Republican Steve Schiff – congressman, district attorney and U.S. Air Force Reserve colonel, died in 1998. His papers are now open for researchers at the Center for Southwest Research at UNM. They reflect a serious and conscientious public servant who took on a number of tough projects along with one of New Mexico’s biggest mysteries.
Photo: Steve Schiff
In 1993 Schiff wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin asking for his help in explaining events in central New Mexico in early July 1947. Schiff’s letter outlines the public furor over debris found on a ranch near Corona, N.M. followed by a public announcement, then retraction of a press release on the crash and recovery of a “flying disc.”
The brief dismissive letter he got back led him on a multiyear quest to find an adequate answer from the U.S. government. His papers document efforts to determine what happened and what federal agencies might have information about the Roswell incident. Schiff wrote the original letter at constituents’ urging and was skeptical that the incident was anything other than a weather balloon, as the Air Force eventually claimed. But after years of trying to get satisfactory answers from the federal government, Schiff was eventually forced to conclude that the Air Force was hiding something about the incident.
Arrangement and description of the collection was done by graduate student Max Fitzpatrick, the Dennis Chavez Fellow funded by the Center for Regional Studies. Fitzpatrick said he was interested in how Schiff handled conflicts of conscience. He said, “Schiff didn’t support the war in Bosnia and voted against it, but he also volunteered to go to Iraq and Bosnia as a JAG attorney.”
He says the collection documents how the political position of parties shifts when they are not in power, but throughout his public service Schiff was always a strong protector of civil liberties.
In addition to correspondence on the Roswell incident, the collection contains information about the effort to save Kirtland Air Force Base from the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission’s recommendation, and correspondence about creation of the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque.
The collection itself is divided into sections. Biographical information about Schiff and his staff is included in his personal papers. Material about Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs, and the letters concerning the Roswell incident are included in the issues section. The legislation section has drafts of bills, newspaper articles and reports about the legislation. This section includes information about work Schiff did on health care fraud.
The committee work section holds material from hearings, correspondence, reports and news clippings concerning work on specific issues. Congressman Schiff served on the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, known as the House Ethics Committee, and portions of the collection deal with a case involving former Speaker of the House of Representative Newt Gingrich.
The communications section of the collection includes information about his reelection campaigns, media relations strategies, news releases and information about issues of interest to his constituents.
University Libraries provides online detailed descriptions of the Schiff collection, along with hundreds of other collections that document the history of New Mexico at: Rocky Mountain Online Archive.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at June 18, 2009 04:41 PM