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Between February 1971 and July 1973, President Richard Nixon secretly recorded 3,700 hours of his phone calls and meetings across the executive offices. Currently, approximately 2,371 hours of these tapes have been declassified, released, and made available to the public. Neither the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) nor the Nixon Presidential Library have produced official transcriptions or made the complete audio files available online. 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 digitized Nixon tape audio and transcripts. We have the most complete tape collection in existence--approximately 2,150 hours spread over 2.5 terabytes of hard drives that contain more than 6,000 audio files.** The few hours of audio that we do not have will require additional troubleshooting, and could not be converted due to more advanced technical difficulties. However, we are working through these final "problem tapes" and will make them available before anyone else does. In addition, as the remaining tapes from January through July 1973 are released by NARA, they will be added here. 

The purpose of this website is to make freely available the best-quality digital audio and selected transcripts to scholars, journalists, and 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. To aid researchers, we do more than simply post the audio files: we also make available the NARA-created tape logs and time codes, the president's daily diary, and pertinent information about each conversation that makes your listening experience better and the tape collection more accessible.

At great personal expense, with technical assistance by the National Security Archive, we have transferred the audio from analog cassettes to archival quality Digital Audio Tapes (DATs), and finally to uncompressed digital formats, and have posted these files here in easy-to-download formats such as mp3. This multi-year conversion work was completed during Summer 2008. 

In order to ensure the highest level of accuracy, we listen to the best possible quality digital audio and review each transcript posted on this site multiple times. There is no guesswork involved in making accurate transcripts: if there is more than one opinion about something we hear on the tapes, we mark the segment "[unclear]". It is very difficult to render the natural speech found on the tapes; the audio quality ranges from unintelligible to fair. We encourage visitors to this site to listen to the audio while reviewing the transcripts, and we welcome your feedback.

** For example, the Nixon Library notes that conversations recorded in the White House Cabinet Room are "not yet online". However, we have the complete collection of White House Cabinet Room recordings online.
 
NEW! LISTEN to Luke A. Nichter and Nixon Library Director Timothy Naftali on Los Angeles NPR affiliate 89.3 KPCC (mp3, 8.2m, 17:29)
 
NEW! LISTEN to Luke A. Nichter on San Francisco Bay Area KSRO Newstalk 1350 (mp3, 6.2m, 6:34)

NEW! LISTEN to Luke A. Nichter on Frankfurt ARD German Public Radio (mp3, 3.6m, 3:49)

Updates:
 
 
 
June 14, 2009: President Nixon and George Shultz's Telephone Conversations Assembled in Single Collection for First Time
 
June 12, 2009: Chronological Release 4: 240 hours of tapes originally released by the National Archives in 2003; recordings were made between July 1972 and November 1972
 
June 10, 2009: "John W. Dean III and the Watergate Cover-up, Revisited"
 
Click here to see past updates.
Copyright 2009 | nixontapes.org