NOTE:
nixontapes.org will be temporarily unavailable for as long as a few days
beginning the week of November 1, 2008 due to a planned expansion of our server capacity.
Please
excuse this inconvenience while we grow in order so that we have the space
necessary to post the remainder of the Nixon tapes collections in their
entirety. This website is entirely self-funded and maintained, without any
budget or staff, so we have no way around these occasional upgrades.
Once
we perform this upgrade, this website will be the only location in the world
for a compete digital collection of the Nixon tape recordings. (Posted October
20, 2008)
Between
1971 and 1973, President Richard Nixon secretly recorded 3,700 hours of
his phone calls and meeting across the Executive offices. Currently, as of
mid-2008, approximately 2,100 hours of these tapes have been declassified,
released, and made available to the public. However, neither the National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA) nor the Nixon Presidential Library has made
official transcriptions. Instead, they have left this monumental task--a
task that NARA once estimated took 100 hours of staff time to transcribe 1
hour of tape--to individual researchers and scholars.
nixontapes.org
is the only website dedicated solely to the scholarly production and
dissemination of Nixon tape audio and transcripts. The purpose of this website
is to make these transcripts available and to disseminate the best-quality
digital audio, to members of the public who are not able to travel to NARA's
Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland, or to the Nixon Presidential
Library in Yorba Linda, California. We hope that the availability of the
complete audio and the official NARA finding aids will facilitate
transcription with a minimum amount of hassle or required expertise.
At
great personal expense and time commitment, and with material resources
provided by the National Security Archive, we have transferred the audio from
archival Digital Audio Tapes (DATs, which NARA made from the original
reel-to-reel tapes) to high quality computer-based formats, such as .MP3.
In
order to ensure the highest level of accuracy, we listen to the best-quality
digital audio and have reviewed every transcript posted on this site multiple
times. Additionally, nearly every transcript has a summary, which appears at
the beginning of the first page along with pertinent citation information.
Unclear conversation material has been explained in footnotes where necessary.
Despite
our best efforts, we encourage visitors to this site—including scholars,
students, and members of the press—to listen to the audio while reviewing
the transcripts. Finally, in our attempt to promote openness and transparency,
we welcome your feedback
.