atwatch the communicators 6:30 p.m. eastern on c-span2. join us next week for this conclusion on cars that talk to each other and the road. 2500 pagesreleased of previously classified material from the richard nixon and gerald ford administration. they were part of the president's daily brief on security threats and issues seen only by the president and selected officials. historians discuss changes residents made to the daily briefing, the relationship between the cia, department of defense, and the white house during the richard nixon administration. let me add my welcome to previous remarks and welcome you to one of my many houses. the system was created by franklin roosevelt shortly after he created the archives.

it was the first of 13. at that dedication he articulated his vision, which has guided my entire agency from its early days. ofbring together the records the past and house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of women and then in the future. the nation must believe in the above all,uture, and believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment to create their own future. collecting, protecting, and encouraging the use of records of our country has been our use from the beginning. we are proud to open government focus on transparency has resulted in an unprecedented level of access to previously classified material.

the december 2009 executive order which created the national declassification center at the archives, the mandate to review by 2013 for declassification a backlog of 352 million pages dating back to world war i. the six oldest records were world war i formulas for invisible ink, declassified by the cia. thank you. completed oneview time had been to complete processing, 62% declassification rate. importantly, indexing on demand approach where requesters ask for series, 239 projects totaling 8 million pages, 80% declassification rate. the best news is the review process will prevent future backlog scenarios.

according to the recent report on the information security oversight office, production of national security secrets fell significantly over the past five-years. 52,000 see yours were created in 2015. 258,000 were created in 2005. security news reports that data appeared to confirm the national security classification is undergoing a slow-motion process of transformation involving , incremental reductions in classification activity and gradual increasing in solutions. this, this is the second in a series of historical releases with the openness theme . the presidential daily brief has been guarded and in great demand since they were created during the kennedy administration.

there are lots of individuals in the chain that made this possible. i want to acknowledge joe lambert for his collaboration and partnership. truly embodied the slogan of our national declassification center, releasing all we can, protecting what we must. thanks, joe, for making that happen. [applause] david ferriero: with an advance copy of today's release, i had an opportunity to did in and go -- to did end -- to dip in and go through the history through the lens of the daily brief. i immediately went to five marks of 1970, the first marine division into nam, and my first day in the country. not that i expected to see my name prominently announced in the presidential daily brief, but i was curious about what was going on. related to vietnam, and the principal developments of that

day, the middle east policy, libyan troops are coming back from egypt, and entirely redacted reports on jordan and short notes on guatemala and venezuela, not a mention of vietnam. or mouse or cambodia that they. or cambodia that day. enough about me, i have the honor of introducing today's panel of experts who will address the importance of these records. your program has detailed biographies. i will not read them, but briefly our moderator is gregory treverton of the national intelligence council. the council supports director clapper in his role as head of the intelligence committee -- intelligence community created in 1979 to serve as a bridge between intelligence and a source of deep substantive

expertise on intelligence issues, and a facilitator of intelligence community collaboration and outreach. he served as a policy analyst and director of the center for global risk and at the -- global risk and security in the rand publication. he talked about reshaping national intelligence for an age of information. our distinguished panel includes david robards, the chief historian of the central intelligence agency, publishing classified and unclassified works on the reconnaissance -- on the cia reconnaissance aircraft and intelligence in the american revolution. erin mahan is the chief historian in the office for the secretary of state and the office for kennedy and the goal and western europe. stephen rudolph is the historian for department of state, and author of powerful and brutal , kissinger, and

the eastern associative. and david sargent is associate professor of history at california berkeley and the author of a superpower transformed, remaking of american foreign relations in the 1970's. in the spirit of true disclosure, steve and erin served on the national archives, which i chair. [applause] >> thank you, very much, david. it will be a great honor and pleasure to be here as someone who has been outside government and outside intelligence more than i have been inside. this is my fourth time on the inside. that is probably plenty. i am struck by how ungood the intelligence community is. -- intelligence community is to explaining what we do to the american people. we often leave it to the edward snowden to do it for us, and that is not good.

so i find this welcome, and i want to add my thanks to the archives and the library as well as the cia for making this possible. i had the privilege before i took my current position to speak at an earlier gathering on an earlier release, they released a bunch of documents pertaining to the 1973 war, and that was a wonderful occasion for transparency. i applaud that line with director clapper's transparency initiative, the more we can do, the better. the only did we provide too much fodder for students with phd's, we hopefully should provide grit for people that want to understand better what we do. david said to me, gave to me the -- saved me the task of introducing the panel, so i won't. let me say it is wonderful to have a trifecta of distinguished government historians,

distinguished academics who have thought about this issue. i want to turn quickly to them. i want to keep this conversational, but i wanted to frame the panel and what i thought was a very interesting conversation between jim and john. changed ae pdb has lot over time and could evolve in the future. it began as a pickle, the president checklist. so he would not be confused by reading the same thing twice, not knowing where something would come from. it has gone from that modest beginning to what is now a very substantial operation. that makes us think about how it might evolve in the future. we want to focus on the nixon and ford administration. i was struck, i had the

opportunity before i took this job to look for the center of intelligence and how subsequent administrations to these, specifically the three administrations before mr. obama's, had dealt with the president's daily brief. i had good oral histories of the cia. what struck me about those oral histories is the senior official that testified on the point like the pdb's, but they like to the briefers better. they were an introduction, and entree to conversation. ,they could ask questions, get more information. a reminder that when we focus on the pdb's as documents, it is about process, not points. it is about the process over