New Nixon Tapes Released

Never suspecting that his secret taping system would eventually lead to his resignation, President Nixon was cheerful and inquisitive the first morning the recording system was up and running in the Oval Office, a newly released tape shows.

"How does it work in here?" Nixon asks his aide, Alexander Butterfield about 8 a.m. on Feb. 16, 1971.

It didn't work very well, judging from the poor quality of the recording, which was among 445 hours of tapes released Tuesday by the National Archives. Buzzing and humming noises drown out many words, but snippets of the conversation -- the first of 3,700 hours that Nixon would secretly record -- can be deciphered.
"The purpose of this is to have the whole thing in the file for a potential leak," Nixon says.

"Yes, sir," replies Butterfield, who then goes on to school Nixon on the technical aspects of the voice-activated system and answer his queries about who was aware of its existence.

"There are only five people that know about it outside of (Bob) Haldeman (Nixon's chief of staff) and you and me," says Butterfield, who two years later would disclose the existence of the taping system to the Senate Watergate Committee. The tapes provided the evidence that ended Nixon's presidency and landed a few of his associates in prison.

Since Nixon resigned in 1974, only 420 of the estimated 3,700 hours of his presidential recordings have been released. Most of those tapes deal with the Watergate break-in and the subsequent White House cover-up.

The government seized the tapes after Nixon's resignation. Nixon, and later his estate, went to court to get them back. Legal wrangling and archival processing stalled their release for years.

The latest release, covering events between February and August 1971, is the first in a series of chronological tape openings planned at the archives' complex in College Park, Md.

On the tapes, Nixon talks with White House staff members, foreign policy advisers, congressmen, Cabinet secretaries and reporters. He discusses a vast array of foreign and domestic issues, including Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, the environment, busing, unemployment and anti-war demonstrations.

"It's an amazingly rich resource. Scholars are going to be chewing on this stuff for 50 years," said John Taylor, executive director of the Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda, Calif.

Some of the tapes were released with transcripts that the archives supplied over the years in response to court cases. Some excerpts follow:

• On April 19, 1971, Nixon makes disparaging comments about federal workers. "We have no discipline in this bureaucracy. We never fire anybody. We never reprimand anybody. We never demote anybody. We always promote the sons-of-bitches that kick us in the ass," Nixon tells aide John Ehrlichman.
• On April 27, 1971, Nixon tells secretary Rose Mary Woods the administration must stand firm in the face f protesters opposing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. "They're all a funny bunch ... I got Henry (Kissinger) in here. I said, `Now look, just, they're not going to rattle us one bit. We're gonna stay on our course. This country's not gonna be run by a bunch of goddamned rabble.'"
• On May 7, 1971, Nixon underscores his belief that the anti-war demonstrations represent only a tiny slice of American public opinion. "I thought, uh, that guy standin' up there naked in front of everybody, that must've just turned off the heartland by the millions."