Thomas S. Blanton

Thomas S. Blanton is the director of the non-profit and independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University, a position he has held since 1992. He is also the author of numerous political and historical works, including "[Articles in] The International Herald-Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Slate, Wilson Quarterly, and many other publications," as well as numerous books.

Early Life and Education

Thomas S. Blanton was born in 1955. He began attending Harvard University in 1973, where he graduated in 1979.

Use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

The National Security Archive, which Blanton has directed since 1992, makes extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Having filed approximately 60,000 FOIA and declassification requests to over 200 U.S. governmental offices and agencies, the National Security Archive has obtained more than 10 million pages of U.S. government documents, over a million of which "[are] published on the World Wide Web." This makes them the largest non-governmental repository of declassified U.S. documents in the world.

Blanton made his first FOIA request in 1976 while working as a newspaper reporter in Minnesota.

Selected Books

Below are listed a selection of books by Thomas S. Blanton:

• The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush: Conversations that Ended the Cold War
  • Blanton was awarded the Choice magazine award for Outstanding Academic Title of 2017.
• “Masterpieces of History”: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe 1989
  • The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awarded Blanton the Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize for 2011 for this work.
• White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages The Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy
  • This book details the lawsuit that kept over 220 million records, ranging from the Reagan to the Obama administration, from being destroyed. The American Library Association's awarded Blanton with the James Madison Award of 1996 for “defending the public’s right to know.”
• The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras
  • Bob Woodward praised this work as “the most comprehensive, authoritative, objective and useful summary of the Iran-Contra Affair available. It makes the pieces fall into place and brings the individual players into focus.”

Awards

In 2000, Blanton received the George Polk Award on behalf of the National Security Archive for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth, and informing us all."

He won the Emmy Award in 2004 due to "individual achievement in news and documentary research."

The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected Blanton as a member in 2006.

He received two awards in 2011. The first award, titled the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, was presented to him by Tufts University for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.”

His books have received several awards, only three of which are listed here. The first was the American Library Association’s James Madison Award in 1996. The second was the 2011 Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize for 2011 awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the third was Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Title of 2017.

References

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