n. (also Presidential papers)the records created by the office of a president of the United States of America, usually only those created before the Presidential Records Act of 1978 went into effect in 1981Trever 1945a, 88Presidential papers received recently at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library consist chiefly of sections of the White House files relating to the Casablanca Conference of January, 1943, and the President’s Hawaiian Islands-Alaska trip of July-August, 1944.Rowland 1950, 208–209The papers of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, by far the largest collection of Presidential papers in existence, are by the President’s action the property of the Nation.Lloyd 1955, 101The Presidency is a constitutional office and as such has an independence like that of the other two branches of the Government. One of the aspects of this constitutional independence is the treatment accorded to presidential papers. The national legislature cannot subpoena presidential papers while the President is in office. It cannot force a President to make his communications public.Snyder 1969, 13In the garret she discovered the 44 volumes of the Fillmore Presidential papers and stacks of other manuscripts and documents, presumably belonging to the Marshalls.Kirkendall 1969, 273Jones makes another suggestion about presidential libraries that deserves more respect, although it may be unrealistic. It concerns restrictions on access that are imposed by former Presidents and result from the “legal fiction” that presidential papers are private property.Fenn 1979, 439Among the papers are personal and pre-presidential materials, presidential papers including the White House central files and White House staff files, and papers of the post-assassination period, reflecting the worldwide reaction to President Kennedy’s death.NYT 1980, 21Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which takes effect when Mr. Carter leaves office, Ronald Reagan’s Presidential papers and those of all future Presidents will become the property of the Government.Peterson 1982b, 205Now, if the division into public and personal results in a relatively small amount of documents deemed personal, it is conceivable that a President could, like George Washington, pack them into two black trunks and take them home. If that occurred, a central depository for all Presidential papers might be created for those documents determined to be public under the terms of the Act.Peterson 1986, 128Unfortunately, by treating presidential papers separately from the general question of personal papers of government officials, the theoretical distinctions between records and papers were not resolved.Haight 1989, 33In 1972, eleven years after Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House, archivists at the Eisenhower Library began processing his high-level presidential papers.Montgomery 1993, 591By repeatedly appropriating funds to purchase presidential papers, Congress implicitly recognized former presidents’ rights of private ownership of their official papers.Brown 2001, 22The Nixon presidential papers scandal of 1974 was a second instance of Nixon struggling with the National Archives over control of his administration’s materials.Ericson 2005, 28One of Andrew Jackson’s early biographers reported that when Jackson was notified that one of his servants was smuggling documents from his presidential papers to his political enemies, his response was, ¶ They are welcome, sir, to anything they can get out of my papers.Jimerson 2007, 257The importance of Nixon’s presidential papers can be seen in the protracted legal struggle to control their disposition and accessibility. This struggle lasted long after Nixon’s death.
