Words Speak Volumes in U.S. Archives Display

In a capital where apologies are framed to sidestep blame, the National Archives has put on display one man’s historic, unambiguous acceptance of responsibility.

It is a slip of paper on which Dwight D. Eisenhower scribbled a statement to be issued if the D-day invasion of the European mainland in World War II failed.

Eisenhower’s statement holding himself solely accountable--carried folded in his wallet and never needed--is one of a smattering of the 4 billion government records held by the National Archives and put on exhibit at its Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters.

Others call up heart-rending or heart-stopping moments in the nation’s history: A letter from muckraking author Upton Sinclair educating the country about rats ground into its meat supply. A heart-rending plea from a black man soon to stripped of his freedom by the Supreme Court. A physics student’s notes recording the first man-made atomic fission with two triumphant words: “We’re cookin’!”

And a fan letter from 12-year-old Fidel Castro to the occupant of the White House in 1940: “My good friend Roosevelt. I don’t know very English, but I know as much as write to you . . . “

But perhaps none is more pertinent in a city where writing evasive statements of apology is an art form than Eisenhower’s forthright note, written on June 5, 1944, the eve of the Allies’ assault on Nazi-occupied France (but misdated by Eisenhower “July 5”):

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold, and I have withdrawn the troops.

“My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and navy did all their bravery and devotion to duty could do.

“If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

Curator Stacey Bredhoff said the papers held by the archives here, in its 13 regional centers around the country and in the nine presidential libraries capture the sweep of history--”from the Monroe Doctrine to the Watergate tapes, from Yorktown to Saigon, from heroes to scoundrels, presidents to slaves.”

Among those on display:

* Young Castro’s request to President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green American, in the letter, because never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green American and I would like to have one of them.”

He adds a second reference to his aptitude in English: “I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American. . . . Good by. Your friend. Fidel Castro.”

* The Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in the case of Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, slaves who sued for their freedom after living in free territory. The ruling that black people were not citizens and could not expect federal protection is often called the most wrongheaded the high court ever rendered. It made the Civil War less avoidable and was overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

Dred Scott’s melancholy plea is quoted: “Will nobody speak for me at Washington, even without hope of other reward than the blessings of a poor black man and his family?”

* A 1906 typewritten letter from Upton Sinclair to President Theodore Roosevelt urging him to send an inspector secretly into the Chicago packinghouses: “Let him go to Packingtown as I did, as a working-man, live with the men, get a job in the yards, and use his eyes and ears . . . “

Sinclair’s novel, “The Jungle,” describing tubercular beef and the grinding up of poisoned rats, caused revulsion over slaughtering methods and led to passage of reform laws.

Sinclair said later his purpose had been to inform the country on the exploitation of immigrant labor and the need for socialism, not about its meat supply. “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach,” he said.

* A notebook recording the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction during the Manhattan Project, a secret effort to build an atomic bomb before the Germans did. Richard Watts, a physics student, jotted down a series of numbers describing the developing experiment. But when the moment of fission arrived, he wrote two excited words: “We’re cookin’!”