Sandy Berger evidence

Do you get a creepy feeling when you look for a document and find that it is totally missing, stripped from the historical record?

There are a few cases that give me that creepy feeling.  In historic sequence, the first is the main speech that Senator Joe McCarthy gave in public and then gave again on the Senate floor. No copies exist of either speech, but because this is where McCarthy first cited the names of State Department employees who were Communists, and McCarthy was forever berated for not really naming names, the absence of this speech from historic records is 'creepy'.

The second instance is the Surgeon General's report on smoking in 1959.  I used that report for two statistical tests in the statistics class where I was a teaching assistant in 1961.  Of course the data contradicted the main theses of that report that smoking caused lung cancer. The charts never appeared again in any subsequent reports. I have paid researchers to find that original report and it is clearly missing from every major library that should have it.

The third was a missing 15 minutes from a tape of Richard Nixon, talking in his office.

Most recently we had Sandy Berger going to the National Security Archives and removing documents, taking them out of the building under his coat.  Did they ever get back in the file?

Berger is the reason for the title of this blog.  Berger got a slap on the wrist.  Frankly I am always offended when confronted with a Bergerism. His name should be comparable to Guy Fawkes for historians.