Scholars at the Miller Center of Public Affairs’ Presidential Oral History Program will soon begin to conduct audio interviews with members of former President George W. Bush’s administration, as well as foreign public officials. The 43rd president selected the Miller Center to document the official oral history of his two terms.

As part of the project, University faculty and staff will conduct interviews with members of the former White House Cabinet, representatives of Congress, independent political advisers and foreign leaders — particularly those affected by the Bush administration’s presence in the Middle East.

Bush’s “presidency might prove to be one of the most influential in this country’s history,” said Russell Riley, chair of the Presidential Oral History Program. “And listening to the people who led the administration is essential to understanding why they did what they did. It’s essential to understanding the administration’s successes as well as its failures.”

This understanding could help shed light on contemporary politics and help politicians learn from their predecessors’ mistakes and accomplishments, Riley said.

“This oral history project will offer future generations a comprehensive look at what it was like to lead the country during some extraordinary challenges,” Bush stated in a University press release.
Riley said the Oral History Project documents the audio history of elites instead of simply relying on textual archives.

“Nearly everything that’s done in the White House starts in-person,” he said. “The thousands and thousands of boxes filled with reports and files don’t tell the whole story.”

The over-arching goal of the Oral History Project — which began in 1981 and has since documented the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton ­— is to complete that story so historians can study the pieces of information missed or omitted by newspapers and government records.

These historical gaps exist for two reasons, Riley said. First, government records were not created for historians, but rather as shorthand notes for meetings and ideas. The second reason is that many administrations’ lawyers often have advised against creating documents that might be leaked to the press, because records often appear harmful — as they were for former President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

In interviews, however, administration members often say things they might not have been willing to put into a report, Riley said. Though interviewees have the chance to listen to the recordings and retract any part of their testimonies, they often decide they want the public to know the complete truth.

Because the Miller Center is nonpartisan and the interviews are released several years after they have been conducted, the Oral History Project provides a perfect forum for politicians to speak freely, without fear of repercussions, Riley added.

“This might sound naïve, but politicians are almost always working under a high ideal, and they often feel the press didn’t give them a fair shake,” he said. “I think most of them want to take the opportunity to explain their actions candidly.”

The Oral History Project also offers historians an answer to — or at least a tempering of — the problem of subjectivity. The idea, Riley said, is that a single story might skew the facts, but 100 stories, when considered together, might provide a more balanced assessment.