A Fight for the History Books

resident Bush showed little respect for history, and even less for the illuminating work done by presidential historians, when he issued an executive order last November making it significantly harder to gain access to a former president's official papers. Now a worthy bipartisan attempt to overturn that order is being stalled by the White House, which is scrambling to portray its new rules as a benign attempt to tidy up the system for releasing presidential records.

It is nothing of the sort. Mr. Bush's decree essentially repealed the presumption of public access at the heart of a proud post-Watergate reform — the Presidential Records Act of 1978. This bipartisan act established that a president's White House records are not his personal property but rather belong to the American people. Former presidents have leeway to withhold sensitive material for up to 12 years, including papers revealing the advice served up by White House aides. After that, a former president seeking to override an archivist's decision to release material must seek a court order.