The Importance of Taking Notes

Many years ago, when I was serving on the Air Staff in the Pentagon, I worked for then-Major General Ken Minihan, who at the time was the Air Force's Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence. General Minihan was a great boss and a gifted leader, and we all enjoyed serving under him. But like all of us, he had his faults ... one of which was a very soft voice and a tendency to mumble, which sometimes made it difficult for us to follow what he was saying in meetings. This was coupled with a tendency to host lengthy brainstorming sessions with his staff to hash out difficult problems. He'd begin most meetings by telling us "now, don't write this down" as he went on to think through the issue of the moment out loud.

Naturally, because we were good staff officers, we did write everything down, and we used our notes later to reconstruct the discussions and document the results. This allowed us to create the staff packages that the General could use to make good decisions and implement sound policies. Taking good notes was a critical part of our jobs.

I've told you that story because I think that one of the most interesting things to come out of the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and on the potential obstruction of justice by Donald Trump and his enablers is this: Trump doesn't like people who work for him to take notes.

General Minihan didn't want us to take notes because he didn't want us to waste our time writing when we could have been thinking and contributing to the discussion. Donald Trump doesn't want his staff to take notes because he hates leaving a paper trail that might come back to haunt him.

Donald Trump doesn't write much, unless you consider thousands of spiteful, insulting, and juvenile tweets to be presidential writing. Past presidents and their staffs left hundreds of thousands of pages of diaries, contemporaneous notes, and commentaries, and presidential libraries are treasure troves of information for historians. New discoveries and insights continue to be uncovered in the papers of George Washington, FDR, and other great presidents. One wonders what sort of presidential library will document the Trump administration. I suspect it will be very small, have few records larger than a tweet, and will not give future generations much insight into the workings of one of the most divisive and poorly-performing presidential administrations in our history.

Documenting what you do, particularly at the highest levels of government, is essential. Many presidential actions have results that will not become apparent for many years ... if nothing else, good documentation lets future administrations understand how and why decisions were made, and how plans and policies evolved in response to changing conditions. The presidential paper trail tells future administrations as much what wasn't done as what was.

It will take the United States decades to overcome the damage done by Donald Trump and his secretive, authoritarian ways. A hundred years or more from now, historians will look back and try to figure out why the nation elected such a man, why he did the things he did, and why so many members of his party ignored his blatant unsuitability for office and blindly supported him. It'll be tougher without the type of written record left by every previous administration.

Have a good day. Write more ... it may be the only way you'll be remembered*.

More thoughts tomorrow, when we name the Left-Cheek Ass Clown for the month. See you then.

Bilbo

* For my earlier rumination on how we'll be remembered, you can look at this post from November of 2009.