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My Kissinger story. Every 6 months, the DC @ap would send reporters to the National Archives in College Park to search through a roomful of newly declassified docs to see if anything 30 years old was newsworthy. I made one such trek in 2002.
You literally had to randomly search through boxes and hope something would pop put. I found transcripts of meetings Nixon and Kissinger had with foreign leaders -- notes that Kissinger or others in the meetings would take. What struck me was how much, up close, they were bullies
They made clear to thier supposed peers that they were the big cheeses and they'd better get out of their way. so I wrote the story that way. Buried deep inside was this sentence: "In his meeting with Heath, Nixon ... boasts that U.S. ally Brazil rigged the election in Uruguay."
The next morning I got a frantic call from GWU's National Security Archive. Could I please share that document about Uruguay? I said sure. The caller explained, your byline is on front pages across South America, you know that, right?
I did not know that. I thought surely, this must be known that the US rigged the election in Uruguay in the early 1970s. People suspected, but there was never a smoking gun ... until it popped up on a decades old typewritten sheet at the National Archive. Story in next tweet
This got way more attention than I anticipated. Here’s the GWU National Security Archives analysis my article spurred. Invoiced is a link to the notes I found. nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB7…
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