Why nixon taped

Despite so much uncertainty regarding the timing of the installation of the taping system, its demise is well-known. This is not to say that Nixon did not on occasion manipulate conversations to get viewpoints on record—he did, as Kissinger describes in Years of Upheaval —but it is a dubious assertion that the president was in control of all of his conversations, especially ones in which he had little to no speaking part.

Beyond this criticism, the richness of the Nixon tapes has also proven to be a double-edged sword. In order to utilize the tapes for historical purposes, researchers must listen to tapes in real time and painstakingly transcribe audio that ranges in quality from somewhat decent to unintelligible.

For many scholars and casual listeners alike, Richard Nixon has truly been the gift that keeps giving, and with over 1, hours of Nixon tapes still to be released, this will continue to be the case for many years. Nixon and Haldeman both analyzed why earlier presidents had decided to tape. In addition to the phone equipment, he had room microphones placed in the Cabinet Room and in the private office next to the Oval Office.

At one point there was also a recording device that could pick up conversations in the room outside the Oval Office where Johnson's visitors would wait before being ushered in to see him. The Johnson system was operated manually, which permitted him to decide which conversations to record… Johnson thought that my decision to remove his taping system was a mistake; he felt his tapes were invaluable in writing his memoirs.

It is worth nothing that Haldeman later distanced himself from The Ends of Power in his later years and released his daily diaries on CD-ROM and in annotated book form in an attempt to correct the record.

Nixon and Alexander P. Butterfield, February 16, , Unknown time between am and am in the Oval Office. Nixon, Alexander P. Butterfield, and H. Thanks to Ken Hughes for providing a first draft of this conversation. Nixon and H. Kennedy Library. February 16, Alexander Butterfield wholeheartedly concurred that Nixon was unconscious of the taping. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval , The analog nature of recording technology in the s, and the use of analog tapes for listening copies for the first three chronological tapes releases has created a variety of quality control issues for transcription efforts since each generation of analog audio reproduction entails some loss of quality.

CDs avoid the pitfalls inherent with the earlier audiocassettes. The tape machines powered up whenever the First Family Locator system indicated that the President had entered the Oval Office; then, when someone spoke or put a coffee cup down on the desk a voice-activated relay caused the machine to start recording. The TSD also hid six microphones in the lighting fixtures of the Cabinet Room for a manual recording system that the President could activate by pushing a button under the conference table.

Butterfield, who as appointments secretary always knew where the President was, could also turn on the Cabinet Room system from his office. One electrician who helped pull sound cables through the White House walls was not even informed of their purpose. Behind the locked doors of WT-1, the tape recorders themselves operated within a locked metal cabinet with only three keys, each of them held by an employee who took part in setting up or maintaining the system.

The Secret Service kept the completed tape reels secured in the cabinet as well, marking the recording date and location on each tape box. Once 10—12 tapes accumulated, they wrapped the tapes in heavy paper and transferred the bundle to a combination safe in Room 43 of the Executive Office Building next door to the White House.

An alarm system further secured the rooms where tapes were recorded and stored. Haldeman shared that knowledge out of necessity with two aides who were entrusted to arrange the installation, Butterfield and Lawrence M. Ambrose writes. He just continued to make them. Once Watergate brought the tapes into the spotlight, audio experts found much to criticize. Professionals, by comparison, recorded at 7. With a four-track tape machine, the inputs of four distinct microphones could have been recorded independently, making it possible to separate the voices of speakers when they overlapped.

Having a voice-activated system saved tape, but whenever anyone began speaking, it took a second or so for the recorder to reach full speed. Since the voice-activated relay stopped recording after a few seconds of silence, the whipping sound pops up not just at the start of conversations, but repeatedly within them. The use of five-inch reels made it possible to play the tapes back on a variety of available consumer devices, but the size limited recording time to six and a half hours per reel.

Technicians replaced the tapes on the Oval Office and Executive Office of the President machines every day except on weekends, so sometimes the tape ran out on Sunday. Coffee cups, cutlery, pens, papers, knees, elbows, slapping palms, and rapping fingertips—all these come through loud and clear.

The office tapes are noisy. The sheer volume of Nixon tapes poses a challenge to historians. NARA does not furnish transcripts with the recordings, having calculated that it can require hours of work to transcribe an hour of conversation.

Archivists have helped researchers by preparing invaluable tape logs listing the date, time, location, participants, and major topics covered in each conversation—and even those finding aids total more than 30, pages. In the absence of lavish resources, however, transcribing all of the Nixon tapes has been an impractical goal. Yet they are too valuable to ignore. By the time I made it through February and March of , it appeared that we would have the resources to undertake a multiyear project to bring 20 hours of Nixon Oval Office transcripts to publication.

To make the selection as comprehensive and objective as possible, PRP decided to take an all-or-nothing approach. Rather than evaluate each passage individually for its historic merit, we chose the topics of greatest historical value and selected every passage of every Oval Office tape from February and March in which they were discussed.

Although some topics—China, SALT, Vietnam—have universally acknowledged historical interest, the selection process involved some editorial triage. The judgment and guidance provided by Taylor Branch, Patrick J. Garrity, Irwin F. Zelikow, and the late Ernest R. May, ensured that the best made the cut. Although many months of effort then went into preparing transcripts, the money ran out before the work did.

Richard Milhous Nixon was a paranoid man. Between February and July , he secretly recorded 3, hours of conversations— far more than any president before him. Initially, government investigators focused on the tapes concerning the Watergate scandal. Over the next four decades, the Nixon Library and the National Archives released 3, hours of tape that it considers in the public interest, holding back the rest for family privacy or national security concerns.

They released the final batch of tapes in This means we can look forward to many more years of Nixon revelations. Just find one that is a Jew, will you. After the leak of the Pentagon Papers in , he became convinced that that leak was part of a conspiracy that was going to leak his own secrets.

Indira Gandhi and Nixon talking at the White House, This gets at one of the centrally weird things about the Nixon tapes: they allow Nixon to continue offending people and incriminating himself long after his death. Kissinger responded by blaming Nixon, who had conveniently died in The language was Nixon language. In June , Nixon told his staff to steal the report from Brookings.