Terrorist Attack Triggers
Long-Term Difficulties

���After we moved out, we had a lot of people . . . in the Pentagon
. . . who were asking when we were going to come back in the building, what���s happening. They really wanted to know, and we had nothing we could tell them.������Kathryn Earnest

(American Libraries Editor and Publisher Leonard Kniffel interviewed Kathryn Earnest, former director of the Pentagon Library, on October 13, 2002. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. The Pentagon Library is the flagship library and the corporate library for the Department of Defense; it serves all workers in the Pentagon.)

American Libraries: Last November, you told me that the majority of the collection at the Pentagon Library had been saved. What happened to that collection between September 11, 2001, and the time you retired in May 2002?

Kathryn Earnest: Around the first week in December, it was determined that the Pentagon Library had to move out of the Pentagon. The space that we were supposed to have moved into in October had been given away to another Army organization.

AL: Decided by whom? Were you told why?

Earnest: On the first day [after the attack], it was said that the senior principals, which would be the generals, and the secretaries of, and their immediate staff would be the people staying in the Pentagon. That didn���t go over too well with the senior officials. Some senior officials decided that they wanted their entire staffs to stay in the Pentagon. So then the decision was that the war-fighters would stay in the Pentagon, and those things that were not part of the war-fighting would be moved out.

The Pentagon Library works for the administrative assistant to the secretary of the Army. Basically, the Office of the Administrative Assistant does things like runs the motor pool, the library, takes care of passports and visas for all the people in the Pentagon. They take care of audiovisual. It���s a housekeeping type of organization.

And the Pentagon Library functions as the departmental library for the entire Pentagon, for all the services in the Pentagon���Army, Navy, Air Force, JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff], DOD [Department of Defense]. So we have a broad spectrum of clientele. At that point, nobody really said anything. . . .

Meanwhile, the preservation effort was going on down in the library. My chief of Research and Information Services, Geri Knicke, had gone through all the efforts to talk to the folks at the Library of Congress and various agencies about how to go about the preservation. She found the money, she got the company to come in, and she was basically honchoing all of that. Around, as I say, on December first is when they finally came to the determination. The collection had been preserved. We were basically . . . some of us were back in the library, and some of us, we still had offices down in Crystal City [in the Taylor Building, in the Crystal City section of Arlington, Virginia] also.

AL: But not in the damaged area of the Pentagon.

Earnest: The A [innermost] Ring that the Pentagon Library was in did not have anything but water damage. No smoke damage. So that ring was fine, and during the month of November, you could literally walk out the back door of the library and you could look across this expanse where they had literally taken the whole building down, the E, D, and C rings, and we had the A and B rings. So I kind of knew in the back of my mind something was going to happen, and we were really, in that ring, the only activity still there. And the Pentagon renovation people already had contracts out. I knew that the contractor was going to come in and say, ���Hey, why are these people still here,��� and that���s literally what they did . . . on the first of December and in a week, they moved us, lock, stock and barrel, out of the Pentagon. That included all of our furniture, shelving, all of my wonderful wood shelving.

AL: But that was ostensibly in the name of . . .

Earnest: The renovation. . . . They needed to finish renovating all of that area. So they moved us . . . to the third floor of the Taylor Building, so all of the materials, microfiche reader-printers, all of that sort of thing are all on the third floor of the Taylor Building. The staff was on the 12th floor . . . or the 11th floor . . . so we were separated from our collection.

AL: That seems odd.

Earnest: Well, the Taylor Building itself was under renovation. When they hadn���t rented it out at that point, the Army took over various parts of it, and they had been negotiating with the building and GSA [General Services Administration] for moving into this building for this entire year. As of last week, I heard we still don���t have a lease on that building.

We had suggested that there was a possibility that there was an old bookstore in the Pentagon, that we move people in there. And originally nobody wanted to listen to that. Eventually, when someone else above us came up with that idea, the idea flew. The library staff thought of it originally, but when we thought of it, it didn���t fly, but when somebody else thought of it, it did fly. So right now, they do have a small reference center in the Pentagon . . . on what we call the concourse, which is a good location. It���s right next to the card shop, the bank, all the other things that people go to. It���s close to the cafeteria. . . .

We started opening in April. I had hoped to have it open for National Library Week, but it didn���t really fully get operational until May. [I said to the staff,] I feel like this is a time where we can learn how to deliver our services differently. We���ve always been very customer-oriented, very one-on-one; we do an awful lot of that sort of reference work. Now we were going to have to do it using more of our Web page and doing things more telephonically. It meant that we had to go down and get the materials for our people back in the Pentagon, and then we had to find ways to get the materials back and forth. It [was] a lot easier after May, when we had the Reference Center.

AL: Were the people who use your services satisfied with that arrangement?

Earnest: No. . . . Prior to our move out, we had had a meeting with my boss and another gentleman. Mr. Kirklighter [Pentagon Director of Administrative Services Fritz Kirklighter] was my boss at that time, and Mr. Leon Alexander was the head of the reorganization that was going on within the Department of, well in the Office of the Administrative Assistant, and he met with some of the historians. . . . That was a very contentious meeting. . . . The customers wanted the library back in, and they were afraid that it wasn���t going to be there, and these particular customers were historians. They used the library quite a bit.

These were Pentagon people, and there was all kind of political things that were going on . . . reorganization that was going on to combine the staffs of the chief of staff of the Army and the Office of the Administrative Assistant so that . . . there was a lot of turmoil in the building already before 9/11, from people wondering whether or not they were going to have their jobs and that sort of thing. It didn���t affect the library, but it was all part of this political thing that was going on, and when this general said, ���I want all of my staff, 300 some, in the building,��� the others said: ���Well, if he���s going to have his, I���m going to have mine.��� It was very disheartening. . . .

After we moved out, we had a lot of people, a lot of our speechwriters, a lot of historians, the lawyers . . . in the Pentagon
. . . who were asking when we were going to come back in the building, what���s happening. They really wanted to know, and we had nothing we could tell them. I knew from listening to various people (who were not really communicating well with me, either) that we were moving out and that they wanted us to build the library down in the Taylor Building.

AL: Were other parts of the Pentagon going through this or was this unique to the library?

Earnest: Space-wise, the Army was the one that was hit the most, and so they were the ones that really had to find space to put their people while the cleanup was going on. So they were put out in various, different locations. The Office of the Administrative Assistant had been going through an issue of wanting to move all of [its] people . . . out of the Pentagon. I very much disagree with that item because everything . . . if you���re not where you���re customers are, it���s a problem. And yet some of the senior people felt that, well, the customers will come to us. That���s not necessarily true. Some of them will. Some of them will find other ways.

AL: What���s the process for disagreeing or agreeing with decisions like that? Were you, as director of the library, given a voice in these decisions?

Earnest: No. It was all decided. I was not part of the decision-making process. I was totally left out of that.

AL: But you did speak up.

Earnest: Yes.

AL: You spoke up and it fell on deaf ears?

Earnest: Deaf ears. It was not what they had in their plan.

AL: What were you told was the problem that this was solving? Was it simply the space for the generals who wanted their entire staffs on the premises?

Earnest: I think so. Yeah, pretty much. And I think in the back of my mind I had felt that once those spaces were freed up, when those people moved into the space they were supposed to be in, that the space that the Pentagon Library was supposed to move into would be taken care of. In the whole renovation process, there had never been, to my knowledge, any decision to ever have the Pentagon Library out of the Pentagon. . . .

When they first started the renovation process, the library was shrunk into a space in Wedge Two [of the Pentagon]. When Wedge One was supposed to be finished, they were going to flip us on the other side of the wall, and that���s where we were going to be. They started working on the plans, and they had things like huge heating rooms and computer spaces, which were going to be right in the middle of the library, and once we started doing the planning on that and I started pointing out the problems with that, I went away on vacation and came back and found out that they had found a whole new space for us and that was the space we were supposed to move into in Wedge One finally. And that���s the library we were planning . . . up until 9/11.

AL: Can you describe your pre-9/11 staff for me?

Earnest: Oh, shoot. (Laughter.) . . . Basically I had a technical services staff, primarily with librarians, cataloguers, acquisitions librarians, and we had technicians who did binding and cataloguing. We had a systems management group, which took care of all of our systems requirements so that we were not dependent on other activities primarily to provide us with our computers and that sort of thing. They took care of all of that for us. They also handled all of our financial and budgeting and that sort of thing; that was in that division. And then I had the research and information services branch.

In 1992, we had a staff of 42, so we had made this major cut between 1991 to now going from 42 down to 27 . . . and so I had librarians who were being reference librarians, some of the librarians who were being reference and collection development. Had a very heavy interlibrary loan component as well as regular circulation. Had a classified section, which basically had closed-still had the classified documents, but we were not actively soliciting more classified documents at that point. And I had a military documents collection in that we had Army regulations going back to the very beginning of the Army, and those documents were used very heavily.

AL: From what you���ve observed, is the library being phased out in some way?

Earnest: In the summer of 2001, we had a new boss come on board, Mr. Kirklighter, and he had just graduated from the Army War College. . . . He wanted to modernize the library and yet I could not get him to tell me what his vision was.

AL: It was not modern already?

Earnest: Well, we thought it was. (Laughter.) And we thought we were planning for an even more modern library in the new facility.

AL: Is modernize a euphemism for phase out?

Earnest: No. . . . Basically, I think his premise was that it���s all on the Internet and we didn���t need to have all of those books . . . [or] all of those old documents, that we should put them all for historians someplace else. The two places that the Army goes for history is, well, three places, four places: Pentagon Library; the National Archives, where you can���t find anything (and they���ll say that, too); . . . the Military History Institute up in Carlisle [Pennsylvania], which has a major backlog, and they are in the process of moving into a new facility so it���s going to be very difficult to get materials out of there for a while; and then you have the Center for Military History that���s over at Ft. McNair [in Washington], and they have a very small library. . . . Our historians who are in the Pentagon and our lawyers who are in the Pentagon, they want the material right there where they can get it, so they were very used to being able to get all of this material very easily from the library. All they���d have to do is walk downstairs.

When [Kirklighter] came on board, Ann Parham, the Army Librarian, had a lot of different projects that we were looking to do which I wanted the Pentagon Library to be part of, and I would brief him on these things, and after every conversation was the comment, ���Well, we have to modernize the library.��� And I would say, ���Well, what is it that you think we need to be doing?��� And I would never get a response other than, ���We���ve got to modernize the library.��� And when we had the meeting in October with the historians it was, ostensibly, his idea was that we would send all the historical materials up to Carlisle and that we didn���t need to have the rest.

AL: If you could make one point to Mr. Kirklighter right now, what would it be?

Earnest: I obviously can���t. Part of the reason I���m retired is that right after the meeting in which some words were . . . he expressed some sentiment about librarians, two weeks later he was taken and given a new position, and April was when I was told that he was going to be our boss again, I just simply said, ���I���m not going to deal with it.��� And that���s when I decided to retire. Obviously, anything that I say is not being listened to.

AL: How did you advise the staff?

Earnest: Basically that we needed to keep on doing what our customers asked us to do, and [that] it was going to be harder on us to do it because we had the distance of getting the materials back and forth. . . . One of the things that we would have been doing in the new library is that we were going to start training our users how to use the databases better.

AL: Are they going to replace you?

Earnest: Supposedly they will. They will go through the Army career program. There are people out there that are interested in the job. Since I retired, well, since 9/11, about half the staff has left.

AL: Are they being replaced?

Earnest: No. Some of them are, but the other thing that���s ongoing in the Army���well, not only in the Army but in the federal government���is recruitment problems. . . . [The] Army has come up with this recruitment program that quite frankly has more stumbling blocks in it than is helping the situation or correcting any of the errors that were going on before. It���s made things much worse. So we had not brought on too many more people. We also had a hiring freeze during that period. . . . When I left at the end of May, I had all of the recruitment actions all ready to go. All that had to be done is send them to personnel when the hiring freeze was lifted.

AL: Is there anything that you would have done differently as you look back?

Earnest: I���m a pretty low-key person, and I kept thinking that if I work with my administration and try to keep them informed about the library and its staff, that we could work together. We always had before, but after 9/11 the whole feeling within the organization changed.

AL: From what to what?

Earnest: It was very adversarial. A lot of things that were going on had to do with the renovation, too, and they were like the 500-pound elephant. What the renovation people said, if they wanted something to happen, it happened, and if you didn���t like it, too bad. It was just a steamroller. I just kind of feel like the library was caught here in the middle between the Pentagon renovation people . . . [and] the Administrative Assistant���s Office, which was also going through its changes with cutting part of our staff and all the other changes that were going on. I just felt like we were caught right there in the middle.

AL: Are we going to see the library pretty much dissipate the way the USIA [U.S. Information Agency] libraries did, where somebody was put in front of a computer and it was called a research center?

Earnest: I���d like to think it���s not. There���s still people out there that are fighting very hard to have the library back in the building. . . . We���d been tossing the idea around for a number of years about having a users��� council, but we���d never had the time to get it operational.

AL: Almost like a friends group?

Earnest: Yeah, a friends group, and I had one of my reference librarians researching if federal librarians had done this before, etc., and that was another project when we get in the new space that we���ll think about. So there���s an informal group out there that is working to make sure that the library stays visible, that this issue stays visible. This whole administration is so different from the last. Someone told me in a discussion that they were having [at a] meeting of federal librarians that a lot of the libraries, everything used to be very open, but now things are very closed up. People aren���t talking as much as they used to.

AL: Is there anything you���d like to say for the record that I have not asked you about?

Earnest: I don���t really want to have any axes to grind. I was really sorry; I feel like I let them down when I left. There���s an awful lot of healing that needs to go on in that building, and I didn���t see that I was going to heal. There���s a lot of anger, and I kept thinking I got rid of it.

AL: It isn���t the way you wanted to leave.

Earnest: No.