No, but to be honest I wasn’t looking for that.
For ex., I requested a series of papers on Reagan’s economic policies-—Director of the Budget, Treas. Sec., Commerce.
I’d get rolling carts with 30 BOXES per, each box with thousands of docs. (BTW, based on the logs, I’m the ONLY historian who has EVER looked at those as of 2018.)
Most of these are extremely routine; and you find copies of copies. The same memo will appear in all relevant departments.
Yes, I DO know what I am seeing in the papers.
I was the one that discovered that Reagan INITIATED the “Simpson-Mazzoli” amnesty in 1981, mainly as a means to deal with the Cubans and Haitians Clinton brought in, but expanded it to illegal Mexicans. Much of this was done at the behest of Ark. Gov. White, who had hundreds of these people locked up on a military base, Ft. Smith.
I was the one who found internal documentation from Stockman to department heads, and responses, that basically said, “Yeah, we wanted to cut our departments, but we’ve already spent our money.”
I went through every single NSDD, the secret defense directives that shaped cold war policy. So, yeah, I knew exactly what I was seeing because I’ve read so many presidential papers and agency papers. You begin to see the protocol, how every box is checked by the reader before circulating. You learn to look for handwritten notes in the margins.