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sensitive materials related to national security from their administrations without being charged with crimes,” Hur wrote.
Students of history have always placed great stock in the unguarded musings of high officials, whether in a diary, a leaked conversation or one of the thousands of White House recordings that six presidents secretly taped from the Franklin Roosevelt administration to the downfall of Nixon.
Those episodes are rarer in the scripted, polished and controlled enterprise of the modern American presidency, under any recent president not named Trump.
They “provide unique windows into the presidency, helping us better understand how policy is made and power is used,” said Marc Selverstone, director of Presidential Studies and co-chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “You get it, as LBJ would have said, with the bark off.”
To be sure, there wasn’t much guarded about John Quincy Adams, judging by the 15,000 pages of diary entries he wrote over more than 68 years, four of them in the White House. His diaries “comprise the longest continuous record of any American of the time,” says the Massachusetts Historical Society, which publishes them online.
On May 26, 1828, Adams closed a long, detailed post about his “harassing day (of ) crowded and multifarious business” with happy news from his garden. “I perceived a tamarind heaving up the earth,” he wrote, and he planted hautboy strawberries.
Another day, he enjoyed “sitting naked, basking on the bank at the margin of the river” after a swim. No secrets there.
On July 22, 1825, his early morning routine of walking and swimming took a dark twist.
“I walked as usual to my ordinary bathing place, and came to the rock where I leave my clothes a few minutes before sunrise – I found several persons there, besides three or four who were bathing; and at the shore under the tree a boat with four men in it, and a drag net … in search of a dead body.”
“I stripped and went in to the river; I had been not more than ten minutes swimming when the drag boat started, and they were not five minutes from the shore when the body floated immediately opposite the rock; less than one hundred yards from the shore.”
Thus the diary of the sixth president notes the death of Mr. Shoemaker, a post office clerk seen swimming about in the water until he was gone.