U.S. to Pay $18 Million for Nixon Tapes, Papers

The federal government has agreed to pay $18 million to the estate of Richard Nixon to settle claims that the Watergate tapes and other presidential materials were improperly seized by the government in 1974 without compensation.

The out-of-court agreement, climaxing a five-month civil trial that ended last year, would result in $6 million in improvements and expansion for the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif., and paves the way for copies of his White House tape recordings and papers eventually to be made available at the Orange County facility, officials said.

Justice Department lawyers argued in federal court last year that placing any value on Nixon’s materials was “speculative” and that in no case should payment exceed $2.2 million. Lawyers for Nixon’s heirs sought compensation of $213 million for 3,700 hours of tapes and more than 4 million pages of historic White House documents.

David W. Ogden, the Justice Department official in charge of the case, called it “a fair resolution” that brings to a close 20 years of litigation surrounding Nixon’s materials.

John H. Taylor, executive director of the Nixon Foundation, said in an interview Monday that the agreement was “a fair, equitable and good compromise negotiated in virgin legal territory.”

Shortly after Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Congress decreed that the General Services Administration, the parent agency of the National Archives, should seize all his White House recordings and papers to guarantee that Nixon would not destroy them.

Until that time, presidents traditionally were free to take all their papers and other historic materials with them into retirement. But Congress made an exception in Nixon’s case because he was the first president to resign in a criminal scandal. His successor, Gerald R. Ford, granted him a full pardon from any possible future prosecution.

The Watergate tapes, which Nixon surrendered only when the Supreme Court ruled against him, documented conspiracy and obstruction of justice by Nixon and his top aides and led directly to his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. His departure came after the House Judiciary Committee had voted articles of impeachment.

Nixon’s lawyers spent subsequent years trying legally to block public access to the Watergate tapes, arguing that many of the conversations were private and privileged. When the Supreme Court rejected their efforts, the lawyers began fighting specific regulations proposed by the National Archives to make the tapes public.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in 1992 that Nixon was entitled to “just compensation” for his materials. While this issue still was being adjudicated, Nixon died in 1994 and his daughters began to loosen the family’s grip on his materials, in hopes of a better understanding of their father’s presidency.

The settlement must be approved by U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn, who has had the compensation issue under advisement since closing arguments by the Justice Department and Nixon family lawyers ended last December.

The Nixon papers and tapes will remain at the National Archives facility in suburban College Park, Md. But the agreement signals that copies may eventually be housed in Orange County, even though the time element is uncertain.

Taylor said that Nixon’s papers, tapes and other materials--if ultimately dispersed to the West Coast as well--will help ensure a better appreciation of Nixon’s foreign policy achievements, including bringing the Vietnam War to an end.

Besides the $6 million for Nixon’s library, Nixon’s attorneys, led by Herbert J. Miller, will receive $7.4 million, and approximately $3.7 million will go for estate and other federal taxes. After administrative expenses, less than 0.5% will be distributed to Nixon’s family.

Nixon’s lawyers argued to Judge Penn that an award of $16 million last August to the heirs of amateur filmmaker Abraham Zapruder by a panel of government-approved arbiters showed that the Nixon tapes, by their sheer volume alone, were worth far more. The Zapruder film, only 26 seconds long, captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November, 1963.

However, the Justice Department contended that Nixon’s tapes and other records “were created, retained, organized and processed ultimately for one purpose--to deposit them in a Richard Nixon presidential library open to the American people for research.”

As a result, “these materials were dedicated to public use by Mr. Nixon from the earliest days of his administration . . . to be held in what Mr. Nixon called ‘a public trust’ ” and so have little commercial value, government attorneys argued.

Additionally, they said, the judge should consider that American taxpayers already have spent about $21 million to keep and index all the materials as custodian for 25 years. “These are costs which Mr. Nixon would have borne had he retained the materials,” the department said in its final legal brief.