For those of us who believe history is the key to civilization, the death of a wonderful and thoughtful man should be noted.
John E. Taylor, the brilliant military archivist at the National Archives, died on Sunday,
John welcomed historians and journalists into his cluttered office as old friends, with characteristic charm and Southern gentility. He would plough through the historical documents, photographs, and films in the archives with the enthusiasm of Sherlock Holmes. A bulldog at tracking down the right document, he would not be denied by reluctant colleagues. On a personal note, without him I could not have gotten to the bottom of important stories in six books and a dozen documentaries.
Occasionally John took it upon himself to push for the declassification of a document he thought might be useful to a writer. When a government agency unfairly refused declassification, John bent over backwards to get it done. He had a passion for both preserving our history and illuminating its dark and secret parts. So when the Bush Administration arrived in town with a secret plan to reclassify what had been declassified years before, John did not appreciate it. He did not take a kindly attitude to the political goons the Bush folks brought in to enforce reclassification.
“That stuff started with Nixon, and the Bush people did the same thing from the first week they came to town,” John complained in 2001.
A year earlier, I was have trouble getting all the records of the late Army intelligence Chief Ralph Van Deman. Though the records of the man responsible for what became the blacklists and other horrors of the 1950s were all supposed to have been open to the public, I knew from FBI sources that key boxes were missing. The archivist in charge was deliberately unhelpful. Every time I checked, he simply said they were not available. So I called John for help. Minutes later, he called me back to tell me the FBI was still using the old Van Deman files to chase suspected communists and which agents in the Washington Field Office had the unreturned material. A few weeks later, I received a call telling me where the boxes were and when to go look at the files.
John helped me with books on NASA, the CIA, and a number of television documentaries, including a project on Pearl Harbor and a documentary on the Japanese Atomic Bomb program for CNN. He took great delight in what he did and loved the idea of collaborating with the kind of people who put history into pictures and words.
John Taylor was an exceptional public servant who helped tell the American story with grace, a devotion to accuracy, and fortitude that did the mission of the National Archives proud.
