Missing History: Artifacts Vanish From National Archives

A look at how some Washington artifacts can vanish from history

By LARRY MARGASAK

Updated 9:08 AM PST, Sun, Jul 5, 2009

Print Email Share TWITTER FACEBOOK

Shutterstock

WASHINGTON -- National Archives visitors know they'll find the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the main building's magnificent rotunda in Washington. But they won't find the patent file for the Wright Brothers' Flying Machine or the maps for the first atomic bomb missions anywhere in the Archives inventory. Many historical items the Archives once possessed are missing, including:

Civil War telegrams from Abraham Lincoln.
Original signatures of Andrew Jackson.
Presidential portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
NASA photographs from space and on the moon.
Presidential pardons.

Some were reportedly stolen by researchers or Archives employees. Others simply disappeared without a trace. And there's more gone from the nation's record keeper. The Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, is conducting a criminal investigation into a missing external hard drive with copies of sensitive records from the Clinton administration. On the hard drive were Social Security numbers, including one for one of former Vice President Al Gore's daughters. Because the equipment also may include classified information, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, calls it a a major national security breach.

Brachfeld has documented thousands of electronic storage devices, including computers and servers, that have gone missing over the past decade from the National Archives and Records Administration. Grassley, who has demanded an accounting of all missing items, said the loss of historical documents "robs our nation of its history and is completely unacceptable."

The Archives' stewardship of the nation's records has been questioned before. In a well-publicized incident, former President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, took documents from the Archives in the fall of 2003 while preparing, along with other ex-Clinton administration officials, for testimony to the Sept. 11 commission.

In September 2005, Berger was sentenced to two years of probation, 100 hours of community service, a $50,000 fine and loss of his security clearance for three years. Some records have been missing for decades from the Archives' 44 facilities in 20 states and the capital, including 13 presidential libraries.

"When I came here nine years ago, there was no acknowledgment that we had a problem," Brachfeld said in an interview with The Associated Press. Since then, he has started a recovery team that attends trade shows and Civil War re-enactments, and enlists the help of dealers and researchers to recover historical items that belong to the government.

The agency has two missions that sometimes are in conflict: preserving documents and making them available to the public in monitored research rooms with surveillance cameras.

"We do not have item-by-item control," said Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. "We can't. We have 9 billion documents. We don't know exactly what's in each of those boxes. There's no point in preserving materials that cannot be used."

Each missing historical item has its own story.

From 1969 to 1980, the patent file for the Wright Brothers Flyer was passed around multiple Archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum. It was returned to the Archives in 1979, and was last seen in 1980.
In 1962, military representatives checked out the target maps for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The maps have been missing ever since.
In May 2004, one of FDR's grandsons asked to see a portrait of his grandfather at the Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y. It couldn't be found, and hasn't been seen since 2001.
Shaun Aubitz, a former employee at the Archives' facility in Philadelphia, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2002 for stealing -- among other items -- 71 pardons signed by Presidents James Madison, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and Lincoln. The Archives recovered 59 records. They had been sold to manuscript dealers and collectors.
In 2005, researcher Howard Harner was sentenced to two years in prison, two years probation and a $10,000 fine after pleading guilty to stealing more than 100 Civil War-era documents from the Archives between 1996 and 2002. Fewer than half were recovered.
A 40-year-old National Archives intern in Philadelphia stole 160 Civil War documents. About half were sold on eBay. The documents included telegrams about the troops' weaponry, the War Department's announcement of Lincoln's death sent to soldiers, and a letter from famed Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown Stuart.
A financially strapped Denning McTague was sentenced in the case to 15 months in prison in 2007. He had told a psychiatrist that he was angry that his internship was unpaid.