National Archives to Begin Dividing Up Nixon’s Tapes

Under court order, the National Archives in Maryland will begin the arduous task Monday of slicing up 3,700 hours of secretly recorded tapes from President Richard Nixon’s years in the White House.

When the dicing is done, 820 hours of the original taped personal discussions will become the property of the Nixon estate, as demanded under a federal court ruling. The rest will be released publicly.

The project means the beginning of the end of a generation-long legal battle over the tapes, which were partly responsible for Nixon’s resignation from office as a result of the Watergate scandal.

While Nixon estate officials said the original tapes of personal conversations will be destroyed, the estate will hang on to a “preservation copy” of all 3,700 hours, and decide in future years whether any of the personal conversations--some of which deal with political issues--will be made available to historians.

Critics argue that Nixon’s heirs and supporters cannot be trusted to determine which of his personal conversations would be of historical interest.

John H. Taylor, director of the Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda and co-executor of Nixon’s estate, said the decision on what, if any, of the personal material will be released would probably come from Nixon’s heirs.

He said the decision will be made more difficult by the way the tapes are being indexed by the National Archives, which does not differentiate between personal family conversations, such as medical discussions, and personal political conversations--such as Nixon’s opinions of various party officials.

“The executors won’t listen to [the tapes],” Taylor said. “That’s one of the many areas of [difficulty]. How do we get at the political personal stuff without listening to the personal stuff? But they chose to do it that way.”

He said the decision on what might be released could involve Nixon’s children sitting down and listening to the tapes themselves.

The battle of the tapes began with Nixon’s departure from the White House in 1974. Until then, departing presidents took their personal papers with them, and often housed the material in presidential libraries.

But after Nixon--by then pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford--struck a deal with the General Services Administration to destroy some of his records, Congress enacted the Presidential Materials and Preservation Act and seized about 42 million pages of documents and 880 tapes.

Nixon lost a legal challenge to regain the records but was successful, in a 1977 U.S. Supreme Court decision, in winning agreement that personal and family conversations should be returned to him. Nixon also won a 1992 court ruling that the federal government, while it can keep the seized records, must pay him for them.

How much those records are worth will be the subject of a lawsuit scheduled for trial later this year in Washington.

More than 12 hours of Watergate-related tapes were released publicly in 1980, and 60 additional hours were released in 1992.

But Nixon obtained an injunction in 1993, the year before he died, against the further release of the tapes until the personal material was returned to him.

The next year, the archives returned 820 hours of material deemed personal, and also removed the personal material from a master copy of all 3,700 hours. Under a 1996 agreement, the remainder of the material--without the personal conversations--is to be released to in stages.

But the archives retained the original tapes and a preservation copy, maintaining that it had a legal duty to do so.

The U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed, and in April ordered the archives to hand over to the Nixon estate the personal portion of the original tapes, even if it meant cutting them up.

While archivists have decried the destruction of the original tapes, Taylor says the tapes have become an issue only because of the “government’s fixation.”

He said the original tapes are “purely symbolic” since other copies of those tapes will be held by the family.

“No one should think that anything irreplaceable is happening as a result of the National Archives finally, after 21 years, fulfilling the Supreme Court requirement that personal segments, family segments, in the original tapes be returned to the president,” Taylor said.