Photo Credit: https://www.newspapers.com/article/chicago-tribune-pat-price-quote-chicag/25320868/
My first introduction to any kind of archive was in high school when, on a teacher’s recommendation, I visited the Prelinger Library—a small library, just one large room, and open to anyone, in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and full of gems of all kinds: fifties-era urban slang guides, outdated maps of the Bay, punk zines on lockpicking, and the like. Since then, I’ve thought of libraries and archives as essentially ends-in-themselves, places where you can go and have fun, chat, pass around sometimes-old and nearly lost things, without any particular objective. At places like Columbia, where archives primarily function as tools for researchers, students and artists, it’s easy to forget to go to an archive just to play around. Thinking back to those visits to the Prelinger Library, I recently made a trip to the RBML, where I made an appointment to look through a small portion of the newly acquired David Wise papers.
Wise is probably best known for his book The Invisible Government (1964), one of the first serious studies to bring details of (CIA) American foreign covert action (e.g. in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba) to a wide American audience. He also maintained a correspondence with Jackelyn Kennedy Onassis, who later edited his novel The Samarkand Dimension (1987) at Doubleday. Going through his papers—at least the few folders I managed to get through in my brief, three hour appointment—was, it turned out, a lot of fun. What follows are partial transcriptions of a few documents that I found especially interesting.
