Beware of the Meeting Minutes

Talk-talk, said Winston Churchill (reputedly), is always better than war-war. But how is such diplomatic talk-talk recorded for posterity? Until relatively recently, history has depended mostly on written records. Those are never the same as conversations, which by their very nature are ephemeral. The recollection, reconstruction, and/or condensing, in the “minutes” of a meeting, of what was said is the issue sociologist David R. Gibson explores.

Converting “talk with all its complexities, disfluencies, ambiguities, and occasional disarray, into a written record of who said what,” writes Gibson, is no easy task. Every historian should be aware of the potential pitfalls of this fraught form of translation. And not just historians. With so much of the news reliant on anonymous sources, the issues raised are important for a functioning democracy as well.

“We might say that minutes are not merely taken, but actively made, and the minute-takers are equally minute-makers, sometimes with input from others.”

Meeting minutes, writes Gibson, are “traces of words uttered behind closed doors, but they often have the appearance of a verbatim report, and even when they do not, it is tempting to read them that way, lulling us into erroneous conclusions about who said what, how they said it, and whom they were in agreement with.” Such minutes in the official compendium of “major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity” that is the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series are given the imprimatur of history. But what exactly are they? (FRUS holdings begin with the Lincoln administration and are amply voluminous; there are, for instance, 25 volumes for the Kennedy administration and a planned 48 volumes for the Clinton administration.)

Minutes may be edited after the fact, by “the minute-taker or someone else,” notes Gibson. Members of the Soviet Union’s Politburo were neither the first nor the last who could and would alter minutes before they were disseminated. Gibson continues that “we might say that minutes are not merely taken, but actively made, and the minute-takers are equally minute-makers, sometimes with input from others.”

“Memories of talk” in after-the-fact minutes are as suspect as any other memories. “One problem with such recollections is that our ‘conversational memory’ is not especially good,” writes Gibson. “Experimental evidence suggests that we forget much of what was said in a matter of minutes. Another problem is spin.”

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Spin, like gravity, seems to be a given. Gibson gives the example of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who “exaggerated his importance as an advocate for the temperate approach that brought the crisis to a peaceful resolution” during the heady days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

The reason we know this is that Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, was secretly taping those National Security Council Executive Committee meetings in which the launch of World War III was seriously contemplated. So there is something to compare RFK’s retelling to.

The advent of relatively cheap audio recording in the second half of the last century began to allow for such comparisons of taped recordings with written records. They can be like night and day. British parliamentary proceedings, as one example, were taken by shorthand-reporters working five–ten-minute shifts. Recordings show these reporters corrected informal language and grammar, and omitted disfluencies (repetitions, non-lexical vocal sounds, all the “ums/ahs/likes” of actual conversation), making everyone sound a lot better, more, you might say, like, uh, statespersons. Another example, of a police interrogation transcript and audio recording of the same interrogation, showed how the transcript simply skipped over the police officers’ effort to cut a deal with the defendant by incorrectly noting that those passages were “unintelligible.”

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Gibson’s own exploration compares the secret tape recordings of Kennedy and Nixon administration meetings with the minutes taken at those meetings by minute-takers unaware the meetings were recorded). In some cases, there are audio recordings, notes taken during meetings, and the finalized minutes produced afterward. It’s this process of transforming talk into an enduring record that concerns Gibson. What is preserved, what is deleted, what is added? Two examples: disagreements and ambiguities are glossed over in the name of consensus, and “conversational minutia” is sacrificed. For the study of history and its personalities, that’s a lot to sacrifice.

The problem of questionable minuting or transcription isn’t new. Of late-sixteenth-century official court transcripts, Gibson writes, “the notary’s task was to create an organizationally useful document, not a perfect record that would meet the sanguine expectations of historians centuries afterwards.”

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