline Smith, was on-hand in Room 160 to witness the beginning of Cardona's career. She had chosen him for a series of stories comparing the experiences of a new teacher to a classroom veteran.
"He loved the idea of his first classroom and invested about $450 in materials for his class of 12 girls and eight boys," Smith wrote in a 2019 column that appeared in The Middletown Press. She says he bought each student a notebook, a writer's handbook and a box of crayons, as well as "a 'space maker' — a plastic rectangular box to see how they would make it their own."
A classmate of Garcia's, Karla Rodriguez, also 31, remembers Mr. Cardona as a tireless cheerleader, encouraging her passion for singing. He even invited her to sing one of her favorite songs, Cher's "Believe," in front of the whole class, to help boost her confidence.
Years later, in high school, Rodriguez remembers taking the stage at a talent show, "and I hear my name, 'Go Karla!' And I look over, and [Mr. Cardona's] right there. And I would always know he was there because I could hear him, like, he was not shy," she says, laughing.
Garcia says, when he moved to Puerto Rico for fifth grade, Mr. Cardona "sent me a packet this thick of letters [from former classmates] like, 'Hey, we know you're in Puerto Rico. We want you to know that we're thinking about you,' and, you know, 'We care about you.' And I was like, 'Wow, that's really special.'"
When Garcia returned to Meriden and found himself struggling to keep up in school, his mother suggested he visit a neighborhood homework club.
"Well, guess who was there? Mr. Cardona!" Garcia says, laughing at how his former teacher just kept popping up when he needed him most.
I hear my name, 'Go Karla!' And I look over, and [Mr. Cardona's] right there. And I would always know he was there because I could hear him, like, he was not shy.
At 27, Cardona was hired as a local principal, the youngest in the state, and served in the role for a decade. In 2012, he was named Connecticut's Principal of the Year.
The consensus builder
During his decade as a principal, Cardona made his first foray into policy and politics beyond Meriden, co-chairing a statewide task force dedicated to shrinking the state's yawning educational equity gaps — also the subject of his doctoral capstone.
In the task force's 2011 report, it issued several initial recommendations, including that the state create a center to develop "educational methods that are culturally relevant to English language learners," consider lengthening school days and school years to give students more learning time, and provide families access to universal, high-quality preschool and all-day kindergarten.
Superintendent Mark Benigni says Cardona is at his best when he's trying to find consensus among factions. "Miguel's approach is to listen ... to work together to see the other side of the situation. I don't think he's ever, 'It's my way or the highway.'"
With Cardona's star rising, in 2013, Benigni asked him to leave the principal's office for a tough new role at the district level, working with the local teachers' union to create a new, state-required teacher evaluation system.
The Obama administration had pushed mightily the idea of using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and, potentially, hold them accountable for poor student performance. The move infuriated many teachers and galvanized their unions in opposition, creating bitter tension between traditional allies: the unions and a Democratic presidential administration.
"This was not a happy time," remembers Erin Benham, a longtime Meriden teacher and the then-head of the local teachers union, the Meriden Federation of Teachers.
When Connecticut's governor ordered all districts to implement a teacher evaluation system, Cardona teamed up with Benham to craft one that didn't leave teachers feeling angry and alienated. Benham remembers Cardona as a keen listener who brought a calming presence to a process that had become overheated in so many other districts.
"You're not going to get someone screaming and yelling. That's not Miguel. I don't think I've ever, ever seen him scream," Benham says.
When teachers argued that they should not be judged on the test scores of students who did not spend the whole year in their classrooms, Cardona agreed. In fact, Benham says, the evaluation system they arrived at downplays the importance of once-a-year standardized tests, counterbalancing their influence with things like parent surveys and classroom evaluations. In a 2013 release, the national American Federation of Teachers said Meriden, under the leadership of Benigni and Cardona, offered "a road map for union-district relations."
Benham spent years working alongside Cardona, first on teacher evaluations and later when Benigni promoted him to assistant superintendent. She says he was a champion of students' social and emotional learning, even before the phrase had buzz in education circles.
"Miguel always had a sense that that was just as important, that you can't just look at academics," Benham says.
She remembers working with him to review district curricula in hopes of finding more time in the school day for academics. But when it was suggested that elementary teachers could cut their morning circle time, when kids get a chance to be social and share, Cardona held fast.
"[If] one of the students gets upset or wants to tell a story, you're not going to say, 'We don't have time for that now.' ... That's not good teaching," Benham says, and Cardona understood that. Even while he wanted to raise the district's math and reading scores, she says, he wasn't willing to cut a circle time or the arts to do it.
In fact, reporter Jacqueline Smith's 2019 recounting of Cardona's fourth-grade classroom shows the value he placed on kids' social and emotional health, even as a first-year teacher. She writes that he had a teal rug where students would gather every morning "for a half-hour 'morning meeting' to talk informally about what's on their minds."
"Students come in with baggage; they can let it out," Cardona told Smith in 1998. "This will assess how the class is feeling."
She says he created a "student-centered classroom," where kids would learn writing, reading and math in small groups.
"You try to make learning involve responsibility and ownership; it's not just about knowledge ... it's academics, social skills and personality," Cardona told Smith.
Not in Kansas anymore
Of more than a dozen former students, district parents and Meriden coworkers NPR interviewed for this story, there's one concern featured prominently: Cardona is so diplomatic, such a consensus-builder, that it's not always clear where he stands on certain issues.
Gwen Samuel runs the Connecticut Parents Union and remembers when her daughter had a bullying problem at her Meriden school. She quickly raised a red flag with the district, when Cardona was assistant superintendent.
If you want him to heal the nation, he's going to be great for that. Where he might get in trouble, where he realizes he is not in Kansas, is when he starts to make some of these decisions, because he will have to find his voice.
"I was like, 'Hey Miguel, this just should not be happening. We got some serious stuff going on.' And that's one of his strengths," Samuel says, noting that Cardona was parent-friendly, responded immediately and came up with a plan to deal with the bullying.
But, she says, she didn't feel that plan went far enough, and ultimately withdrew her daughter from the district. An eagerness to build consensus, Samuel says, too often leads down a path of least resistance. And, with many schools still closed from the pandemic and the debate over when and how they should reopen growing ever more heated, there may be no path of least resistance for the next U.S. secretary of education.
In a recent interviewwith Lucy Nalpathanchil, host of Connecticut Public Radio's Where We Live, Cardona the consensus-builder was on full display, saying that decisions around closing and reopening schools in the pandemic should not be made at the national or even state level but in "very close partnership" with local health officials.
"At the national level, that's critically important that we work with CDC, that we work with Health and Human Services to make sure that the decisions that are being made around schools are in line with what we know [can] protect people," Cardona said.
But Cardona does not see it as the education secretary's job — or even within the secretary's authority — to force school districts to reopen or adopt these science-based strategies.
"If you want him to heal the nation, he's going to be great for that," says Samuel. "Where he might get in trouble, where he realizes he is not in Kansas, is when he starts to make some of these decisions, because he will have to find his voice."
Since it was Miguel Cardona who helped Karla Rodriguez find her voice back in fourth grade, NPR asked: Does she worry if he's ready for the politics and the spotlight of Washington?
"I do worry because his heart is pure," she says. "He's one of the best people I've ever met."
But Rodriguez believes he's "perfect" for the job, and, when he takes the stage, she says this time she'll be the one cheering loudly.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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By Jeanne Ball
As governments falter in their struggle to find a solution to unpredictable outbreaks of terror, an international alliance of concerned scientists has offered a possible solution – A Peace-Promoting Technology.
The Global Union of Scientists for Peace has recently published an Open Letter to Presidents Obama, Hollande and Putin–and to the leaders of all nations–proposing a scientific alternative to the conventional approach of creating peace through force or violence (International New York Times, December 3, 2015).
In the following interview, Quantum Physicist John Hagelin, President of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace, answers questions about this novel approach.
Dr. Hagelin received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and conducted pioneering research at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics) and SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). He is responsible for the development of a highly successful grand unified field theory based on the superstring, and his scientific contributions include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences.
Your open letter in the Times offers an explanation of the root cause of terrorism: deep-rooted societal stress. Could you summarize?
It is the overwhelming consensus of experts in the field of conflict resolution that the first stage in the emergence of war is mounting societal stress–acute political, ethnic and religious tensions among rival factions in critical hot-spots throughout the world. If these tensions continue to grow unchecked, they eventually reach a boiling point. Then they inevitably erupt in social violence: crime, war, and terrorism. If we can defuse these societal tensions before they erupt–even a little–they do not break out into social violence. Water does not boil at 99 degrees centigrade.
'Collective consciousness' is a term that means the sum total of all the individual consciousnesses that make up a society. Stressed individuals create a stressed society–a stressed collective consciousness. And everyone embedded within that stressed society feels that societal stress. It thereby feeds upon itself.
Individual practice of certain evidence-based, stress-reducing meditation techniques relieves individual stress, according to extensive published research. And practice of these techniques–in particular, the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique–by a significant sub-portion of a population (even 1%) has been similarly shown to reduce societal stress, leading to substantially reduced violent crime, psychiatric crisis calls and other indicators of acute societal stress.
Moreover, practice of TM and its related advanced meditation techniques in large groups has been found to produce an even more powerful societal effect. Multiple studies looking at war in the Middle East, as well as global terrorism, have shown that as few as the square root of 1% of the population of a given region, practicing in large groups, can very effectively defuse and prevent social conflict throughout the entire region. (Here is a brief summary of that research.) It is totally unnecessary for the most violent members of society–criminals and terrorists–to engage in these meditation practices. They become settled as the society becomes settled, and as local community support for their fanatical behaviors dissipates. This has been confirmed again and again. And this is the novel, innovative, but extensively proven approach that we are proposing today. |
Why is this solution more effective than other approaches?
Conventional approaches to conflict resolution are simply too superficial. They are "Band-Aid" approaches in that they do not address the underlying root cause of war: mounting political, religious and ethnic tensions in a society. History shows that political settlements and negotiated treaties are hardly worth the paper they're written on. These treaties are historically short-lived because they do not address and defuse the deep-seated tensions–or the lust for blood vengeance that seethes in the hearts of certain historical antagonists.
Has this been tried before–is it tested and proven?
There have been more than 50 demonstrations and 23 scientific studies published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. There have been at least seven interventions in the Middle East since the early 1980s, each time reducing war deaths and war-related injuries by an average of 80%, and bringing significant progress towards peace among the rival factions. It is a pity that government support was not made available to sustain those large, peace-promoting groups of meditating experts.
There has never been an approach to preventing war and promoting societal peace that has been as rigorously tested, or shown to be as effective, as this consciousness-based, brain-based, foundational approach to peace. |
Do you feel that conventional approaches to countering terrorism are inherently bound to fail?
The historical record is clear. If you look at the Middle East, for example, there have been literally hundreds of peace treaties that have lasted, on average, only a few months. Negotiated settlements by representatives of government do not directly address the deep-seated stress in the collective consciousness of the masses.
Even military approaches, despite their enormous cost and toll in terms of human life and suffering, have rarely achieved a lasting peace. Witness, for example, the war in Iraq. Military interventions typically only further inflame tensions within these politically volatile regions.
You reference a "technology for peace" that's more powerful than weaponry–could you explain?
When it comes to achieving lasting peace and social harmony, weapons are truly not powerful. They are a knee-jerk response in the absence of anything better. They appeal to men (mostly!) who seem to be unmindful of their historical impotence–of their poor track record. World War I was meant to be "The war to end all wars." But the resulting humiliation and destruction wrought among the vanquished inevitably led to World War II. We need something more successful, more innovative, more powerful–something that addresses and defuses the root cause of violence.
With so many warring factions and conflicting ideologies, how can any approach allow all sides to reconcile and get what they want?
What people fundamentally want cannot be won on the battlefield. They want peace. Prosperity. Security. Happiness. The devastation wrought by war is not a path to any of these. You cannot achieve peace through violence. Or happiness through killing. Instead, it simply perpetuates the endless cycle of war followed by war.
If we want peace, we should enliven peace in the collective consciousness of society. If we want happiness, then enliven happiness in the collective consciousness. There is an abundance of research that shows that TM practice enlivens both. (See, for example, www.TM.org.) |
What is needed for this to be implemented quickly?
Fortunately, relatively little is needed. Any governing body can designate a group of individuals to receive training in these peace-promoting technologies and can also provide sufficient funding and resources for their security and comfort–such as troops at an army base, students at a military academy or any sizable university, a group of unemployed citizens, or even a group of refugees. Then the Global Union of Scientists for Peace (www.GUSP.org) will arrange for their proper training. The effects will be felt immediately, within months.
I would also recommend that a proper research study be simultaneously put in place to demonstrate and document this effect, for the satisfaction and benefit of politicians, policy makers, and the public.
Any government representatives and/or private philanthropists who would like to see this done should contact: [email protected]
Originally published by Jeanne Ball:
Thanks for sharing 🙂


text:
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has built a political career out of playing fast and loose with the facts about immigrants—from stories of "headless bodies" in the desert to mischaracterizing all unauthorized immigrants as "drug mules." And she's not finished yet. Following a recent GOP Presidential debate, Gov. Brewer overplayed her hand by assuring the Huffington Post that unauthorized immigrants fleeing Alabama are "probably going back to Mexico" and that Alabama farmers will "probably find the U.S. workers" they need to replace them. If you think Governor Brewer is "probably" bluffing, you're "probably" right.
It may be comforting for supporters of harsh state immigration laws to think Brewer's claims are right. Immigrants, Latinos and their families, however, are "probably" not leaving the U.S. and, as Brewer said, "going back to Mexico." First of all, not all unauthorized immigrants are Mexican. Secondly, not even during the recent economic recession was there any evidence that Mexican immigrants were returning to Mexico. A recent study from the RAND Corporation found that, despite improved economic conditions in Mexico and worsened conditions in the United States, fewer Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico in 2008 and 2009 than in the two years before the recession.
The truth about the impact of state immigration laws is far more complicated. While it's possible that some unauthorized immigrants might be returning home, it's more likely they are fleeing to either neighboring states or states where family members live.
Why? Evidence suggests that many unauthorized immigrants are firmly integrated into U.S. society. According to a Department of Homeland Security report, three-fifths of unauthorized immigrants who were in the country as of 2010 (11.1 million) were here for more than a decade. These immigrants live here; they work here; they send their U.S. citizen children to school here. In fact, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that roughly 8.8 million people in the U.S. live in a mixed-status home—meaning that one or more direct family member is unauthorized.
And just because an unauthorized immigrant leaves a job doesn't mean there's an unemployed U.S. citizen standing in line to fill it. Governor Brewer is attempting to sell the same false "jobs creation story" that many supporters have used to justify passing strict immigration laws.
Thus far, Alabama farmers have been unsuccessful in attempts to recruit American workers. And it's not just because Americans are unwilling to do the work. It's because unauthorized immigration is not the cause of unemployment. Experts, like Daniel Griswold from the libertarian CATO Institute, have pointed out that immigrants and unemployed U.S. workers have different education and experience levels and work in different occupations. We cannot simply swap one for the other or deport our way out of unemployment.
The role unauthorized immigrants play in our workforce and economy is far more complicated than Brewer's misguided assumptions. While it may be easy to scapegoat unauthorized immigrants for high unemployment rates, driving them from state to state is not going to solve our employment or immigration problems. It will, however, create new economic problems for states and small businesses…"probably."
Photo by @ADLavinsky.
FILED UNDER: Immigration, Immigration 101, Jan Brewer, Restrictionists, Rhetoric, SB 1070, undocumented immigration


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Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script" (SCRIPTS) with Prof. Dr. Tanja Börzel and Prof. Dr. Michael Zürn as spokespersons has been approved
News from Oct 15, 2018
Global Challenges for the Model of Liberal Democracy and Market Economy
After the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy seemed to have prevailed for good. Today, 25 years later, however, the liberal model of political and economic order faces a profound crisis. The Cluster of Excellence Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)analyzes the contemporary controversies about the liberal order from a historical, global, and comparative perspective. What are the causes of the current contestations of the liberal script, and what are the consequences for the global challenges of the 21st century? The Cluster connects the academic expertise in the social sciences and area studies in Berlin, and thereby bridges prevailing methodological and institutional divides. In addition to Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, the Centre for East European and International Studies, the German Institute for Economic Research, the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, the Hertie School of Governance, and the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient are participating in the Cluster. Based on research collaborations with universities in all world regions, SCRIPTS addresses the diversity of the contestations and their inter-connections. At the same time, the Cluster maintains close cooperative ties with major political and cultural institutions.


text: A new study demonstrates for the first time that the oral administration of Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM mediates analgesic functions in the gut equivalent to morphine effects. These findings suggest that the microbiology of the gut influences visceral pain perception, and they open new perspectives in the treatment of abdominal pain and irritable bowel syndrome with this unique microbial strain. One of the world's most tested probiotic strains, it is backed by extensive scientific documentation that proves its gut health benefits as well as its long-term stability.


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North Korea executes leader's powerful uncle in rare public purge
The Korean leader's uncle Jang Song Thaek is considered the second most powerful man in the secretive North
North Korea has executed the powerful uncle of young leader Kim Jong Un, state media said on Friday, the biggest upheaval in years as the ruling dynasty sought to distance itself from responsibility for the isolated states's dire living standards.
Jang Song Thaek, considered the second most powerful man in the secretive North, was killed just days ahead of the second anniversary of the death of Kim Jong Il, the father of North Korea's current ruler.
The execution coincided with Kim Jong Un - the third Kim to rule North Korea - suddenly being portrayed in state media as the image of his father rather than his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who is still revered as the founder of the nation.
Kim Jong Il was blamed by some for the 1990s famine that killed a million people.
The North's KCNA news agency released pictures on Friday of a handcuffed Jang being manhandled by guards and said that he had been executed for trying to seize power and for driving the economy "into an uncontrollable catastrophe."
Jang was pictured in the ruling party's Rodong Sinmun newspaper without his Kim Il Sung loyalty badge on his lapel when he was led away, which would indicate his disloyalty to North Koreans who all wear lapel badges.
"Jang Song Thaek has been purged in a way that suggests Kim Jong Un wanted to make a point," Ruediger Frank, a North Korea expert, wrote in an article on Johns Hopkins University's U.S. Korea Institute website 38 North on Friday.
The dictatorial North has been run by the same family since 1948. Its economy, which was once larger than South Korea's, is now a fortieth the size of its prosperous neighbor. Its 24 million people regularly suffer food shortages, according to the United Nations.
The younger Kim has been credited in the North's media with presiding over a powerful military state as well as an economic revival.
Jang was married to Kim Jong Un's paternal aunt and is believed to have been 67 years old. He had been purged in 2004 and disappeared from public view until 2006, but became a vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission and a member of the ruling Workers' Party politburo.
He had visited Beijing, North Korea's only major ally, and was in charge of economic projects as well running a string of illicit money-raising schemes for Pyongyang, according to North Korea experts and defectors.
While North Korea has purged many officials in its 65-year history, it is rare that anyone so powerful had been removed in such a public manner - suggesting a recognition of internal divisions and of competing factions surrounding Kim Jong Un.
"This is a man who could have competently executed a coup in North Korea," said Mike Madden, an expert on the North's power structure and author of the North Korea Leadership Watch website and blog.
The commentary from KCNA said that Jang had been plotting to overthrow Kim Jong Un and had "a fantastic dream to become premier... to grab the supreme power of the party and state."
"The accused Jang brought together undesirable forces and formed a faction as the boss of a modern day factional group for a long time and thus committed such hideous crime as attempting to overthrow the state," KCNA said.
"The special military tribunal of the Ministry of State Security of the DPRK ... ruled that he would be sentenced to death according to it. The decision was immediately executed," it said, using the North's title of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
North Korean politics are virtually impenetrable from outside and Jang could also easily have been purged over a falling out with Kim, or even with his wife.
There are signs that the North's 1.2-million strong army has sought to assert power and that Jang ran foul of Vice Marshal Choe Ryong Hae, the top political operative for the armed forces.
Earlier this week, North Korea said it had stripped Jang of his power and positions, accusing him of criminal acts including mismanagement of the state financial system, womanizing and alcohol abuse.
"From long ago, Jang had a dirty political ambition. He dared not raise his head when Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were alive," KCNA said.
"He began revealing his true colors, thinking that it was just the time for him to realize his wild ambition," it said.
Regional powers have watched the purge of Jang and his associates for implications to regional security.
South Korea's presidential office said it had held a ministerial meeting to review the developments, although the government in Seoul said it had not detected any unusual military activity in the North.
The young Kim, believed to be about 30, has carried out two long-range missile tests and a nuclear weapons test in defiance of United Nations sanctions since he took office two years ago.
At the same time as pursuing his father's nuclear and military ambitions, he has been portrayed as the North's "master builder" for presiding over an attempt to revive its moribund economy.
The United States said it was following the developments in North Korea and consulting with allies in the region.
"If confirmed, this is another example of the extreme brutality of the North Korean regime," said White House National Security Council spokesman Patrick Ventrell.
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