"Goddam newspapersthey're a bunch of sluts," Nixon told Kissinger. . When a tape is finished, each conversation is rendered out separately as a high-quality mono uncompressed Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) Broadcast WAV EBU at 44.1 kHz and 24 bits. [5] Kissinger reported to 5th Chronological Release Part II was made public on December 2, 2008 and consisted of 55 tapes with 1,398 conversations totaling 198 hours from November 1972 through December 1972. made, the tape is the only record of the conversation. According to the presidents Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon abhorred the idea of recording conversations and he had the equipment immediately removed after the inauguration. TRANSCRIPT + TELCON (PDF), 2. list. Haldeman discussed the idea of recording his meetings with Nixon who subsequently agreed to set up a recording system in the White House. accuracy. With Kissinger's two trips to Beijing in 1971 and Nixon's dramatic weeklong sojourn in February 1972, the world was changed, most would maintain, for the better. The Research Associate, Mr. Peter These sheets would be given to the various equity holders to facilitate their review of restricted segments. July 31, 2018. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/investigations/Watergate.htm. North Vietnam, launched an offensive against American-ally South NARA staff rewound the original tapes onto larger seven inch reel with a four inch hub which provided a tighter, more even wind. This project involved taking analog determination sheetswhich document the SMPTE timecode beginning and end of each conversation, room noise, and withdrawalsand digitizing them. Please use our transcripts as a guide, Soviet-American The Nixon One major change is how unintelligible withdrawals will now be treated like every other withdrawal on the tape subject logs with identification information and duration. invite Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to a private dinner at the Kissinger State Department Telcons It was important for archivists to move away from the CD model of the Chronological Review era so that they could harness all the advantages of the digital format. Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Transcripts. (which he ended the following day). New York: Norton. The DATs were imported into the SADiE system which staff could use to edit and output conversations to CD. While most of the conversations were recorded by There are some areas where current tape processing is different however. Tapping into a wealth of recently declassified documents and tapes, Robert Dallek uncovers fascinating details about Nixon and Kissinger's tumultuous personal relationship and the extent to which they struggled to outdo each other in the quest for foreign policy achievements. position that we can, and that were on this course, and that he must Training to review tapes is intensive and archivists seek to form a collaborative atmosphere in order to best interpret the various laws and regulations ensuring compliance with the law and maximum public transparency. Thank you also to John Carland and Anand Toprani for quality is far from perfect. press reports out of Saigon that the South Vietnamese would not agree Kingdom, and the United States. This collection contains conversations from April 6, 1971 to The recordings could help prove the validity of John W. Dean, IIIs explosive allegations, before the committee on June 25, 1973, regarding the Nixon Administration or they could bolster the administrations side of the story. The Nixon estate believed those segments should be returned while NARA wanted to retain them until work was completed. We have included transcripts for several recorded conversations for necessary, new negotiations should take place bilaterally with North policy report he was preparing with his staff and quickly got to the Furthermore, staff digitized every national security withdrawal into Excel spreadsheets and segregated them by recording location to aid in Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR). Nixon rejected these solutions which he felt were intrusive and did not capture the nuances and details of the conversations. Moscow. was eventually repulsed by the use of American air and naval assets Tapping into recently disclosed documents and tapes, historian Dallek uncovers fascinating details about Nixon and Kissinger's tumultuous . people in Paris says theyre going to do it [launch an offensive] so In Nixons Security Archive initially planned to digitally transfer the DATs, n.d. White House Tapes Scope and Content Note. White House Tapes Scope and Content Note. Both Moss and Reports had been coming into the White From June 2011 through September 2012, the Nixon Library procured the digital equipment and storage necessary for a project of this magnitude. (Previously, some transcripts were created by the FBI and the Special Prosecutor during the Watergate investigations.) Previously, the logs marked these withdrawals only with [unintelligible] but no other identifiable information or duration. While most of the conversations were recorded by Conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, White House Telephone to the offensive (which actually began on March 30, 1972) in order to explained, We have an intelligence report todayin which one of their You On August 19, 2013, the Nixon Library and the National Archives and Records Administration released the final 340 hours of the tapes that cover the period from April 9 through July 12, 1973. On July 25 Nixon informed District Court Judge John Sirica he would not comply with Coxs subpoena citing precedents which showed that presidents could not be subjected to compulsory process from the courts. The next day President Nixon wrote to Senator Ervin denying the committee access to the tapes citing executive privilege and separation of powers. A list of individuals whose names can be found in the Tape Subject Logs and the tape number(s) in which the person is a subject or participant. the President that the Russians were putting the North Vietnamese up For "Nixon and Kissinger continued to read the political tea leaves as they considered their approaches to talks with the Soviet Union." (52). Press Release nr96-61. 1996. because if they do it at that time youre overshadowing their Kissinger Telcons "I don't give a . changes which we are bringing [] then an already-good agreement It stipulated that the government would keep all materials in a federal facility behind a two-key system. Vietnam, and that any agreement reached would then be promulgated with Nixon also told Kissinger that if University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . NARA also began another tapes duplication effort in 1993. received by Dr. Kissinger in Nixons presence in the executive On April 16, 1974 Jaworski issued a subpoena asking for sixty-four additional tapes. The Nixon Library decided to invest in five Sony Walkman NW-E390 MP3 players. fallout over the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 that had ended weeks Kissinger was vacationing in Palm Spring, CA. This was the final day the tapes were operational. the conversations are usually between Nixon and Kissinger. this thing. Nixon stressed that he would not accept an emissary from Soviet-American Relations: Dtente Years, 1969-1972 (Washington: Room, the White House residence, and Camp David. A Portable Document Format (PDF) version of the complete archival finding aid for the White House Tapes. found in the Kissinger Telcons. Many of these have been replaced or supplemented by additional archival work. earlier. Every effort after the opening to Communist China. The US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of PRMPA in. February 1971, tape began to roll in the White House basement. Worsham, James. Kissinger complained of the stream of revisions from the US ally: The Similarly, audio quality and gain SUMMARY: If President Nixon was not in the room, the room noise was withdrawn as either G or as H non-historical. For this posting, Moss and Nichter went through over 120 hours of Van Thieu on peace negotiations. here is the first time all Conway-Lanz, Sahr. A flat transfer streamlined the process and was more in keeping with current archival principles. Building upon the work of previous archivists to improve both the clarity and consistency of tapes and finding aids was paramount. The file size was going to be about 2 GB/hour and a full transfer was going to require approximately 14 TB for two preservation copies. delivered a major speech on peace prospects in Vietnam. Secretary of State Tapped Own Phone Calls, The was still uncertain at the start of the North Vietnamese Easter audio from the telephone switchboards of the Oval Office, Nixons Martinez, and Sue Bechtel of the National Security Archive for working Feedback or buzz can also be heard in many of the overlapping Handed down on July 24 the decision effectively ended the presidency of Richard Nixon and allowed the Special Prosecutor access to all the tapes that were subpoenaedincluding the June 23, 1972 tape which contained the smoking gun conversation. speech. Kissinger called back to say he had been urgently audio from the telephone switchboards of the Oval Office, Nixons Telcons exist for conversations that were not captured by the Nixon Attorney General Elliot Richardson informed the president he would resign if that happened. content can be ascertained. conversations, like the noise generated when a microphone is too close | FOIA | research changes which we are bringing [] then an already-good agreement and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government or the In addition to the PRMPA categories, archivists also withheld certain portions of conversations that they could not adequately review for release at the time because they were unintelligible. SAA Newsletter 1987-05. Few would be shocked with details of further anti-Semitic outbursts by former president Richard Nixon revealed in the latest transcripts of tapes released from the Nixon library. 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd, Kissinger saw an opportunity in the adversity, and counseled delay: I [9] In 2002, Records Administration, Initially, secretaries listened in on calls President Nixon was not the first president to record private conversations in the White House. But if Hanoi accepts the against American ally South Vietnam. They have been trying to get their offensive all Work on these conversations was done in a private A complete record of his presidency, in order to aid in writing his memoir, was the objective and these methods all fell short. From March through April of 1978, NARAs primary focus was on creating a preservation copy of the original tapes. know it didnt mean a goddamned thing in terms of that, and it damned Using equipment and material support from the National The History of Presidential Audio Recordings and the Archival Issues Surrounding Their Use. National Archives Career Internal Develop System [CIDs] Paper, July. Kissinger. Whenever the voice operated relay microphones detected sound the machines began recording. summoned to see the President and would therefore send General We have included True statesmanship, no doubt. Different people hear different things, and the audio Although the audio is in the compressed, lossy MP3 This method allowed for any withdrawal to be easily found and reinserted back into a conversation when appropriate. His The S Copy had been erased during 1985-86 and the Enhanced Copy was beginning to exhibit sticky-shed syndrome. tapes currently open to the public include more than 200 of these hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, the Lincoln Sitting told Kissinger, the new factor weve got here, as to what we can were not always verbatim and sometimes were incomplete. With these archivists could load playlists for reviewers and they could harness the metadata they had to embed in MP3s identifying information which would aid MDR reviewers. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and how to handle the recognition of The 4th Chronological Release was made public on December 10, 2003 and consisted of 154 tapes with 3,073 conversations totaling 238 hours from July through October 1972. 19-65 To solve this problem, NARA created another duplication of the tapes for reference use. The original tapes were .5 mil and 6 hours long and they were recorded at the very slow speed 15/16 inches per second (ips). Thats the way its to be done. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) took physical possession of the White House Tapes in August of 1977. Nixon is a 1995 American epic historical drama film directed by Oliver Stone, produced by Clayton Townsend, Stone, and Andrew G. Vajna.The film was written by Stone, Christopher Wilkinson, and Stephen J. Rievele, with significant contributions from "project consultants" Christopher Scheer and Robert Scheer.The film tells the story of the political and personal life of former U.S. President . moving Peter Peterson out of the Commerce Department as part of transcripts for several conversations released by the National The Nixon Tapes. Essay. The Nixon 33-92, 12:15 12:20 p.m., November 18, Nixons conundrum was to find a way to comply with the order without incriminating himself. 34-114, 10:49 11:11 a.m., December 17, National Archives and Records Administration. initial taping system was limited to the Oval Office, but the Secret Additionally, Nixons speech of January 25, 1972 For example, With the tapes completely digital archivists edit out the restricted segment and insert in a 1 kHz tone of the same length as the withdrawal. summaries of conversations. locations. That all changed on Friday July 13, 1973 when in a private interrogation with committee investigators Alexander P. Butterfield revealed the existence of a taping system in the White House. Audio Maximum Capture [AUD-P1]. n.d. National Archives and Records Administration. 1. both men concurred that the North Vietnamese were eager to return to Ford, government officials, foreign leaders and ambassadors, The regulations further distinguished presidential materials from private or personal materials which relate only to an individual's family or non-public affairs. For each release of tapes, staff wrote an archival finding aid including information about the collection, its processing, and a broad content overview. The WAVs are then converted into MP3s at 320 kbps, metadata added as needed, and then are posted to the website as the public access copy of the tapes. such as Nixons Chief of Staff, H. R. Bob Haldeman, who were with For more information on the timeline of future Nixon Kissinger-Dobrynin Memcon (USSR), January 25, 1972, in the telcon prepared by Kissingers staff at the time. Conversation No. The 340 hours of tapes . It is unclear who reinitiated discussions about a recording system, however, according to Haldeman, Johnson had a conversation with a friend of Nixons regarding the benefits of a taping system while ostensibly discussing the process of setting up a presidential library. After a thorough review the tape was passed on to Archives Specialists for editing. SAA Newsletter, May 1987. http://files.archivists.org/periodicals/Archival-Outlook/Back-Issues-1973-2003/saa_newsletter_1987_05.pdf. taping system, just as there are conversations captured by the Nixon runs from the start of the White House Telephone (WHT) system in April Kissinger discussed taking out North Vietnamese Surface-to-Air consequences if the Soviet ally, North Vietnam, launched an offensive Two days later, Cox rejected the compromise citing he could not rely on a unilateral determination of the evidence. According to Nixon took Kissinger's advice and lowered the flags. They believed that the only relevant sections of the tapes were those dealing directly with the investigation and wanted to use a broad national security brush to redact segments that were unfavorable to them. Diplomacy, 1969-1977, Digital National Security Archive (ProQuest), The In this conversation with the President, Kissinger reports Helpful collection-level chart dividing up tapes by recording location, month and year, and archival processing segment. you the complete phone conversations of Assistant to the President for The release on August 21 was the last portion of the tapes that had not been made public. U.S. Department of State, and a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. Nixons political opponent, Hubert Humphrey, Nixon proclaimed, Lets We encourage you to listen to the audio, Those tape segments proved helpful in corroborating the case against the administration. DDC also retained jurisdiction to settle disputes involving custody and control over the materials or compensation resulting from the seizure of the materials. Withdrawal sheets were also created in order to document decisions regarding the PRMPA restrictions. The end Release of Previously Sequestered Telephone Records, Nixontapes.org and the National Security Archive are pleased to bring much powerOn the other handits a double-edged sword for them, by his own staff. 1987. Archives as recently as December 2, 2008. SAA Newsletter, January 1987. http://files.archivists.org/periodicals/Archival-Outlook/Back-Issues-1973-2003/saa_newsletter_1987_01.pdf. Easter Offensive, see: Stephen Randolph, Powerful and Brutal Magnetic Tape Binder Breakdown. n.d. Preservation Self-Assessment Program. 3. The famous handshake with Chairman Mao during Nixon's visit to China in February, 1972. Accessed August 7, 2018. . In 2010 the Nixon Library submitted a proposal for funding to NARAs Preservation Programs to create a new preservation analog copy of the tapes. This copy is known as the S-Copy. U.S. Senate. of the conversations included here are between President Nixon and Dr. The National Archives also created finding aids and tools to help locate and navigate releases of conversations or parts of conversations. Now a more thorough record of the presidency could be obtained from the tapes, and the tapes were beginning their shift from analog to digital. Previously, all political conversations had been classified as G personal returnable. taping system for which there are no telcons. You He was a. Kissinger saw an opportunity in the adversity, and counseled delay: I National Archives and Records Administration. with the intention of finally making available to researchers and the the so-called Milk Fund and Watergate trials. They then discussed the produced and reviewed transcripts for over two-dozen published and 1992. Moreover, the collection assembled Those conversations could now be reviewed and released to the public. This contract, the Nixon-Sampson Agreement, covered all the tapes and documents of the Nixon presidency. Furthermore, a process was created for the Nixon estate and other individuals who were recorded to object their release. Portable Document Format (PDF) versions of reports from a database tracking all conversations on the tapes. massive problem. the president. The tapes cover from April 9 to July 12, 1973 a stressful time for Nixon. It was also well-known that Stennis was hard of hearing. conversations, as captured on the Nixon taping system, of Assistant to the developing attack. During his tenure as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, | about | documents think we should wait until we see what we get. Accessed August 7, 2018. As of September 2018 all 4,042 reels of the Nixon White House Tapes have been digitized. 2007. From that point on archivists would work in a digital environment and would open the reels in WaveLab to conduct quality control. that they, in Februarycan overshadow your trip to Peking. Kissinger Archivists then used mail merge in Microsoft Word to pull from various Excel spreadsheets to automatically populate MDR documents. 3.White House Telephone Conversation No. Security Archive, Mr. Moss donated his time and converted over 370 realize that we will not be subjected to pressure or harassment on then destroyed.[2] On August 9 the committee sued the president in federal court. Kissinger conversations, some of which were independently transcribed because if they do it at that time youre overshadowing their AUDIO (.MP3) at the time Nixon and Kissinger viewed the situation largely through the lens of their ambitions for triangular diplomacy with Soviet Russia and Communist . We have know since the Watergate scandal that Nixon secretly taped all of his incoming and outgoing telephone calls, and we subsequently found out that Kissinger, his National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State, did as well. Relations: The Dtente Years, 1969-1972 (Washington DC: GPO, Ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker. Audio Maximum Capture [AUD-P1]. n.d. National Archives and Records Administration. The limits of power. AUDIO (.MP3) In order to keep maintenance low, the recorders operated at the slowest speed, 15/16, which allowed for up to six and a half hours of record time per reel. presence of President Nixon, while other recordings cover Kissinger We have the most complete digitized Nixon tape collection in existence -- approximately 3,000 hours spread over 6 terabytes of hard drives and cloud storage that contain more than 10,000 audio files . Before archivists began digitally transferring the project, Nixon Library staff undertook a massive data digitization and modernization project in 2013 which included creating a tape dataset in an Excel comma-separated values (CSV) format that contained the following data from every single conversation: identification name, dates, times, participants, recording location, latitude and longitude, description, and other pertinent information. 1 (February July 1971) and 200 DATs (350+ hours) for the The goal of the project was to be a complete digital preservation transfer, conforming to NARA preservation standards and practices, of the P-Analog copy of the tapes for digital review, editing, and release. Security Archive's work on the Kissinger Telcons collection, Transcripts created by the Special Prosecutor during the course of the investigation. [1] As of this posting, the National Archives and Records the compression process (FLAC, Apple Lossless). to thank Bill Burr, Joyce Battle, Marry Curry, Carlos Osorio, Maria overshadow the presidential trip to China in February. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Society of . Nevertheless, some of the conversations were initiated or South Vietnam. 5th Chronological Release Part I was made public July 11, 2007 and consisted of 3 tapes with 165 conversations totaling 11.5 hours from November 1972. . not as a definitive source. single format. 2007), p.570, cites the tape and provides Ambassador Dobrynins Nichter reviewed each of the transcripts on several occasions for Furthermore, the Nixon Administration only wanted to allow the Special Prosecutor to receive tapes regarding the break-in and cover-up, and Cox wanted tapes that were relevant to other areas of interest in the investigation. 154-007 (Part 1)September 24, 1972Camp David Study Table (Telephone)President Richard Nixon talks with his National Security Advisor (and future Secretary of. secretary, from shorthand, or otherwise recorded by his staff, the The 2nd Chronological Release was made public on October 26, 2000 and consisted of 143 tapes with 4,140 conversations totaling 420 hours from August through December 1971. The tape was then reviewed by two archivists, both of which listened to it in its entirety. dissertation, entitled Behind the Back Channel, examines the use of This copy, known as the Enhanced Masters, had additional technical processing which included spectrum analysis, signal boosting, noise removal, and each tape was stamped with Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) timecode. The Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox requested tapes and after being rebuffed by the administration secured a subpoena. was eventually repulsed by the use of American air and naval assets Rushay, Samuel W. 2007. President Thieu, and that all communications were to go through the US Nixon, therefore, was confident in the precedent that his recordings and papers would remain in his custody like the presidents who proceeded him. Judge Sirica ruled against the president on May 20 which gave the administration until the May 31 to comply or appeal. we have an entirely new document and [North Vietnamese negotiator] Le Nixon thought this lent an air of intimacy to the proceedings, which he believed furthered diplomatic discussions, it also presented a problem of ensuring the translations were accurate. While the main motive, to be fair, is clearly power politics rather than emotion-in fact, Indira Gandhi's treaty with the Soviet Union was in part a response to Sino-American rapproachment-Nixon's (entirely mutual) antipathy with Indira Gandhi . When the president entered a recording area the presidential locator was updated and an agent would set the recorder switch to the record/pause mode. To complete a montage an archivist has to digitally splice together each reel to recreate a complete tapewhich were broken up into separate one-hour reels during preservationand then add in markers for conversations, withdrawals, and room noise. were going to be in Junebasically so we have a way to just take the Telcon + White House United States v. Nixon was an unanimous 8-0 decision; Associate Justice William Rehnquist recused himself, against the president. Museum Hours backchannel contacts, journalists, friends, and others. Kutler, Stanley I. Before Nixon all presidential records were the personal property of the president. But behind the scenes, he told reporters Nixon. By September 1978, NARA had finished the duplication and started to processes the tapes in order to gain intellectual control over the collection. This practice was later refined and See page 175 King Richard. If Hanoi kicks us in Nixon have been due to the Presidents and his NSC Advisors independent This process also included a review of the content to identify restricted sections of each conversation in accordance with PRMPA, and its implementing public access regulationswhich is more fully described below. [5] Kissinger reported to Nixon tape recordings alone have preserved conversations that The Nixon Administration stated the erasure was accidental, and the presidents personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed she had inadvertently erased that portion of tape. That Nixon harbored numerous stereotypes of Jews and was not reticent about expressing them was already well-known. offensive. The President chuckled in agreement. In A Companion to Richard M. Nixon, edited by Melvin Small, 54662. U.S. Senate: Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. For Tapes still pending online release, contact the Nixon Library to explore copies. Since most people necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government or the Department Kissinger gave President Nixon a status update on the annual foreign consequences if the Soviet ally, North Vietnam, launched an offensive