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.
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