At OBU, Huckabee papers sit unsifted

Lid kept on trove as funds fall short

FILE - In this April 18, 2015 file photo, former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee speaks at the Republican Leadership Summit in Nashua, N.H. For Democratic politicians, same-sex marriage has become an easy issue: They're for it. Many Republican VIPs,  notably the presidential hopefuls,  face a far more complicated landscape. Some of the most conservative contenders such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Huckabee, are comfortable using forceful language in opposing gay marriage and railing against judges who have struck down state laws against it. (AP Photo/Jim Cole, File)
FILE - In this April 18, 2015 file photo, former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee speaks at the Republican Leadership Summit in Nashua, N.H. For Democratic politicians, same-sex marriage has become an easy issue: They're for it. Many Republican VIPs, notably the presidential hopefuls, face a far more complicated landscape. Some of the most conservative contenders such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Huckabee, are comfortable using forceful language in opposing gay marriage and railing against judges who have struck down state laws against it. (AP Photo/Jim Cole, File)

WASHINGTON -- If former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee runs for president in 2016, he won't have people combing through his papers from his time leading Arkansas.

The hordes of reporters and opposition researchers who flocked to the Clinton Presidential Center to learn about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton will find that Huckabee's official papers, housed at Ouachita Baptist University, are off limits.

The private school received Huckabee's papers in 2008. The collection includes about 800 cubic feet of boxes containing papers, photos, videos, news clippings and other artifacts from Huckabee's decade as governor and three years as lieutenant governor.

But most have not been processed and there is no timeline for when they will be made public, said Ray Granade, the director of library services.

The agreement between Huckabee and the university stipulates that the collection will not be opened until it has been completely processed, Granade said.

Huckabee announced in 2003 that his papers would go to his alma mater, the Baptist liberal-arts school in Arkadelphia, roughly 70 miles southwest of Little Rock.

Granade said then-university President Andy Westmoreland told the library at the time that private donors would contribute the several million dollars needed to process the collection and to endow the Michael D. Huckabee School of Education.

"He was certain that there were people who would be interested in taking care of all of this. Well, none of those people showed up, you had a downturn in the economy and the president who was involved left, taking with him of course all of his connections to the donors he thought he would be able to tap," Granade said.

Immanuel Baptist Church pastor Rex Horne of Little Rock, Bill Clinton's onetime minister, replaced Westmoreland in 2006.

"So, we have a different administration with different priorities and so far as I know, nothing in the way of donor interest in either the Huckabee School of Education and endowing that or the Huckabee papers and paying to get that done and those things made available," Granade said.

Huckabee's spokesman Alice Stewart said the former governor has contributed financially.

"Gov. Huckabee has made a sizable donation to Ouachita Baptist University and he's grateful OBU is housing the governor's papers," she said.

For now, the papers along with the rest of the university's archival collections are stored in a "secure, environmentally controlled space where the three great enemies of print materials can be regulated: light, temperature and humidity," Granade said. That space is in the library building.

If there were employees who could focus just on Huckabee's collection, Granade said, it would take at least three years to process. But, the university has about 125 collections in some stage of processing, including the papers of former Arkansas U.S. Reps. Mike Ross and Jay Dickey, he said.

"So, you work some on this and you work some on that and smaller collections usually get precedence because you can get them done," he said. "Unless somebody throws a lot of money at them, bigger collections are simply going to take longer simply because of the sheer size of them."

Huckabee's papers aren't the only ones that have been hard to access.

Records from the Clinton White House have trickled out over the past decade-and-a-half. News organizations pored over thousands of Clinton-era documents after they were unsealed and released last year by the National Archives and Records Administration.

Meanwhile, thousands of pages of documents from Clinton's Little Rock years remain off limits more than two decades after his time as Arkansas governor.

The Central Arkansas Library System's Butler Center for Arkansas Studies received the 3,600 linear feet of boxes in 2003, Library Director Bobby Roberts said. All of it has since been inventoried, but only about 25 percent has been processed, said Roberts, a former Clinton staff member.

Under the agreement signed with Bill Clinton, he retains ownership of the papers while the Butler Center processes them. Roberts said as a section or topic is finished the library seeks Clinton's permission to open it. Currently, the library is awaiting a decision to open papers dealing with education, Roberts said.

At minimum, it will take at least another four years to process Clinton's papers, he said, and even then some documents deemed less important to historians may not be finished for years.

"Every box you open up is going to be a little bit different. You can open one box and spend months on it because it's extremely important and the next one, it may be 10,000 letters of racing passes, which you can finish in a day," Roberts said.

The Butler Center has largely paid for processing the collection out of its taxpayer-funded budget, using some private donations, but none of the money has come from Clinton, Roberts said.

Clinton has been willing to let researchers look at papers that haven't been publicly released on a case-by-case basis, Roberts said. Reporters are starting to ask which papers detail Hillary Clinton's work as first lady, he said.

"Bill Clinton as governor has entered the history books and so most of the interest is academic," Roberts said. "Of course we're beginning to get questions about Hillary's involvement in all that and there's very little in those papers from her."

The collection does not include papers from Hillary Clinton's work on a 1983 commission that helped overhaul the state's education system, he said.

"I'd love to get my hands on those papers, but I've never seen them," Roberts said.

Nationally, there is no standard for how states retain the official papers of their governors, said John Weingart, director of the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, but, "most of them have a law saying they have to be submitted to someplace, a state museum, a state historical commission, something like that."

Roberts said he knows of no Arkansas law that says papers produced by the governor's office belong to the public. He said the state is lucky that most of the governors since Orval Faubus have donated their papers to a college or library to be preserved.

"As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a governor from taking the papers and burning them if they decided they wanted to and we really need some law that protects the interest and privacy of the governor, but eventually puts those papers in the public realm where they belong," he said.

Metro on 04/26/2015

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