From last week's Scripps Howard News Service, via Helpful Reader K, "Mystery at the National Archives":

The Bush administration's secretive ways have made a Washington mystery of something as relatively straightforward as choosing a new National Archivist.

On April 8, President Bush nominated historian Allen Weinstein to be the head of the National Archives and did so without the customary consultation with professional societies of archivists and historians. They now suggest darkly that there might be some ideological agenda at work, especially because the Archives administer the presidential libraries.

And then there were the murky circumstances of the departure of John Carlin, whom President Clinton had appointed archivist in1995 and who had publicly expressed his intention of serving his full 10-year term and leaving on his 65th birthday next summer.

But on Dec. 19 Carlin told the White House he planned to resign this fall and as of Thursday was refusing to say why, giving rise to speculation that he was pushed.

This could be dismissed as so much inside-the-Beltway intrigue except that in November 2001 Bush issued an executive order giving him broad powers to control the release of papers from the libraries of presidents Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton.

Not only did he give himself the power to block the release of presidential records, he conferred it on former presidents, vice presidents and their designated representatives. Previously, the law required the automatic release of papers 12 years after a president left office. Papers could be withheld, but the library had to justify doing so. Bush's order put the burden of proving that a document should be declassified on the researcher, a real obstacle.

Some suspected he was trying to protect his father, Reagan's vice president. And indeed the following January the Bush White House initially blocked the release of 68,000 pages of Reagan's record even though the Reagan library had no objection to their disclosure.

The meddling seemed to continue when the White House initially refused to turn over the bulk of 11,000 pages of records the 9/11 commission requested from the Clinton library before relenting.

And suspicions have been raised that the reason Carlin is leaving ahead of schedule is that Bush wants his own person in place at the archives when the papers from his father's presidency come up on the 12-year release point next January.

Given the administration's track record, these forebodings can't be summarily dismissed. Weinstein, for his part, told a reporter, "I am committed to maximum access."

If so, it will be a first for a Bush administration official, and Congress, which must confirm him to the post, should hold him to it.