Post date: Aug 22, 2013 11:33:5 AM
Final installment of tapes from the Nixon White House offers listeners a "view" from the Oval Office.
YORBA LINDA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (AUGUST 21, 2013) (REUTERS) - The final installment of White House conversations that were secretly recorded by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s were released on Wednesday (August 21), offering up a batch of tapes mainly highlighting domestic and foreign policy issues.
The 340 hours of conversations cover a three-month period from April 9 to July 12, 1973, the day before the existence of Nixon's taping system was revealed by presidential aide Alexander Butterfield in testimony before a U.S. Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate scandal.Besides their historical significance, the recordings provide listeners a chance "to be there," explained Gregory Cumming, the Supervisory Archivist at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.
"I always think it is fascinating in the President's own words, what he is thinking about other presidential leaders," said Cumming. "That is what you get here, you get his unvarnished thoughts and his interaction with someone like Brezhnev. It is very interesting and I think it is very important for scholars to hear the discussion of what is going on in the Oval Office with these very important leaders."
Nixon resigned from office in August 1974, facing almost certain impeachment over the involvement of his staff and campaign team in an attempt to bug his Democratic opponents' offices at theWatergate complex and their efforts to cover it up.
By then, the White House taping system, installed by Nixon in 1971, had been dismantled, apparently on the orders of either Nixon himself or his then-chief of staff, Alexander Haig.
But never-before-heard material from the latest batch of 94 tapes made available through theRichard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, administered by the National Archives in Nixon's birthplace of Yorba Linda, California, deals mostly with subjects other than Watergate.
They include conversations related to such Cold War-era events as the Vietnam peace settlement and the return of prisoners of war.
The voice-activated system also captured the 1973 Oval Office meeting between Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the only summit-level meeting ever recorded by a U.S. presidential taping network.
While the audio quality on many of the recordings are poor, some are crystal clear. A 1973 taped telephone conversation from then California Governor Ronald Reagan to the President provides an insider's prospective on the politics of the day.
For visitors like Rita Biddle of Lansing, Michigan, the tapes offer a chance to revisit history.
"It sort of puts you there at the time," said Biddle. "It kind of gives you the fly on the wall viewpoint."
Nixon's taping system, known only to a few aides before it was disclosed, extended not only to the Oval Office but also to the White House Cabinet Room, the Lincoln Sitting Room in the mansion's living quarters, Nixon's office at the Executive Office Building next door and the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland.
Nixon was not the first president to secretly record his White House conversations. A certain amount of taping was done by each of his predecessors going back to Franklin Roosevelt.