- WASHINGTON (AP) -- For two decades, President Richard Nixon's White House
tapes have been preserved and protected in a cold storage vault at the
National Archives. Now, technicians are slicing them up with a razor blade.
Not that they want to. A judge ordered the archives to cut out personal,
private and some political conversations from the 3,280 hours of conversations
the public still hasn't heard. Nixon discusses his daughter Tricia's Rose
Garden wedding. Snip. Nixon plans a political campaign trip. Snip. Family
members talk about their health, or one another. Snip. Snip. Altogether
820 hours of tape are being cut -- about a quarter of the total. "After
all these years of protecting the tapes, it was really a traumatic moment
to actually begin cutting them," said Sharon Fawcett, deputy assistant
archivist for presidential libraries. It's delicate, tedious work that
will cost $600,000 and take at least six years. "This tape has the
consistency of thick Saran Wrap," says Dick McNeill, supervisory audio
visual specialist for the Nixon presidential materials project. "Your
audio cassette is twice the thickness of what we're dealing with."
McNeill and three white-gloved technicians work in a secure, windowless
room on the ground floor of the archives. They listen, cut and splice for
three or four hours at a time -- that's about as long as anyone can keep
at it. Some days, they hear a Nixon tirade or National Security Adviser
Henry Kissinger's low-toned drones on foreign policy. Other days, they
get an earful of someone vacuuming the Oval Office. There are no transcripts,
only conversation logs cued with the first and last words of talk to edit
out. A stopwatch and calculator are used to fast forward the tape on reel-to-reel
recorders like those used in the Nixon White House in the early 1970s.
The tape experts mark the beginning and end of each edit with a special
archival pen. Then they slide the tape off the machine, thread it into
a splicing block and cut it with a razor blade. "You have to hold
it firmly and make a really fast, firm cut," Fawcett says. Nixon secretly
tape recorded conversations for 2 1/2 years. In the Oval Office, five microphones
were installed in the president's desk and two in wall lamps by the fireplace.
They were stowed under the table in the Cabinet Room, at the Camp David
presidential retreat and in Nixon's hideaway office at the Old Executive
Office Building. Recorders also were wired to various phones, including
one in the Lincoln Sitting Room, where Nixon liked to make calls in the
evening and listen to classical music. The government seized all the tapes
when Nixon resigned in 1974. In all, there are 3,700 hours of conversation.
That's enough tape to stretch 521 kilometres, or farther than Washington
to New York. To hear them all, a person would have to listen to them eight
hours a day, five days a week for nearly two years. Over the years, about
420 hours of tape related to Nixon's resignation have been released. The
most famous snippet is the "smoking gun" conversation recorded
six days after the Watergate break-in, in which Nixon instructs chief of
staff H.R. Haldeman to tell the FBI: "Don't go any further into this
case, period." All along, Nixon's estate has been trying to gain custody
of the personal and private conversations, as the U.S. Supreme Court ordered
in the 1970s. And last spring, the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the archives
to comply. A full copy of the tapes, including the personal and private
sections, has been offered to the Nixon estate. The archives also will
offer the estate any cuttings from the original tape, but those flimsy
wisps likely will be destroyed, Fawcett says.
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