The President's Book of Secrets

Scene · reconstructed from the paperworkPicture it. 21 December 2007. Disney releases “National Treasure: Book of Secrets”, directed by Jon Turteltaub. The hero's quest to clear an ancestor's name leads him to a closely guarded book containing the nation's deepest secrets[rt-film].

The plot gives the book a shape. It is a fabled shared diary written by US Presidents containing national secrets[wiki-film], hidden at the Library of Congress, and no one may read it without the sitting president's consent.

That is where this file's myth is born, and it has a clear birth certificate: a release date, a studio, a director. I did not find the book in any record before the film, and I did not find it in any record after. What I did find is the reason the idea sticks. Two real practices sit close to it, close enough that most people half-know them.

The first is a handover. Outgoing presidents do leave something, in private, for the person who comes next. The second is a reading. Presidents do read material that almost nobody else is allowed to see. Put those two together and blur them a little, and you have a book of secrets passed from president to president.

The rest of this file takes the two apart again. One is a note in a desk. The other is a daily intelligence summary. Both are documented. Neither is a diary. And the first of them starts almost twenty years before the film, on a Friday morning in January 1989.

On 20 January 1989, leaving office, Ronald Reagan put a notepad in the Oval Office desk for George Bush. The next day Bush showed it to reporters. It had cartoon turkeys pulling down an elephant, the line “Don't let the turkeys get you down”, and a handwritten message: Dear George. You'll have moments when you want to use this particular stationery. Well, go to it.[upi-1989]

That is the best-documented handover in this file. A joke pad and two lines of encouragement.

Four years later Bush, defeated in 1992, left a note for the man who had beaten him, Bill Clinton. When Bush died in 2018, the Associated Press wrote it up. One line from it: I am rooting hard for you.[pbs-ap-2018]

In January 2017 Barack Obama left a letter for Donald Trump. It was published that September, first by CNN; the full transcript gives four pieces of advice, on opportunity, America's role, democratic institutions and family. The third reads: we are just temporary occupants of this office[abc-au-2017]. There are no secrets in it.

That is the handover as the record holds it: personal notes, advice, not files.

The second practice is the reading. The president receives the President's Daily Brief, a daily all-source national security summary coordinated by the ODNI with CIA input, for the president and selected cabinet members and advisers[odni-pdb]. So it is not one reader. It is a handful. The 9/11 Commission described it as six to eight short articles and said it is distributed to only a handful of high-level officials[commission-2004].

The Commission also did something the film's book never allows: it printed one. The 6 August 2001 item on Bin Ladin, given to President George W. Bush, appears in the Commission's report[commission-2004], redactions marked.

So the paper trail has two real things in it. A note that is private until someone publishes it, and a brief that is secret until someone declassifies it. Then the declassifying began in bulk.

In September 2015, at the LBJ Presidential Library, the CIA released nearly 2,500 previously classified daily briefings[lbj-2015] given to Kennedy and Johnson, including the early President's Intelligence Checklists. They cover the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tet Offensive and an update on Kennedy's assassin.

A year later, on 24 August 2016, at a public symposium at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, the CIA released about 2,500 briefs from the Nixon and Ford years, some 28,000 pages[cia-2016].

That is the turn. If anything in the real record resembles a book of the nation's secrets read by presidents, it is these. And thousands of them are now public. They are intelligence summaries: crises, wars, foreign leaders, an assassin. They are not a diary, and they are not written by presidents. Presidents are the readers.

Set that beside the film. The film's book is written by presidents, passed along only among them, and never comes out. The record's brief is written by the intelligence community, read by a few officials, and, after enough years, comes out by the thousand. The film's handover is hidden knowledge. The record's handover is a cartoon notepad and the advice that presidents are temporary occupants of the office.

That is why the label is Explained. The myth's origin is a 2007 film, and the real practices it borrows from are documented. I want to be careful about one thing, though. We found no source saying the film's writers drew on the desk-note tradition. The resemblance is ours to point out, not theirs to have confirmed.

What stays open here is small, and most of it is about what is still locked.

Most PDBs, even old ones, remain classified. The ODNI says so directly: most PDBs—even those from many years past—remain classified[odni-pdb]. The releases of 2015 and 2016 run from Kennedy to Ford. When briefs after 1977 will be reviewed for release is not something the file can answer.

The desk notes are only partly public too. The Reagan note was shown to reporters the day after[upi-1989]; others surfaced through news reports and publication years later. Which presidential libraries hold the originals, and which have been released in full, we have not checked.

And there is the case for the myth, which deserves a hearing. Its core is not absurd. Presidents really do read a document few others may see, and the notes stay private until a president, an archivist or a leak makes them public. A secret that only presidents share would, by its nature, leave no record for us to find.

That is true, and it is also the limit of any file like this one. A record cannot prove a negative. It cannot show that nothing confidential ever passes between presidents in private.

What it can show is this. The book with that name comes from a 2007 film[rt-film]. What has surfaced from the real handover is advice. What has surfaced from the real reading is intelligence. None of it looks like the film's book.