WASHINGTON — As a young lawyer for President Reagan, John G. Roberts Jr. argued strongly that the White House should keep its internal files secret and refuse to release them to the Senate to win confirmation for a presidential nominee to a senior government post.
"We should take whatever steps are necessary to ensure the general opening of files to Hill scrutiny ... does not become routine," Roberts said. "I would hope that ... we would be in a better position to resist committee demands." He also denounced as "pernicious" the Presidential Records Act of 1978, in which Congress called for the future public release of files housed in a president's library.
"By 2001," Roberts wrote with alarm on Aug. 29, 1985, "Hill staffers need only go to the Reagan Library to see \o7any \f7internal White House deliberative document they want to see."
This memo by Roberts, whom President Bush has nominated to the Supreme Court, appears among 5,300 pages of White House files released Monday by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, as young Roberts had predicted.
Among the documents were one that indicated Roberts' support for prayer in public schools and his support for the antiabortion movement.
The bulk of the files released Monday contained neither the writings nor the views of Roberts. Instead, they consisted of court opinions, speeches, letters and memos written by others and collected in files held by Roberts while he served in the White House counsel's office, beginning in 1982, when he was 27. He left four years later to join a Washington law firm.
In addition to winnowing the files released thus far, the Bush White House has refused to release many of the internal files covering Roberts' later service in the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush. Those files are sought by Senate Democrats. In particular, files from Roberts' time as the top political deputy to U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr are off-limits, the White House has said.
The Bush White House also appeared to follow Roberts' advice in moving to control the release of files from the Reagan Library.
In his 1985 memo, Roberts said the "pernicious effect of [the Presidential Records Act] will have to be addressed in any effort to revitalize the deliberative privilege." The "deliberative privilege" refers to the idea that the debate and deliberation within the White House will be crimped if the president's advisors believe their comments and memos will be released to the public in the future.
