Tweed Wars.(committee members of th State Department quarrel over the documentary Foreign Relations of the United States)

As anyone who has lived through the past eight years can attest, disputes about the foreign relations of the United States frequently deteriorate into shouting matches. Not so with disputes about the "Foreign Relations of the United States"--the official documentary history of America's dealings with the rest of the world. The series, not so widely known as FRUS, makes public the viscera of officialdom--diplomatic cables, intelligence reports. If you want to read a transcript of President Nixon and Chairman Mao joking about Henry Kissinger, FRUS is the place to look. (Nixon: "Anyone who uses pretty girls as a cover must be the greatest diplomat of all time." Mao: "So your girls are very often made use of?" Nixon: "His girls, not mine.")

But recently FRUS became not just a chronicle of conflict but a source of it. Last month, the State Department's Foggy Bottom headquarters was the site of a contentious meeting, during which two members resigned from an advisory committee of nine historians that oversees the series. The resignations were the culmination of nearly two years of acrimony between the committee and the State Department's Office of the Historian, which is currently headed by Marc Susser. Last fall, the committee learned that one of its members,Tom Schwartz, a historian at Vanderbilt, would not be reappointed by the State Department to another three-year term. Schwartz had been the lead drafter of the committee's 2007 annual report to the Secretary of State and Congress, which noted that the office was having trouble retaining staff historians. A number of staffers had begun to complain about Susser's management style. Some of the gripes sound like generic faculty-room politics: the Historian, the historians groused, played favorites, doling out perks to those who were deferential. As one staff member put it, "It's like junior high. I was going to say high school, but it's more juvenile than that." In a memo to committee members, Craig Daigle, a historian who worked in the office, claimed Susser warned him that if he "committed any mistake, had any problems with security issues, or created any dissension within the office, he would 'cut my fucking heart out.' "

The allegations shocked the chairman of the advisory committee, Wm. Roger Louis, of the University of Texas at Austin. "Even by Texas standards, it was a level of vulgarity and crudeness that we found hard to believe," Louis said. Most troubling to Louis was Susser's apparent intolerance of any dissent. "We began to discover that it ...