Talk:Nixon White House tapes

"Franklin S. Cooper...was selected by the U.S. Federal Court to assemble a group of six experts to examine the tapes"
I could only find one source supporting this statement (http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/community_pulse/1999_Mar_10.LEADOBIT.html). However, the official Advisory Panel report does indicate how the panel was selected, so have removed the statement. Obviously, if someone knows the details of how the White House and the Special Prosecution Force determined the nominees... Rodiger 01:22, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Mind the gap
The short section on the missing minutes of the tapes does not give the date of the missing conversation, nor who was present. Does anyone know? If so, this should be in the article. Considering how bad the stuff we have is, the stuff erased must be much worse. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rick Norwood (talk • contribs) 13:26, 31 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The gap covered a meeting between Nixon and Haldeman (Nixon's Chief of Staff). According to Haldeman's notes, the Watergate arrests were one of the topics at that meeting. So presumably (assuming the erasure was intentional), what was erased was an even better "smoking gun" than the one that eventually came to light—say, Nixon openly asking Haldeman what they could do to obstruct the FBI investigation and then ordering him to start doing so. So, I doubt we'll actually learn anything new, other than confirming a few minor details, if they ever manage to recover it.


 * As for whatever you're suggesting about a Democratic Senator for Idaho, I don't know what "scholars" you've read, but it sounds like a wild fantasy. One of Idaho's two Senators in 1972 was a Democrat, but it was Frank Church, the powerful maverick leader of the bipartisan anti-War faction, one of the last people Nixon would expect to be able to make a deal with. (You might be thinking of the Democrat from _Utah_, Frank Moss, who does fit the rest of your description a little better--but, even if he was more moderate than Church, he was probably even more of a hardcore idealist over those moderate positions, so I doubt he'd be who Nixon might turn to either.) Also, no matter what was on those 18 minutes, erasing them in no way eliminated all trails left by the scandal. And finally, why would he even need a Democratic ally to erase some tapes? What would be the point of such a risky and costly negotiation just to tell some potential opponent that you're going to cover some stuff up and you want him to know so he can never mention it?


 * If you really want a conspiracy theory to believe in, there's always Al Haig. (That works as a general statement for half the 20th century...) Maybe the 18 minutes was 4 minutes of Nixon and Haldeman conspiring to obstruct justice, followed by them remembering they're taping everything and staging 14 minutes of exonerating conversation to be "accidentally discovered" later if needed. Later, Nixon ordered Haig to erase the 4 minutes and discover the 14, but he instead erased the whole 18. That's still 100% supposition (while I've seen people claim it's true, I've never heard any actual evidence)--but at least, unlike the idea of some secret Nixon-Church deal, it fits with the people involved, their relationship, and the timeline.


 * Anyway, none of this is really relevant to the article unless there's an appropriate source making some conspiracy theory or other notable. --157.131.246.136 (talk) 09:13, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Surreptitious vandalism?
Although the edit history may indicate that I was fixing a spelling error, I noticed that there was a change (see this diff) that appears to be "sneaky" vandalism (see Vandalism). The change stood for an entire month before it was corrected. D RAGON 280 ( T ALK / C ONTRIBS ) 12:56, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Contents of the tapes
There's a lot of good historical fact in here...but nothing about the contents of the tapes? Come on wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.103.238.225 (talk) 07:10, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Recording system dismantling
Article should state when the recording system was dismantled, by whom, and what was said publicly about it. Tempshill (talk) 06:06, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Why did Nixon tape conversations?
This article does not say why nixon taped conversations. Can this information be added? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.99.132.30 (talk) 18:42, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

National Treasure?
There is a part mentioning a movie, National Treasure: Book of Secrets that Riley Poole says the contents of the missing tapes are in the book. Is that really something worth putting there? It doesn't really seem professional to add information based off a fictional movie. wikipedia is supposed to have reputable knowledge, not stupid crap like that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.219.227.74 (talk) 05:15, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

New Research on 18 1/2 Minute Tape Gap
Should this information be added? It seems very relevent.

http://www.forensicmag.com/print/4980 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.244.41.251 (talk) 01:10, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

broken/defunct link, sadly.

I have been reading about the uher 5000 which, according to most sources, was the main playback device for these tapes at the white house. two such machines ("exhibits 60 & 60B") were used, one by nixon & one by his secretary; it is OR, of course... speculation.... but based on what I know about tape recorders (a lot) & these machines in particular, the foot-pedal accident is highly implausible. what's far more likely, & still well away from any inference of deliberate action, is that nixon himself was provided with a uher accessory microphone of the model M153. this microphone combines several functions in one hand-held unit, & doubtless would have appealed to the secret service techs obliged to deal with nixon's presidential requirements & his "spectacular ineptitude" with tech. the m153 is a combination remote control, microphone & speaker, see? if someone was struggling to make out the exact words on these 15/16ips tapes (poor frequency response, off-mic voices, reverberant & noisy sound), they might benefit from a small hand-held speaker that combined quick rewind control during a review of these recordings. however, this mic was designed as part of the uher's functionality as a dictation machine, & the same sliding switch that operates the quick rewind feature would also place the machine into record if operated incorrectly. (pull down to rewind, release to resume playback, push upwards to record) all of this is described in the ops manual for the uher 5000.

meanwhile, rose mary wood's footpedal, unless its functionality had been purposely altered from stock, could not put the machine into record during normal playback, accidentally or otherwise. the ops manual describes, however, a 'fast erase' procedure that could be performed after a transcription was complete, so that the tape could be returned for re-use with nothing confidential left on it to be discovered by another user... however, according to the manual, performing this type of erasure (by simultaneously pressing rewind & record) would leave a 'beeping' sound on the tape. (I'll take a look at the schematic, but I'd speculate that this is probably just bias oscillator rendered audible by being applied to the tape while it's moving at high speed & then played back at 15/16ips.) none of the examinations of these tapes mention this tone. I gave seen elsewhere that it was once thought possible to recover audio from the erased portion of this tape by examining the very edge of the recorded area & exploiting the manufacturing differences (head height) of the uher & sony machines, i.e. incomplete erasure. I don't know if this resulted in anything useable- I suspect not. fascinating stuff.

duncanrmi (talk) 18:11, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Evil?
Now, I was just reading about these, and the second sentence stood out to me for one reason, it called Nixon evil, reading "the very evil U.S. President Nixon". Why is this said? Or is it just someone's opinion and added it in? --194.83.93.50 (talk) 17:47, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
 * A POV/vandalism edit, it's been removed, thanks for pointing it out. Shearonink (talk) 19:47, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Nixon tapes in popular culture
A bullet point should be inserted here mentioning that the tapes are referenced in the new X-Men Days of Future Past movie, which partially takes place in 1973. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.239.177.26 (talk) 18:08, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
 * It might also be worth adding a mention of the story told by Arlo Guthrie, and included on the page about his album, Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited: “At the end of the re-recording of "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", Guthrie launches into a postscript story about attending Jimmy Carter's inauguration in 1977. He meets Carter's son Chip, who tells him of the discovery of an opened copy of Alice's Restaurant left behind by the Nixon family when they left the White House, leading to speculation around the fact that the title song and the gap in the Watergate tapes are both 18½ minutes in length”. Jock123 (talk) 13:54, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

The actual recordings are public domain
I just found that the Nixon White House tapes are here and are in the public domain if anyone wants to migrate them.Victor Grigas (talk) 05:55, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Good idea. I have added your links to the text of the article in 'Post Presidency' section. --- Professor JR (talk) 15:45, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Extraneous Clinton Reference
This paragraph appears at the end of the "Post-Presidency" section of the article:

In August 2015, Washington Post associate editor and investigative journalist Bob Woodward, compared Hillary Clinton's handling of her email controversy to Nixon's handling of the matter of the tapes, saying Clinton's emails "remind him of the Nixon tapes".[25]

Why is this information included in this article? Even if Woodward did say that and even if the quote is cited, it's simply not relevant to the article. Who cares if a present-day scandal "reminds" Bob Woodward of the Nixon tapes? I think if should be removed as it's not relevant to the article and un-encyclopedic. If anyone wants to include this info in an article about the Clinton emails, that would be more appropriate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.162.111.188 (talk) 03:34, 1 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Pundits state things all the time. There is no secondary coverage of Woodward's quote indicating any relevance. - Location (talk) 20:23, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Agreement was reached earlier on 'Hillary Clinton email controversy' TalkPage to include Bob Woodward quote here, as opposed to inclusion in that entry. Please seek agreement & consensus before blanking again. --- Professor JR (talk) 08:18, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * You know better than that. Consensus is required to modify articles, not to reject disputed material. Even if your claim were true that consensus was reached elsewhere — which does not seem to be the case — editors rejecting content on one article cannot force editors to accept the content in a different article. I've removed the disputed material as POV, irrelevant, and poorly sourced. Don't add this again, as you know you are on thin ice generally with respect to politics-related edits. - Wikidemon (talk) 08:42, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

History of the Nixon White House taping system 3rd paragraph
In under the header "History of the Nixon White House taping system" on the 3rd paragraph it is stated that the tape machines ran at an extremely slow speed of 15/16 inches per second. I suggest review of the listed sourcebeing number eight. 15 inches per second was generally used in broadcast and professional use due to the better quality it offers and is generally considered the FASTEST speed reel-to-reel tape recorder run at, with other speeds on systems like compact cassette (first common use being dictation) using only 1 7/8th inches per second. I therefore put it to the editors that the sentence in question is innacurate. 15"/s would only offer 60 to 120 minutes depending on tape size, this being unlikely in a voice-only recording system. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.114.168.252 (talk) 19:59, 13 June 2017 (UTC)


 * You quoted the "15/16", but then acted as if it was 15. It's 1/16th of 15. In other words, half of the standard "low-quality" speed of 1 7/8. At that speed, you get 16 or 32 _hours_ on standard tape. But they weren't using standard tape, they were using 0.5mil tape, which allows you to fit much more tape on the same reel size. Plus, the recorders were sound-activated (and also manually-activated, for residential areas of the White House), so many of them actually recorded weeks on a single reel. --157.131.246.136 (talk) 09:32, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Roosevelt taping
From the introduction: Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; the practice was initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt[4] in 1940.

The Roosevelt reference is misleading. According to the reference (NY Times article), Roosevelt recorded only 8 hours (news conferences, and inadvertently a few private conversations), during a short time (11 weeks). In contrast, while Nixon recorded tapes of all Oval Office conversations for 2 1/2 years. The wording of the article ("the practice was initiated") misleadingly suggests that Nixon's recording was parallel to Roosevelt's. I've revised the wording to characterize Roosevelt's recording efforts more accurately. Omc (talk) 12:47, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Smoking Gun
Added a dispute tag, the primary Watergate article treats the Smoking Gun tape as indeed being about the cover-up, while this article states it was about a smaller matter and mistakenly assumed to be the cover-up. As such, a dispute is born. Editoronthewiki (talk) 17:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and added a dispute tag on the Watergate scandal article too. JungleEntity (talk) 22:44, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
 * This seems to have been a POV pushing attempt on the part of one editor, credited to at least one highly dubious source. I have restored the original text and added some more references to back its facts up. — python coder (talk &#124; contribs) 05:10, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Roosevelt Tapes
From the introduction: “ Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; President Franklin D. Roosevelt recorded Oval Office press conferences for a short period in 1940.” This makes it appears as though the practice of recording White House conversations was limited to Roosevelt and Nixon, while in reality it was practiced by all the Presidents from Roosevelt to Nixon.https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/history-presidents-conducting-secret-white-house-recordings/story?id=47416563 195.252.198.47 (talk) 16:55, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Oliver Stone's speculations
It may be content fit for an In popular culture sub-section, but in Oliver Stone's movie Nixon (1995), it's suggested that not only were the 18 1/2 minutes erased by Nixon on purpose, but that they contained Nixon's paranoia in regards to the JFK assassination as such that in the immediate time before the assassination, he may have been contacted by the conspirators who wanted Kennedy dead due to the Bay of Pigs fiasco as well as because of his liberal stance on civil rights, but Nixon chose to ignore what the conspirators implied to him and later felt guilt over having looked the other way. Nixon had discussed this issue with his White House staff on that specific tape, but didn't want to get in trouble with the racist mob gang leaders and high-ranking businessmen implied to be the conspirators behind the assassination, so on a drunken night haunted by his own demons, he chose to erase that evidence. --2003:DA:CF0A:F272:A088:F077:5563:D663 (talk) 06:17, 30 November 2023 (UTC)