Bibliography: Note on Primary Sources

The documents that appear in these volumes, as selected Eisenhower items or as sources for the information that appears in the annotations, have for the most part come from the extraordinarily rich collections housed in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. Most were culled from the Eisenhower Manuscripts, cited as EM in these volumes. The "Bibliography: Note on Primary Sources" in volume XVII of our series, which covers Eisenhower's First Administration, contains a description of EM's constituent files and a key to the abbreviations we use for them.

The smaller and richer of the two EM collections is the Ann Whitman File (Eisenhower's Papers as President), which we abbreviate as AWF. The most important collections in AWF are the DDE Diaries Series (AWF/D); the Dulles-Herter Series (AWF/D-H); the International Series (AWF/I); the International Meetings Series (AWF/IM); the NSC Series (AWF/NSC); the Administration Series (AWF/A); the Cabinet Series (AWF/Cabinet); the Legislative Meetings Series (AWF/LM); the Ann Whitman Diary Series (AWF/AWD); the Name Series (AWF/N); the Gettysburg Series (AWF/Gettysburg); and the Miscellaneous Series (AWF/Misc., an odd assortment of subject files covering unrelated topics). A separate group, the Microfilm Series (AWF/M), is not yet open to researchers and should not be confused with the commercially filmed series of the Ann Whitman File. The AWF Microfilm series comprises images from Ann Whitman's files as they were photographed in the White House periodically between 1955 and 1960. Among the relevant subsections of AWF/M are the Official Files (AWF/M: OF); the Personal Files (AWF/M: Pers); the Geographic Files (AWF/M: G); and the Administrative and Personal Files (AWF/M: AP).

Far larger than the Ann Whitman File is the vast collection of Eisenhower's records as President, the White House Central Files (WHCF). This group includes the Confidential File (WHCF/CF), the Official File (WHCF/OF), the President's Personal File (WHCF/PPF), the General File (WHCF/GF), and the Alphabetical File (WHCF/Alpha). WHCF/OF and WHCF/PPF are especially rich sources for letters written to and by Eisenhower.

As was the case for volumes XIV-XVII, a number of collateral collections in Abilene also help to fill out the historical record of the Second Administration. Foremost among these are the papers of John Foster Dulles and Christian A. Herter, Eisenhower's Secretaries of State. The portion of the Dulles Papers most useful to us was the White House Memoranda Series, which includes general correspondence files and records of Dulles's meetings with Eisenhower. Other valuable sections contain memorandums of Dulles's telephone conversations as well as separate chronological and subject series. The Herter Papers also contains a rich series containing records of Herter's telephone conversations with the President.

The records of the White House Office, also in the Eisenhower Presidential Library, were maintained by some of Eisenhower's closest assistants: Andrew J. Goodpaster, L. Arthur Minnich, Robert Cutler, Gordon Gray, and Dillon Anderson. These files, which are valuable for foreign, domestic, and national security matters, include the records of the Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (WHO/OSANSA) and those of the Office of the Staff Secretary (WHO/OSS). Other documents relating to national security came from the files of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--the "CCS" file--found in Record Group 218 in the National Archives. Also in the National Archives is a relatively small collection that we cite as "State Department Files, Presidential Correspondence" (Record Group 59).

Given the difficulty of locating declassified copies of Eisenhower's important correspondence with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, we were fortunate to obtain access to an additional source of material for this last set of volumes. The Public Record Office in Kew, England, has released most of the letters and cables exchanged between the two Western leaders. Most of the documents that we used were located in record class PREM 11, which contains correspondence and papers from the Prime Minister's Office generated or received from 1951 until 1964. Each subject file in this record class is designated with a particular number, which we provide in our document headings and annotations.

There are extensive finding aids available to most of the collections listed in this note and in the note that appears in volume XVII. Interested researchers should contact the custodians of the manuscripts for information on security classification, donor-imposed restrictions, and copyright regulations.

Daun van Ee