Tapes on Nixon’s Past in Legal Limbo : History: The National Archives, which has recordings of 400 interviews, is in a custody dispute with Whittier College.

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. The government has them sealed, leaving them in what the agency’s Washington spokeswoman calls “legal limbo.”

No one sees any end to the dispute that has the effect of keeping the tapes frozen. It is a bitter rift between the National 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 lives in Chino, said the interviews were conducted with scores of relatives, friends, neighbors and childhood contemporaries of Nixon and his family.

“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, he said.

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

Also in the collection are 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 friends during Nixon’s law school years.

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, because Whittier College was expected 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 it was not to be. “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 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.

The nine presidential libraries are administered by the National Archives. They do not include the privately run facility in Yorba Linda, Cooper said.

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 writings of Nixon’s biographers.

But they 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.

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.

The tendency of the National Archives’ spokeswoman to level criticisms at the Yorba Linda facility is unfair, Jeffrey says.

The Yorba Linda library “has hired impeccable archivists,” Jeffrey said.

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.”

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 lawsuits 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.