WASHINGTON -- As former Vice President Dan Quayle might say, we were unhappy campers, "we" being the reporters and camera operators forced to wait outside the National Archives Building on Thursday morning for permission to enter and sign in, please.

		Michael McGough is an editor at large in the Post-Gazette's National Bureau (mmcgough@nationalpress.com).

Another day, another disgorgement from the White House files of John G. Roberts, twenty-something associate counsel to President Ronald Reagan and future Supreme Court nominee. On Monday, many of the same reporters had shown up at the Archives for an earlier release of Roberts materials, but those files had been conveniently copied on to a CD-ROM that we could take back to our offices and pop into our D drives.

Thursday's papers -- all 38,000-plus of them -- were just that, papers, and we knew we would have to elbow one another for custody of one of 70 boxes of Roberts lore. That wasn't the only reason we were grumpy. We weren't just looking for a story, we were the story.

Ever in search of "visuals," TV networks had dispatched more cameras to the Archives than were trained on the anti-climactic Al Capone vault opened by Geraldo Rivera.

Even the print media thought the print media were newsworthy. The Washington Post sent its quota of three reporters to paw through the Roberts files, but it also sent columnist (and former Post-Gazette intern) Dana Milbank to work the crowd for an amusing article about the onslaught at the Archives. I just hoped he wouldn't compare us all to "Star Wars" nerds lined up outside the multiplex. (He did anyway.)

When we were admitted to this second floor reading room, the crankiness quotient increased. Because there was only one copy of every document, the National Archives people had decided to hold a lottery to determine who would have first pick of the boxes.

With the aid of an index, we already knew that some Roberts files were more equal than others: Everyone had his or her eye on Box 51, containing two files marked "Specter, Senator" (Hmm, what did young Roberts say about the man who two decades later would preside at his confirmation hearings?); nobody wanted to get stuck with Box 2, with five folders dealing with "Agency Reports on Use of Government Vehicles."

The drawing commenced, and an archivist pulled out of the box the index card marked .... "People For the American Way," a liberal interest group, not a news organization. The unspoken reaction of seething journalists was "Who let them in?" Reporters defend the public's right to know, but often what we really mean is the public's right to have us know.

The collective mood eventually, improved, and by afternoon the ransacking of Roberts' files was marked by a sort of "Front Page" camaraderie, with representatives of different organizations making copies of their best finds for the use of our colleagues.

Still, I was happy to abandon the archives to return to the Post-Gazette Washington Bureau to write my story. Even if the logistics of the Roberts release had been more user-friendly, I wouldn't have enjoyed the experience.

Part of the unpleasantness, I confess, has to do with reading someone else's mail, even if that someone is a government official who knew his memos and musings would become part of the historical record.

The first time I dipped into the Roberts files, at the National Archives' satellite facility at College Park, Md., I had to subdue the feeling that I was snooping. How would I feel, I thought, if someone traced my paper trail from two decades ago, pausing to chuckle over frail witticisms directed at co-workers? I don't think I'd like it.

John Roberts, on the other hand, has to like it or lump it. He is now enduring the exposure not only of his long-ago comments on substantive matters -- like the Arlen Specter crime bill he ridiculed in a 1983 memo that turned up this week -- but also his attempts at humor. That's a small price, some might say, for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, but it's not one most of us would like to pay.

Invasions of privacy aside, I've never been a fan of filing systems.

Some of that file-o-phobia probably traces back to my summer as teenage clerk in the Post-Gazette library -- or "morgue," as we used to call it. (The morgue, you see, is where "dead" stories, those already published, ended up.)

Unlike our present computerized data base, the morgue of the late 1960s consisted mostly of paper, and my job was to file clippings of recently published stories by subject matter in little brown envelopes. The filing system of that era was eccentric, and occasionally a story intended for the Moon (Township) envelope was misfiled in the envelope marked Moon (Planet).

Those days are long gone, but my aversion to filing endures -- as a glance at my messy desk will demonstrate.

Don't blame me, blame my personality type. Twenty years ago, when a seat on the Supreme Court was still a glimmer in the eye of John Roberts, I was among a group of Post-Gazette editors who were administered the Myers-Briggs personality test. The results categorized me as an INTP.

That's short for Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceptive, but it also could stand for "I Never Toss Paper." According to a reference work on Myers-Briggs personality types, "the work space of the INTP is generally cluttered with papers, books, objects or prototypes that are important to their interests and thoughts." So important that we can't bring ourselves to throw them out or consign them to a file drawer.

Yet even INTPs have to file occasionally, and when I left Pittsburgh two years ago for the newspaper's Washington Bureau I had to clean out 18 years' worth of clippings and correspondence so that Tom Waseleski, my non-sloppy successor as editorial page editor, could make those file drawers his own.

It made for quite a pile of paper, even if you don't count all the Supreme Court opinions and letters to the editor from Dr. Cyril Wecht.

Rather than lug these "archives" down to Washington, I arranged to have them stored on the fifth floor of the Post-Gazette building. Fortunately, no posse of reporters will be descending on 34 Boulevard of the Allies to sleuth out what I wrote about Arlen Specter in 1983.