'Confidential' interview with Justice Roberts discovered in BYU Special Collections

"I was really just interested in Pusey because he was a Mormon and had won a Pulitzer Prize and was from Utah and was a journalist," Carter said. "I was looking for anything to find out about him for research and my journalism classes. … I'm always looking to find examples who are good journalists and have ethical standards and are good models.

"When I found (the notebook) and saw that it was confidential, I knew it was important. It really was lucky in finding it."

"It's just a marvelous, enormously important find," said Richard D. Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor and Supreme Court history expert, in a BYU press release about the find. "When Professor Carter sent the notes to me, I had a lot of work I should have been doing, but instead I read through the notes with great interest. It was just fascinating. I'm jealous because I wish I had found them."

For Carter, the find was more than simply something extra to share in his journalism classes, it was a piece of important history that deserved to be shared with the public.

"It kind of took me back to that day; his cursive is elegantly written on the pages and I was taken back to the time period of the 1930s and 1940s," Carter said. "From formerly being a journalist, I could picture the scene of the interview with former Justice Roberts in the Willard Hotel, with him taking notes … it was kind of a fun experience to be transported."

Adams always suspected the Pusey notes contained valuable information and he is still categorizing the general contents of each of the boxes.

"We have only just scratched the surface of this collection," Adams said.

Pusey grew up in Woodruff, Utah. He wrote for the Deseret News while a student at the University of Utah, then for the Washington Post for more than 45 years. He passed away in 1985.