Book Review - Inside the State Department: A Candid Appraisal of the Bureaucracy by Bryton Barron

This book is cited in Diana West’s American Betrayal. Barron reveals the difficulties people face when trying to get information from the government. He points out that the Chief of the Historical Division in the State Department advised Dean Acheson that the Yalta papers should not be published because they would “embarrass the Administration.” Also the historian in charge of the Potsdam papers informed his superiors that he had found documents “too hot for public eyes.” These papers were eventually published in a bowdlerized fashion. Barron reports, “Some 100 pages . . . were removed from the Yalta compilation after it was already in type.”Details about U.S. involvement in the slave trade and the Far Eastern settlement among other things were left out for the most part.” Also, “the first compiler of the Yalta papers were not permitted to see certain files.”