On the evening of August 16, 1967, Charles H. Jordan, a U.S. citizen and humanitarian visiting Prague, left his hotel for a walk and did not return. Four days later, Jordan’s body was found floating in the city’s Vltava River. The mystery of how and why Jordan ended up in the Vltava has never been solved, but there are clues for any amateur detectives still on the case: a phone call from a man claiming he saw Jordan accosted by two men and forced into a car, a hotel porter who had overheard Jordan arguing with his wife just before that ill-fated walk, a request for a second autopsy.
These and other details about Jordan’s case have long been buried among the official U.S. files housed in the LBJ presidential library. Now, thanks to an ambitious new digitization effort, they can also be accessed by anyone, anywhere, at any time through an online archive called the Cold War Chronicles.
Spearheaded by Mary Neuburger, a professor of history and chair of UT Austin’s Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, this project has digitized tens of thousands of documents created during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and pertaining to the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. They include embassy communications, CIA reports, national security memos, letters, telegrams, and even handwritten notes created during LBJ’s presidential terms. Scanning and cataloging them has been the labor of a decade and a revolving team of UT students and staff, led throughout by Neuburger.
“We wanted everything in each folder, even if it’s a weird slip of paper saying the memo is on the next page,” Neuburger says, noting that other digital archives are often curated to include only what their creators deem to the be the most important documents. The Cold War Chronicles’ approach, however, “makes you feel more like you’re in the archives,” she says. “A given page might be irrelevant to most people, but it might be interesting you.”
The Chronicles’ archive recently went live with documents on all but two Eastern European countries fully digitized. The resource offers a glimpse into Johnson’s six-year stretch of the Cold War to students, scholars, and anyone unable to visit the LBJ library in person.
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By the time Lyndon Johnson took office in 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union were almost two decades into the tense rivalry that dominated global politics in the second half of the 20th century. Neuburger characterizes the LBJ years of the Cold War as a period of “uneasy thaw” in the superpowers’ relationship. Johnson’s attempts to open up communications were periodically undercut by the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. But, despite such diplomatic setbacks, it was an era of illuminating exchanges between communist and capitalist nations.
“The Cold War was always a conversation between the two sides,” Neuburger says. “Both sides were watching each other very closely, competing, and reacting.”
For Eastern European historians like Neuburger, who do most of their research in archives abroad, observing the Cold War from the U.S. side is vital for filling in the other half of that conversation. However, because Neuburger’s research focus is cultural — she’s written books on culinary history and the tobacco industry in Bulgaria — it didn’t occur to her to explore the LBJ archives during her first decade at UT. But with the library located just across campus, she eventually decided to have a look. At the time, she had been researching international trade fairs in Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries, and her visit to the presidential archive was rewarded with the discovery of numerous government documents detailing U.S. participation in those fairs and its implications.
According to the documents Neuburger unearthed, the U.S. had been instructed by fair organizers not to include anything political in their pavilions, but there were no restrictions on consumer goods. The instructions, she explains, were “you can’t talk about freedom of speech or freedom of religion, but you can bring a microwave oven, and a powerboat, and a motorcycle. You can bring stuff.”
So, while the U.S. couldn’t directly evangelize democracy to all of Eastern Europe, they could create displays showcasing the spoils of capitalism. These turned out to be quite popular and had the desired effect of influencing political priorities as communist countries scrambled to appease a population that had glimpsed the American standard of living. Reading the U.S. documents about these trade fairs, which included detailed travel notes, Neuburger realized that the presidential files contained not just memos and reports but “real human stories.”
The volume and subject of these stories varies by country depending on the level of diplomacy between nations and on how much was happening on the ground during the LBJ years. Albania, which had no U.S. embassy at the time, has all of one document in the library. On the other extreme, the Soviet Union is so well represented — 15 boxes with over 10,000 files — that its documents are among the last to be processed and posted to the online archive.
Czechoslovakia boasts the second-largest set of files thanks to the 1968 “Prague Spring,” a period of political reform and partial democratization that came to an abrupt halt with the August invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and three other Warsaw pact countries. These were the first documents digitized by Neuburger’s team and led to the creation of The Prague Spring Archive, an online exhibition of documents curated by Ian Goodale, currently the European Studies librarian for the University of Texas Libraries. The bulk of the Czech files are from 1968 and paint a detailed picture of the U.S navigating its response to the developing crisis in Czechoslovakia and its aftermath.
Hungary’s files are dominated not by an event but by a person: Cardinal József Mindszenty, leader of the Catholic Church of Hungary. An outspoken critic of fascism and communism, Mindszenty had the distinction of being imprisoned by both regimes. Briefly freed by the 1956 Hungarian revolution, he was granted political asylum by the U.S. and spent the next 15 years living in the American embassy in Budapest. Housing someone considered to be an enemy by Hungary’s government was, as one can imagine, a delicate situation for the U.S., and many of the Mindszenty documents focus on how to get the cardinal out of Hungary without him being re-arrested.
Mindszenty wrote numerous letters to Johnson which were answered indirectly through local chargé d’affaires due to protocol. They were often about his living situation, but not always. Some of his letters also concerned larger issues such as the safety of Hungary’s crown jewels, which Mindszenty had helped to rescue from the Nazis and which he now sought to keep out of the hands of Hungary’s communist leadership.
“There are gems like that that one can find,” Neuburger says, noting that Mindszenty is a national hero in present day Hungary. “I could picture a whole movie being made out of that.”
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Having worked in both Eastern European and U.S. archives, Neuburger has observed some amusing differences. U.S. archives like the LBJ library have careful procedures to ensure the safe handling of their materials, but they don’t always provide much explanation of what the archive houses, expecting researchers to consult with librarians for information. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, scholars pore over precious original documents with food and coffee in hand but are aided by detailed guides. She hopes the Cold War Chronicles can bring some of that organizational rigor to the LBJ materials, minus the snacks.
That’s partly why, while each country’s files in the Cold War Chronicles can be perused piece by piece to replicate the experience of digging through the archives, Neuburger and her team also took pains to ensure that users looking for specific documents would have a well-organized, searchable database with documents and folders carefully labeled with descriptions of their contents.
Neuburger sees the Cold War Chronicles as a potential resource for both original research and teaching. The site offers educational materials, including assignments from her undergrad “Cold War Eastern Europe” course, designed to help students navigate archives and identify the stories that they want to explore further.
She describes the process of archival work as “starting broad with a research interest and narrowing it to a research topic, then figuring out why it matters.” From there, students do what scholars do: find other primary and secondary sources that can contextualize the document or documents that sparked their interest and then figure out how they can contribute something original to the scholarship.
It’s important to remember that the reliability of any single source should be carefully evaluated, Neuburger says. This is most obvious for something like a memoir but is also true of state documents like those found in the LBJ library.
“With any document you have to read between the lines, but there’s a lot of good information in there,” she says.
On both sides of the Cold War, archival documents have a certain amount of spin and even propaganda, so being able to compare the two helps researchers get closer to an unbiased account. But Neuburger also notes that both U.S. and Soviet/Eastern Bloc state files contain self-criticism and an awareness of what isn’t working in one’s own nation and where their rivals are succeeding.
“There’s a lot of really honest assessment and analysis of what’s going on there,” she says of the U.S. documents about Eastern European nations. “It isn’t just ‘they’re evil.’”