Jerome Library officials refused the chance to permanently house a 30,000-page collection of original Vietnam War trial papers in October 2002.

The Col. Henry Tufts collection included thousands of original documents from such felony investigations as the My Lai massacre and the Tiger Force platoon, as well as other war crimes committed during the Vietnam War.

Papers from the Tiger Force investigation led three Toledo Blade reporters to expose the platoon’s war crimes – and win the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

Blade Science Editor Michael Woods offered the documents to the Library’s Center for Archival Collections, knowing that other libraries were tremendously interested in the Vietnam War-era papers.

Woods had inherited the documents from his friend, Col. Henry Tufts, the first head of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, who oversaw every felony trial of the Vietnam War, lawfully keeping thousands of classified papers.

Tufts later declassified the papers, and they sat in his home in Virginia until his death in 2002.

Due to his close ties with the University, which gave him an honorary degree in 1992, Woods picked the Jerome Library Archive as his first choice to house his inherited collection.

When the Jerome Library refused his donation, Woods was astonished.

“I was dumbfounded,” he said. “I was aware at that point of how willing the Library of Congress was to have the documents. I thought this would be a boon for the University.”

But instead of driving to the Jerome Library archive to research the Tufts papers, the reporters had to make the longer trip to the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection.

“I think it was Bowling Green’s loss and Michigan’s gain that this happened,” said former Blade reporter Michael Sallah, adding that if the Jerome Library had taken the documents, he would have been spared a lot of time behind the wheel.

“The University of Michigan jumped at the opportunity to get these records, because they knew they were valuable,” Sallah said. “There are no other records like these that exist, other than copies. These are the originals of the My Lai investigation, as well as the Tiger Force case.”

University History Professor Gary Hess believes the Tufts documents would have been an invaluable research tool for University students – and would have put BGSU on the map for national scholars interested in these Vietnam War-era papers.

“I think we would have benefited by having documents that would be valuable for student research projects,” Hess said. “In addition to student projects, the papers would have been valuable to scholars.”

When Woods contacted the University and detailed the contents of the documents, he received an e-mail from Library Dean Lorraine Harricombe, which said the documents would be, “reviewed – within the framework of our special collections including our archival collections, and policies.”

When he heard nothing more from the University for several days, Woods sent another e-mail to Harricombe.

The Library Dean replied, saying she had just returned from a meeting where the “final decision” was made to decline the documents.

“The content of this collection falls outside the scope of our mission,” Harricombe stated in her e-mail to Woods. “It was our archivist’s opinion that the collection would best be placed in the U.S. Army Archives.”

Vice President of the University, Linda Dobb, who oversees the University Libraries, said she was not informed the Tufts documents had been offered to the University in fall 2002.

In speaking to Sallah, Dobb commented that if the reporter ever needed a place to store documents, University Libraries would be willing to house his research papers.

He replied that University Libraries had already been offered the papers.

“I was not in the loop,” Dobb said. “I did all this research about why we didn’t have these papers. Nobody in the Library seemed to have remembered about these papers.”

Those in the loop were Harricombe and Ann Bowers, who was the University Archivist at the time.

Harricombe said the University legal counsel was also contacted for advice regarding the documents.

Nancy Footer, legal counsel at the time for BGSU, is now vice chancellor and general counsel at the University of North Texas System.

According to Sallah, Footer said the documents could lead to legal liability for the University if the Blade was sued for anything the reporters printed in articles using information from the documents.

Footer did not return phone calls from The BG News for this story.

But for Harricombe, the more important issue for her was how well the documents would fit into the archive, not legal aspects of the acquisition.

Harricombe said she took Woods’ e-mail to Bowers to see if the Tufts Documents would complement the archive’s other papers, adding that Dobb was not deliberately excluded from making the decision.

“Lorraine sent me the series of e-mails and then we talked,” Bowers said. “There wasn’t any doubt, I think, in either of our minds that this was an extremely, extremely important and valuable collection.”

At the time, however, the documents did not seem to fit with the archive’s mission to house documents with ties to northwest Ohio.

“It didn’t fit well with our collecting mission,” Bowers said. “This was a collection that needed to be in an institution that had a lot of staffing and support so it could be processed right away.”

Surprised by the University’s decision, Woods said the University of Michigan was his next choice to keep the documents, because of its relatively close proximity to Toledo.

“I wanted my company – the Toledo Blade – to have easy access to the documents,” he said.

In fact, Woods stipulated that the Blade would have exclusive access to the documents for the first six months they were housed in Michigan’s Labadie Collection, to give Blade reporters the scoop on any new information contained in the papers.

“There was at least one Pulitzer Prize in those papers,” Woods said.

Kathleen Dow, head of archival processing for Michigan’s Labadie Collection, watched as Sallah studied the Tufts documents day after day.

“The reporter [Sallah] came and spent quite a long time with them [the Tufts Documents],” Dow said. “I think because the Labadie Collection accepted this collection and made it available for the public – we are part of the history of exposing what was happening during the Vietnam War.”

Harricombe and Bowers said they would have been more willing to accept the documents if they had been offered after the Blade’s articles were published.

Hess wishes those who decided to refuse the documents had considered the papers’ potential.

“The papers are important because they force Americans to confront American warfare at its worst,” Hess said. “It’s hard for me to understand why the University would not have grabbed the papers.”