Scope and Content Note
The papers of William Eldridge Odom (1932-2008) span the years 1913-2008 with the bulk of the material dating from 1950 to 2008. They focus on Odom’s military career, including his service as a military advisor and an intelligence official in the Carter and Reagan administrations, and his continued work as an authority on national security policy and the Soviet Union in the years following his retirement from the Army. The papers are arranged in two parts described below. The collection is in English and Russian.
Part I
Part I of the papers spans the years 1918-1992, but primarily focus on the years between l977 and 1988 when Odom served as military assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski, as assistant chief of staff for intelligence of the United States Army, and as director of the National Security Agency. A small addition that included photocopies of personal documents belonging to Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn covering the years 1918-1964 was received in 1992. The collection consists of personal and official correspondence, daily activity logs, subject files, speeches and writings, scrapbooks, photographs, and printed matter arranged in eleven series: National Security Affairs Military Assistant, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, National Security Agency, Hudson Institute, Speeches and Writings File, Miscellany, Addition, Formerly Classified, Oversize, Classified, and Top Secret.
Odom earned a national reputation as an expert on the Soviet Union. Early in his military career he had an opportunity to observe Soviet military activities while serving as a member of the United States military liaison to Soviet forces in Potsdam, Germany. From 1966 to 1969 he taught courses in Russian history at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, and while serving as assistant army attaché at the United States embassy in Moscow in the early 1970s, he visited all the republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Upon returning to the United States, he resumed his career at West Point where he taught courses in Soviet politics. His book, The Soviet Volunteers, was published in 1974. The only material in Part I of the Odom Papers from this phase of his career consists of a folder of official telegrams and intelligence reports that Odom had assembled in preparation for a working paper while on the faculty at West Point. Additional material can be found in Part II.
The corpus of the collection begins with Odom's appointment as military assistant to the assistant to the president for national security affairs in January 1977. The correspondence files for this period are generally personal, concerning arrangements for speeches and participation in forums and conferences. The letters reflect the respect of colleagues in the military and academic community for Odom's expertise and opinions regarding the Soviet Union. Many of the letters also emphasize Odom's continuing interest in the quality of education received by military officers. Others pertain to curricula of universities and the continual training of military officials.
Daily logs of Odom's activities and the files relating to the presidential directives on defense policy offer a significant record for a study of government policy. The logs provide insight into the operations of the White House and issues discussed at National Security Council meetings. They were maintained irregularly in 1977 but are more complete for the later years. They form an index to the problems and activities with which Odom was concerned on a daily basis. Some entries are cursory jottings; others are more expansive, containing Odom's opinions, impressions, and summaries of events. The notations record agenda for meetings of the National Security Council and the Special Coordination Committee on the Persian Gulf framework, reactions of participants, meetings with government officials and others, telephone calls, and briefings attended or delivered, including preparations for trips by the president. Issues highlighted include strategic defense policy matters, particularly those pertaining to American-Soviet relations; the hostages in Iran; presidential directives on the situation in the Persian Gulf; President Jimmy Carter's executive order on telecommunications policy; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; terrorism and hijackings; the Middle East; strategic arms limitations talks; and the "continuation of government" during military crises or other threats to normal government operations. The entry for the morning of 20 January 1981 describes the atmosphere and activities at the White House during the last hours of the Carter administration as staff exchanged farewells and monitored the status of the flight carrying the American hostages released from Iran.
In assessing his years at the White House, Odom viewed the series of memoranda he drafted, which culminated in several presidential directives on strategic defense policy, as responsible for turning the United States from a "de facto policy of strategic retreat in the world to a policy of strategic and regional competition with Soviet power." Copies of several of these documents pertaining to the evolution of policy change are included among the classified documents in the Odom Papers.
Odom's papers for his years as the army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence and as director of the National Security Agency also relate to matters of defense and intelligence. Many of the letters and documents concern training in intelligence-gathering methods used by the military and other government agencies. Other papers focus on the study of Soviet military personnel and organization, including the Nitze Group's analysis of Soviet views of strategic competition. Additional topics discussed in the collection are the development of a defense strategy, formulation of an arms control policy, and the structure of a modern military establishment. There are also frequent references to the writings of Samuel P. Huntington, a person Odom believed to be "unexcelled" in tough and sound reasoning on strategic relationships. As in the earlier files, the predominant subjects in the personal correspondence are conferences covering various aspects of the intelligence field and curricula for training classes. Again, the daily logs for 1981-1988 add descriptive detail and insightful commentary on each day's activity. Further explanations of Odom's views on United States and Soviet foreign policy, approaches to developments in military strategy, and the current role of intelligence in the modern army and in international affairs can be found in the articles and speeches in the Speeches and Writings File.
The Addition series contains several notebooks of Odom's personal notes on policy discussions pertaining to the Persian Gulf situation at meetings of the Special Coordination Committee in 1980 and an additional notebook relating to meetings of the Policy Review Committee and National Security Council in August 1978 that resulted in Presidential Directive #41. The addition also includes a narrative depicting Odom's role in the smuggling of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's papers out of the Soviet Union and their subsequent return to the author, several Solzhenitsyn letters to Odom, and photocopies of Solzhenitsyn's passports, medals, and personal documents.
A Formerly Classified series contains declassified documents that had previously been part of the Classified series.
Correspondents in Part I of the Odom Papers include Anne Legendre Armstrong, Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, George Frost Kennan, Eugene C. Meyer, Edward L. Rowny, John W. Warner, and John Adams Wickham.
Part II
Part II of the Odom Papers is much larger and broader in scope. A major focus of this segment is Odom’s work and activities following his retirement from the United States Army in 1988, but it also documents aspects of his earlier life and military career not covered in Part I. The papers in Part II are arranged in the following series: Personal File, Office File, Speeches and Writings, Subject File, Photographs, Classified, Oversize, and Digital Files.
The Personal File includes family and other personal correspondence, diaries, military records, and childhood memorabilia. Among the correspondence in the family papers are letters that Odom wrote to his parents chronicling his activities and thoughts for over thirty years. They detail his experience as a cadet at the United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., his military service in Germany and Vietnam, his graduate studies at Columbia University, and his assignment in the Soviet Union as assistant army attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow. Odom’s diaries date from a later period. While they are not daily accounts, the entries offer Odom’s reflections on events, issues, and the people he dealt with professionally and personally when he served as the army’s chief of staff for intelligence and as the director of the National Security Agency during the Ronald Reagan administration. They also reveal his continued focus on foreign policy after he retired from the military. His personal and professional relationship with Zbigniew Brzezinski is featured throughout. Among the many topics covered in his diaries are Odom’s connection to the Iran-Contra Affair, his travel to Russia and the former Soviet republics, and his public opposition to the Iraq War, 2003-2011.
The Office File is the largest series in Part II and consists of files maintained at the Hudson Institute pertaining to Odom’s work as director of national security studies at this policy research organization in the period following his retirement from the military. The files also document Odom’s writing projects, speaking engagements, membership on advisory boards, service on panels and working groups, contacts with members of Congress and government officials, media appearances, and work as an adjunct professor. A large alphabetical file is comprised of files on organizations, people, projects, publications, and topics, as well as correspondence files for each letter of the alphabet. Copies of newsletters prepared by a number of organizations in the 1990s provide updates on developments in Russia and the former Soviet republics. A section called “correspondence regarding books, articles, and appearances” provides reactions to Odom’s criticism of the Iraq War. Correspondence files relating to Odom’s teaching at Georgetown University and Yale University are filed in this series. Course lectures and other material from his work there are found in the Subject File series. Other segments of the Office File include appointment books, a chronological file of letters sent with related material, files relating to speaking engagements and related activities, and administrative travel files.
Odom’s Speeches and Writings include published articles and unpublished writings, book drafts, his doctoral dissertation, speeches and remarks, interviews, and Congressional testimony relating to aspects of U.S. foreign policy and strategy, U.S. military affairs, Soviet and Russian politics, the Soviet military, and intelligence. Spanning more than forty-five years, Odoms’ speeches and writings cover the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the Post-Cold War era. Many of his later writings and remarks focus on his opposition to the Iraq War.
The Subject File is a compilation of files pertaining to several aspects of Odom’s life and activities as well as topics of professional interest to him. Included are files documenting his education at the United States Military Academy and his graduate studies at Columbia University. Additional United States Military Academy files concern his later work as a Associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences. Items relating to Odom’s teaching experience in the years after he retired from the military include class lectures for the courses that Odom taught at Yale University from 1989-2008 on Soviet politics, Russian politics, and U.S. national security policy. His lectures comment on events surrounding the dissolution of the Soviet Union that occurred during this period. Topical files made up of writings by others and research material on intelligence issues, Russia, Soviet politics, and the Soviet and Russian military, and a grouping of Russian language material dating from the 1920s to 2002 are also in the Subject File. Files pertaining to a number of Odom’s military duty assignments, writings that mention him, and materials from conferences he attended can also be found here.
The Photographs series is comprised of official photographs, personal snapshots, slides, and photograph albums. Many of the photographs from Odom’s various military duty assignments and foreign travel complement files elsewhere in the collection. These include photographs that Odom took in Germany when assigned to the United States liaison mission to Soviet forces in Potsdam, in Vietnam while he was deployed there during the war, and in Moscow when he was assistant army attaché at the U.S. embassy. Other photos from the Soviet Union include those taken when Odom was an observer for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of Soviet military maneuvers near Minsk. The photograph albums document official events and international visits.
The Digital Files series is comprised of files taken from disks that came with the Odom Papers. Many of them mirror the contents of the paper files. Among the material available only in digital form are Odom's diary entries for the years 2003, 2004, and 2007, and files relating to his books Fixing Intelligence(2003) and America's Inadvertent Empire (2004). The latter book was co-authored by Robert Dujarric. Dujarrics's email, correspondence, memoranda, and spreadsheets document the research study that was the precursor to the book. Sets of backup fiolders document the range and focus of Odom's work during the last decade of his life as well as Robert Dujarric's activities at the Hudson Institute, particularly his work with Odom. While the files were created in the period 1988-2008, they include some scans of documents that date from an earlier time. These include scans of Russian language documents from the Soviet Union dating from the 1940s through the 1980s (DIGITAL ID: mss77198_031) and some of Odom's earlier articles and speeches. A grouping of email files is currently unproccesed and unavailable.