The very next day, as headlines of Dean's testimony filled the nation's newspapers, Rostow reached his conclusion about what to do with "The 'X' Envelope." In longhand, he wrote a "Top Secret" note which read, "To be opened by the Director, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, not earlier than fifty (50) years from this date June 26, 1973."
In other words, Rostow intended this missing link of American history to stay missing for another half century. In a typed cover letter to LBJ Library director Harry Middleton, Rostow wrote:
"Sealed in the attached envelope is a file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive nature. In case of his death, the material was to be consigned to the LBJ Library under conditions I judged to be appropriate. ..."After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library (or whomever may inherit his responsibilities, should the administrative structure of the National Archives change) may, alone, open this file. ... If he believes the material it contains should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above should be repeated."
Ultimately, however, the LBJ Library didn't wait that long. After a little more than two decades, on July 22, 1994, the envelope was opened and the archivists began the long process of declassifying the contents.
Yet, because Johnson and Rostow chose to withhold the file on Nixon's "treason," a distorted history of Watergate took shape and then hardened into what all the Important People of Washington "knew" to be true. The conventional wisdom was that Nixon was unaware of the Watergate break-in beforehand -- that it was some harebrained scheme of a few overzealous subordinates -- and that the President only got involved later in covering it up.
Sure, the Washington groupthink went, Nixon had his "enemies list" and played hardball with his rivals, but he couldn't be blamed for the Watergate break-in, which many insiders regarded as "the third-rate burglary" that Nixon's White House called it.
Even journalists and historians who took a broader view of Watergate didn't pursue the remarkable clue from Nixon's rant about the missing file on June 17, 1971. Though a few other historians did write, sketchily, about the 1968 events, they also didn't put the events together.
So, the beloved saying took shape: "the cover-up is worse than the crime." And Official Washington hates to rethink some history that is considered already settled. In this case, it would make too many important people who have expounded on the "worse" part of Watergate, i.e. the cover-up, look stupid. [For details, see Robert Parry's America's Stolen Narrative.]
The Iran-Contra Cover-up
Similarly, Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to dismiss Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into trouble.
The "Big Question" that insiders were asking after the scandal broke in November 1986 was whether President Reagan knew about the decision by White House aide Oliver North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, to divert some profits from secret arms sales to Iran to secretly buy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
Once, Poindexter testified that he had no recollection of letting Reagan in on that secret -- and with Reagan a beloved figure to many in Official Washington -- the inquiry was relegated to insignificance. The remaining investigation focused on smaller questions, like misleading Congress and a scholarly dispute over whether the President's foreign policy powers overrode Congress' power to appropriate funds).
At the start of the Iran-Contra investigation, Attorney General Edwin Meese had set the time parameters from 1984 to 1986, thus keeping outside of the frame the possibility of a much more serious scandal originating during Campaign 1980, i.e., whether Reagan's campaign undermined President Jimmy Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran and then paid off the Iranians by allowing Israel to ship weapons to Iran for the Iran-Iraq War.
So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter's reelection hopes and ensured Reagan's victory.
The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the years, about two dozen sources -- including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat -- have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.
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