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.