The CIA's daily presidential briefings, 1961-1977

The Central Intelligence Agency has released a fascinating historical record by declassifying (most of) the daily presidential briefings that it delivered during the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations.

The CIA has published these briefings as a collection of several thousand individual PDF files. This repo provides code for downloading these files in bulk and collating them into easier-to-handle monthly collections.

Download the documents from GitHub

View and download monthly collated PDFs right here on GitHub, or just download the zipfile of the entire repo. You'll find the PDFs in docs/pdfs.

Scrape and collate them yourself

1. Requirements

   • Python 2.7 or Python 3.x
   • TQDM for friendly progress bars:

     pip install tqdm
     

2. The scripts anticipate that they'll be run in a directory with subdirectories called documents and documents/originals. If you clone this repo, they should be there, but if not you'll need to create them.

3. Run ./scrape_documents.py to download all individual PDFs to documents/originals. On a reasonably fast Internet connection this will take 10-20 minutes.

4. Run ./merge_documents.py to merge the original PDFs into monthly collections in the documents directory.

5. If you want to zip the collated documents into annual tarballs, run ./zip_briefings.sh.