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About
President Nixon's Taping System
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
digitized tape collection in existence--approximately 2,300 hours spread over 2.5
terabytes of hard drives that con tain more than 7,000 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.
About
nixontapes.org
 Luke
A. Nichter is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Central
Texas. He received his Ph.D. in History from Bowling Green State University,
and his dissertation,
entitled Richard Nixon and Europe: Confrontation and Cooperation,
1969-1974 examined key elements in relations between the United States and traditional postwar European
allies, including Great Britain, France, and Germany. Chapters include,
"Nixon and the Allies", "NATO in the Midst of Crisis",
"The Mortal Wound to Bretton Woods", "The Year of Europe",
and "The United Kingdom and the European Community." This multi-archival,
multi-lingual research was
based on the Nixon tapes, as well as sixteen government and historical
archives in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. This manuscript is currently undergoing revision for publication.
Nichter
teaches courses in the field of America and the World,
including Diplomatic history and selected courses on the history of Asia and
modern Europe. Prior
to his doctoral studies, he completed postgraduate work at the London
School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. He was also
formerly employed by the U.S. House of
Representatives, the British House of Commons, and as a management consultant based in Beijing.
Nichter
created this website in July 2007 with the intention of finally making available
to researchers and the public a user-friendly, complete collection of the Nixon
tapes.
*
* *
 Richard
A. Moss is a government
consultant and lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and son. He recently
defended his doctoral dissertation, "Behind the Backchannel: Achieving Détente
in U.S.-Soviet relations, 1969-1972," at The George Washington
University.
From
August 2007 to June 2009, Moss served as the State Department’s resident Nixon
tapes expert. Moss overhauled the quality control system and transcribed or
reviewed over 2000 pages of transcripts for over 30 published and forthcoming Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes.
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