Hundreds of Nixon Tapes in National Archives Left in ‘Legal Limbo’ : Biography: Former President’s alma mater, Whittier College, says oral history interviews are its exclusive property. Government disagrees and refuses to release them, even to Nixon daughters.

They are tape-recorded oral history interviews, numbering in the hundreds and containing some answers to the mystery that was Richard Nixon. But they remain under lock and key, bound up in boxes, accessible to no one.

Not even the late President’s daughters are allowed to hear them.

They can be found here, in a regional office of the National Archives. But the government has them sealed, leaving them in what the agency’s Washington spokeswoman calls “legal limbo.”

No one sees any end to the ongoing dispute that has the effect of keeping the tapes frozen. It’s a bitter rift between the archives, which says the tapes belong to federal authorities, and Whittier College, Nixon’s alma mater, which views the tapes as its exclusive property.

“That may be,” said Carmelo Richard Arena, the retired Whittier College professor who conducted the 400 interviews between 1971 and 1973, “but possession is nine-tenths of the law, and Whittier College doesn’t have possession. The feds do.”

Arena, who now lives in Chino, said the interviews were gathered from scores of relatives, friends, neighbors and childhood contemporaries of Nixon and his family.

“They include characters from all walks of life,” he said. “They’re people who knew him from the time he was born in 1913 to the time he entered politics, after leaving the Navy” in 1946.

They include an emotional conversation with Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the President’s daughter, whom Arena interviewed in the White House.

They include what Arena calls knee-slapping stories from Les Brown, as in Les Brown and his Band of Renown, who knew Nixon, the piano player, at Duke University, where the two were classmates and chums during Nixon’s law school years.

They include affectionate reminiscences from a fraternity brother and close friend of Nixon’s at Whittier College, who happened to be black.

And they include insights from numerous neighbors and relatives who say Nixon’s father--a blue-collar grocer, a converted Quaker and, by all accounts, an angry man--beat him and his siblings.

“A lot of things on the tapes would really open people’s eyes,” Arena said.

The idea for the tapes was conceived in the early 1970s as part of an oral history collection for an eventual Nixon library. The now-defunct Richard Nixon Foundation chose Whittier College for the task and professor Arena as the interviewer, since Whittier College was purported to be the future home of the library.

But Watergate intervened, and after Nixon’s humbling resignation in 1974, the idea of raising funds for a presidential library appealed to no one, said Phil O’Brien, the Whittier College librarian.

Shortly thereafter, the foundation--the library-to-be’s fund-raising apparatus--quietly collapsed.

The foundation’s deed of gift stated that the tapes were to be passed on to the Nixon presidential library, so, for safekeeping, they were given to the National Archives, which has never relinquished them--and has no intention of doing so, spokeswoman Susan Cooper said.

But there is now a Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace. Isn’t it entitled to the tapes?

When the foundation collapsed, its assets were willed to Whittier College, which believed it would inherit the tapes, regardless of where the library ended up.

But, alas, it was not to be.

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“The deed of gift specifically stated that those tapes go to the Nixon presidential library, rather than Whittier College,” Cooper said.

Whittier College has considered suing the federal government but has consistently chosen not to do so because of the expense and time--and the chances of losing--that such a suit would entail, O’Brien said.

Since the dispute arose, the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace was opened in Yorba Linda, but at the mere mention of that facility, Cooper’s tone turned brusque.

“There is no Richard Nixon presidential library,” she said. “Technically, it is not one under the law. It does not hold Richard Nixon’s presidential papers,” which are kept in the National Archives facility in College Park, Md.

As the archives sees it, there are nine presidential libraries, such as the John F. Kennedy library in Boston and the Lyndon B. Johnson library in Austin, Tex., all administered by the archives. They do not include the facility in Yorba Linda or the Rutherford B. Hayes library in Ohio, which are private, Cooper said.

Kevin Cartwright, the spokesman for the Yorba Linda facility, declined to respond to Cooper’s statements.

Nixon’s presidential portfolio in the Maryland Archives includes all materials related to Watergate, Cooper said, including the infamous Oval Office tapes that led to Nixon’s downfall.

“When Richard Nixon left office, he took a lot of material with him,” she said. “There were several court cases, and then legislation was passed, mandating that such material belonged to the government and had to stay in the Washington area. At this point, it would take an act of Congress to change that, and I don’t see that happening.”

Neither do the other principals, who say the inaccessibility of the tapes has created gaps in the biographical undertakings of such writers as Stephen Ambrose, whose three-volume history “would have no doubt benefited enormously from such interviews,” Arena said.

But Ambrose and even Julie Eisenhower have been able to use more than 200 taped interviews at Cal State Fullerton, which conducted its own oral-history project on Nixon in 1969. Both its tapes and transcripts are available through the school library.

They include interviews with the midwife who delivered Nixon, boyhood chums who remember a maniacal competitive streak, and the Whittier football coach, who said that despite serving as little more than a tackling dummy for players far more gifted, Nixon was determined to persevere.

Those interviews were conducted by Fullerton history professor Harry Jeffrey, who believes he may have unwittingly inspired the Whittier project.

Shortly after Nixon took office, Jeffrey flew to Washington to approach Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, who rejected the idea of Jeffrey conducting an oral-history program about Nixon’s pre-presidential years--the focus of both the Fullerton and Whittier endeavors.

Within two years, the Richard Nixon Foundation announced the Whittier project.

“Nixon could control the then president of Whittier (College),” a longtime crony of the President’s, Jeffrey said, “and he, in turn, could control Prof. Arena, who, from everything I’ve ever heard, did an outstanding job with the interviews. But I obviously planted the bug in their ear.”

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Just as conflict swirled around Nixon in the White House, a cyclone of controversy has encircled the Whittier tapes--none of which surprises Jeffrey.

“Nixon absolutely hated the National Archives,” he said.

But, Jeffrey says, the tendency of the archives spokeswoman to level criticisms at the Yorba Linda facility is both misguided and unfair.

The Yorba Linda library “has hired impeccable archivists,” Jeffrey said. “Some of the things found in Yorba Linda are indispensable--and found nowhere else . . . letters to and from the Nixon family, Navy records, Pat Nixon’s correspondence, plus post-presidential material. Other people have begun to contribute papers to Yorba Linda. Haldeman has a block of material there, for instance.”

In a version of events that Cooper, the archives spokeswoman, confirmed, Jeffrey noted that, “when Nixon was ready to resign, he signed a sweetheart deal with the General Services Administration, which at the time controlled the National Archives. The archives are now independent, but at the time, they were under GSA.

“That gave him control of all tapes--all materials--collected before and during his presidency. With the animosity felt toward Nixon after Watergate, Congress went ballistic when all of this was exposed. So, Congress overrode that agreement between Nixon and GSA and passed a law in late 1974, several months after his resignation, saying that all the Nixon materials were the property of the government.

“It set a precedent in American history.”

Cooper said the Whittier tapes are not the only Nixon materials caught in a legal limbo. Hundreds of other items remain frozen, in effect, the product of a series of suits between the Nixon estate--which refuses to turn over certain materials--and the archives. The disputed material includes 4,000 hours of Oval Office tapes not related to Watergate.

“We would like to resolve all of these disputes,” she said, conceding their invaluable worth to researchers and connoisseurs of American history. “But the Whittier tapes contain a deed of gift, and unless the deed of gift is nullified, we can’t release them. Until that happens, we’re caught in this legal tangle, and the tapes will remain in limbo.”