Reading bureaucratic correspondence is no one's idea of fun. But on an otherwise unremarkable day at the British National Archives, I came upon a curious item: a 1972 diplomatic cable from the British embassy in Muscat, Oman, recounting a conversation with the American charge d'affaires. The subject was a certain Robert B. Anderson, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's onetime treasury secretary, who had recently set up shop in Oman.
What caught my attention was not what the American diplomat said about Anderson, but what he refused to say. He would not dare utter Anderson's name, referring to him only as "the man we don't mention in the cables." For the moment, I had to leave it aside, though I was careful to scrawl "look into Anderson" in my notes for a potential paper down the line.
