Thomas J. Blanton

Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University

Thomas S. Blanton is an American journalist, editor, and archival researcher, currently serving as the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The National Security Archive is an independent research institute devoted to obtaining, preserving, and publishing declassified U.S. records. In that role, Blanton has helped make secret documentation on U.S. foreign and national security policy available to scholars, journalists, and the public.²

Blanton is also an editor and author of documentary books based upon archival evidence. His works include The Chronology (1987), a day-by-day documentary account of the Iran-Contra affair; White House E-Mail (1995), a collection of Reagan-Bush White House electronic messages preserved through landmark litigation; and Masterpieces of History (2010), co-edited with Svetlana Savranskaya and Vladislav Zubok, on the peaceful end of the Cold War in Europe in 1989. The Wilson Center credits these volumes as part of a wider body of influential writing on secrecy, declassification, and Cold War history.³

^#