Nixon Told Kissinger of Secret Tapings, Archives Papers Show

Richard Nixon revealed to Henry A. Kissinger, his national security advisor, that their conversations were secretly recorded, apparently to keep him from taking credit for successes in foreign policy.

This was in November 1972, when the secret White House taping system was supposedly known only to a handful of staffers.

Nixon, who hated personal confrontation, instructed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to tell Kissinger that “you don’t make the decisions, and when they are made, you waver the most.”

Haldeman’s handwritten note, which recorded his instructions from the president, was part of 28,000 Nixon administration papers made public Thursday by the National Archives. Nixon’s lawyers had opposed their release for years but chose not to fight when a review board decreed that there were no grounds to suppress them further.

Haldeman mentioned the circumstances in his diary, published posthumously in 1994. Kissinger was claiming that he was responsible for the newly reestablished opening to China, Haldeman said.

“I should let K know,” Haldeman wrote on Nov. 19, 1972, using “K” for Kissinger and “P” for president, that “obviously EOB and office and Lincoln have all been recorded for protection so P has complete record.” The references were to the Executive Office Building in the White House complex and the Lincoln Bedroom in the mansion.

Describing Nixon’s reaction in the book, Haldeman said: “I should let Henry know” that the conversations had been recorded “so the president has a complete record of all your conversations. . . . The P, I should tell him, has written the total China story for his own file.”

Actually, the taping system did not cover the Lincoln Bedroom. Microphones were turned on automatically whenever the president was in the Oval Office, his EOB hideaway office, the Cabinet Room and the main residence at the Camp David, Md., retreat.

Although 28,000 documents were released by the National Archives, many others were still held back.

Stanley I. Kutler, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said documents that might shed further light on the Watergate scandal still had not been released on the grounds that they were political rather than governmental.