Earlier this year, as the Enron debacle began to unfold, the company's accounting firm revealed that its employees had destroyed a "significant but undetermined number" of Enron-related documents, either by shredding paper files or by deleting electronic ones. Actually, the firm revealed that its employees had sought to destroy the documents. How much destruction had in fact been achieved remained uncertain. Computer sleuths moved in quickly, looking for "fingerprints" of the missing electronic transmissions on hard drives and backup tapes; it seems likely that many of the electronic documents have not been fully erased and will be recovered. Some of the shredded documents from Enron itself may also be recovered—a task made easier by the fact that pages were sometimes put through the shredding machines sideways, leaving individual lines of type intact. "It's impossible to destroy all copies of documents," a Washington lawyer told The Wall Street Journal. "They inevitably show up."

Commentators have already drawn many lessons from the Enron case. One that I have yet to hear mentioned is that human beings are not as good at destroying things as we think we are. Oh, we talk a good game. One of the first verbs I was taught in Latin class was "devastare," "to lay waste," because it was needed to describe so much of Roman foreign policy. During the Cold War the nuclear strategy of both sides was governed by the concept of "mutual assured destruction." Roget's Thesaurus provides three times as many synonyms for "destroy" as it does for "create." In the United States, of course, destruction is an opportunity for commerce. Some 600 companies specialize in rendering documents into cinders or confetti. They have a trade association (the National Association for Information Destruction) and a code of ethics.

There is no denying that human beings have laid waste to a great many things in the course of time: cities, species, vast amounts of cultural heritage. What seems more remarkable, though, is how often attempts at destruction go awry.

On the eve of the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran, in 1979, American officials desperately fed secret documents into the embassy's paper shredders. Over the next several years, while waiting for satellite dishes and Baywatch to arrive, the Iranians painstakingly stitched the documents back together. They ultimately published the reconstituted intelligence files in some sixty volumes, under the overarching title Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den.

During the controversy over the Iran-contra affair, in 1986, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North attempted to erase all the relevant e-mail messages on his computer; he repeatedly pressed the DELETE button, thinking that he was thereby expunging the messages. "Wow, were we wrong!" he later observed. North didn't know that pressing DELETE doesn't result in complete deletion. He also didn't know about the existence of a backup data-storage system.

Burial is another highly unreliable means of destruction. In the early 1980s some twenty-five boxes of documents pertaining to allegations of financial irregularities at the University of South Carolina were deposited in the Rockland County landfill. As it happens, landfills tend to mummify their contents rather than to biodegrade them. Years later investigators somehow located the documents, which remained intact and legible. Another problem with burial is that it too easily accommodates changes of heart. In 1862 the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti lost his wife, Elizabeth, to an overdose of laudanum; stricken with grief, he gathered up his unpublished poems and placed them in her coffin. Rossetti came to regret this act. Seven years later he had Elizabeth's body exhumed, and retrieved the poetry.

Historically, the most reliable means of destruction has been fire; used according to directions, it really does work. One of the grimmest episodes in the annals of combustion took place in 1835, when Thomas Carlyle asked John Stuart Mill to read a just-completed draft of the first volume of his monumental study The French Revolution. Mill took the handwritten manuscript away. Some while later he stood before Carlyle, ashen, explaining that his maid had accidentally destroyed it while lighting a fire. Carlyle received the news stoically; he told his wife afterward, "Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up. We must endeavor to hide from him how very serious this business is for us."

Fire destroyed the library at Alexandria. It has been the means favored by al Qaeda (whose hideouts are littered with incinerated evidence) and by Mrs. Warren G. Harding (who thereby obviated the need for a presidential library). It makes a frequent appearance in testamentary directives. One legal scholar has lamented that the correspondence of Benjamin Cardozo, a profoundly private man, was handled by the judge's executor "the way Warwick handled Jeanne d'Arc." Some recent losses to fire have been especially vexing. In the mid-1970s Colonel Guy Tutwiler, the commander of the University of Arkansas ROTC, incinerated a file relating to Bill Clinton's draft status and Clinton's (broken) promise to join the ROTC. The action was taken at Clinton's request. During the 1992 presidential campaign, when the matter surfaced, Master Sergeant Eddie Howard, who served under Tutwiler, provided an explanation that is hard to better: "One reason Colonel Tutwiler burned the file was that I think he thought it shouldn't exist."

But even fire is an imperfect disposal option. For one thing, its utter finality can be a psychological deterrent. Virgil instructed that the Aeneid be cast into the flames after his death; the Emperor Augustus couldn't bring himself to do it. Plato's Second Epistle ends with a request that the epistle be burned; obviously, the request was not honored. A letter from Jane Welsh Carlyle concludes, "Pray read all this unto yourself and burn the letter." A scholar has added this gloss: "Such an injunction is one of the surest methods of guaranteeing that a letter will not be burned."

Not only do some attempts at destruction achieve a less than satisfactory outcome; on occasion they become the cause of outright preservation. The Assyrian empire was brought down in the seventh century B.C. by an invading force of Babylonians, Scythians, and Medes. The conquerors put the great library of Ashurbanipal to the torch. Because the library's contents were written on clay tablets, the consequence was to fire the archives, as if they were so much pottery. Some 20,000 cuneiform tablets survived in the form of accidental ceramics.


In the case of ideas, an attempt to destroy them head on almost always gives them enduring life. Indifference, though, is fatal. The radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse made many unfortunate pronouncements during the 1960s, but he was on to something with the notion of "repressive tolerance"—the capacity of a laissez-faire culture like ours to disarm almost anything. Marcuse coined the phrase in the mid-1960s, right around the time when the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was helping to make the angry taunt "Burn, baby, burn!" familiar; two decades later Seale was busy promoting Barbeque'n With Bobby Seale, a collection of recipes.