Rest of Nixon White House Tapes to Be Made Public

Settling more than two decades of often bitter litigation, the National Archives and attorneys for the estate of Richard Nixon agreed Friday that virtually all of his secretly recorded White House tapes may be heard by the public starting this fall.

The settlement, filed in federal court, means that lawyers for the former president’s estate are dropping legal challenges that had allowed the release of only 63 hours of tapes dealing mainly with the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation.

Now, virtually all 3,700 hours of Nixon’s still-unreleased recordings will be made available, except for portions deemed by archivists to involve such matters as national security or highly personal conversations dealing with medical problems.

Historians expressed delight at the development, saying that the tapes should provide fresh insights into the Nixon presidency.

“These tapes are likely to show that Nixon was even [worse] than many thought he was,” said Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose. “There’s got to be conversations between Nixon and [former White House aide Charles W.] “Chuck” Colson about dirty tricks”--nefarious tactics by Nixon operatives against Democrats in the 1972 presidential campaign.

Ambrose added that the agreement “establishes the basic point that tapes are no different from other documents in the Oval Office and that the president is accountable for everything he does. Who knows what’s going to come out? This is good for America.”

University of Wisconsin history professor Stanley Kutler, who joined in the tapes litigation, said he was elated by the settlement. “All of us who believe in open government and full disclosure of our history are the real winners today,” he said.

“We now have a firm agreement that will make available . . . tapes whose release the former president forcefully resisted as long as he lived.”

First to be released, possibly as early as November, are 201 hours dealing with “abuse of government power”--a category that principally covers the 1972-73 scandal that resulted in Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The Watergate scandal began in June 1972, when burglars hired by the Nixon campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate hotel. Although Nixon never was linked to that crime, evidence subsequently showed that he and top White House aides engineered a cover-up that involved attempts to thwart the FBI’s investigation, lying to Congress and federal grand juries and paying “hush money” to keep some of the burglars quiet.

By 1998, a second batch of tapes totaling 278 hours that deal with Cabinet discussions will be made public. The remaining tapes will be released according to other categories in succeeding years, together with brief logs of the conversations prepared by archivists.

Nixon began his secret taping system in February 1971, and removed it in July 1973, when its existence was disclosed publicly by former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield in testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee.

The president resisted a subpoena issued by Watergate prosecutors for specific tape-recorded conversations but eventually relinquished those tapes when the Supreme Court voted without dissent to uphold the subpoena.

After Nixon’s resignation, Congress approved the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act to take custody of all of his papers and tapes, out of concern that he might destroy them. But except for Watergate tapes played in open court during criminal proceedings, and later released by the archives, the bulk of the remaining recordings has been kept secret.

Alan B. Morrison, founder of Public Citizen Litigation Group, which represented Kutler in his intervening lawsuit, said that the agreement “marks the end of a struggle to establish that Congress’ direction in 1974 . . . was not a hollow gesture.”

U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin told reporters that “we are eager to make public all material that the law allows to be released to document the Nixon presidency but we also are sensitive to the concerns of the Nixon family about material that is legally personal and private.”

“We believe that this agreement protects both the Nixon privacy rights and the public interest as defined by law,” he added.

Lawyers said that the only legal issue still unresolved is whether the archives is entitled to keep both originals and copies of tape segments containing purely private conversations. But this issue will not keep archivists from processing the tapes for public release, they said.

John Taylor, executive director of the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., said that the settlement became possible when negotiators decided to separate the ownership issue of private tape segments from all other matters.

Taylor said that “throughout his life after his resignation, President Nixon sought one thing--that the National Archives ought to fulfill its court-ordered obligation to return personal tape segments to him. But the government took the position it had to keep them.”

Since Nixon’s death in 1994, the family chose to set aside its privacy rights--to be decided later in court--”so that the public might have a fully flushed-out picture of the history of his presidency,” Taylor said.

“Without the family’s willingness to put the public interest first, this settlement would not have been possible,” he declared.

In the often bitter litigation that Nixon waged in his lifetime against release of the tapes, the former president first challenged the constitutionality of the 1974 congressional act. When he lost on that issue several years later, he began to challenge regulations adopted by the archives for release of his tapes, claiming that the rules infringed on his right of privacy.

In response, government lawyers pointedly challenged Nixon’s honesty, saying that he could not be trusted to preserve records of his administration for the public. As a case in point, Justice Department lawyers, representing the archives, cited a famous 18 1/2-minute gap in a crucial Watergate tape.

Nixon executive secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed that she accidentally made that erasure on a tape subpoenaed by Watergate prosecutors, but the belief has persisted that she did it deliberately at his direction. “No satisfactory explanation has ever been provided for that omission,” Justice Department lawyers said in their legal brief for the archives.

To date, the tape-recordings made public are principally those heard by the federal court jury that convicted Nixon administration officials H. R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and John N. Mitchell of conspiracy and perjury in 1974. They also have included some tapes heard by the House Judiciary Committee, which had voted to impeach Nixon a few months earlier.