July 23, 2015
Video Lecture: Took place on March 31, 2015, at CNS of MIIS in Monterey.
Lecture by Thomas Blanton
The Archive won U.S. journalism’s George Polk Award in April 2000 for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth, and informing us all.” The Los Angeles Times (16 January 2001) described the Archive as “the world’s largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents.”
Blanton served as the Archive’s first Director of Planning & Research beginning in 1986, became Deputy Director in 1989, and Executive Director in 1992. He filed his first Freedom of Information Act request in 1976 as a weekly newspaper reporter in Minnesota; and among many hundreds subsequently, he filed the FOIA request and subsequent lawsuit (with Public Citizen Litigation Group) that forced the release of Oliver North’s Iran-contra diaries in 1990.
A graduate of Harvard University, where he was an editor of the independent university daily newspaper The Harvard Crimson, he won Harvard’s 1979 Newcomen Prize in history. He also received the 1996 American Library Association James Madison Award Citation for “defending the public’s right to know.” He is a founding editorial board member of freedominfo.org, the virtual network of international freedom of information advocates; and serves on the editorial board of H-DIPLO, the diplomatic history electronic bulletin board, among other professional activities.
Video courtesy of the Center for Education Design, Development & Distribution, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA
