U.S. OKs Plan for Release of Nixon Material

The government cleared the way today for making public 40 million pages of Richard M. Nixon’s White House papers and 4,000 hours of taped conversations that have been impounded since Nixon resigned in disgrace as President on Aug. 9, 1974.

Jill Merrill, spokeswoman for the National Archives, said tapes and documents already screened by archivists can be released this spring unless new barriers are erected.

“We have 2 million pages ready to go,” she said, adding that more will be systematically made public as archivists finish processing the files, weeding out materials whose release could affect national security and purely personal materials, such as recorded conversations between Nixon and members of his family.

When Nixon resigned he instructed government archivists to send his files to California, but a bill signed into law on Dec. 19, 1974, made the records government property and directed that they be available to public scrutiny “at the earliest reasonable date,” under regulations promulgated by the archives.

Congress found that there was “a legitimate public interest in gaining appropriate access to materials of the Nixon presidency which are of general historical significance.”