Richard nixon installs secret taping system in white house

The demand for the still-unreleased tapes by the Watergate Special Prosecutor eventually led to a landmark Supreme Court case United States v. The burglary set in motion investigations that uncovered other abuses of power by President Nixon and several members of his administration.

Nixon was impeached by the House of Representatives in July , and he resigned in disgrace on August 9, President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon on September 8, , for any crimes he may have committed while president. Read : Stanley I. All rights reserved. Subject Organization. Subject Person. End Date. Start Date. Subject Geog Full Text. Description Place Made. Provenance Gifter. Title Item Name. Source Full Text.

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After Nixon left office, the practice of systematically and secretly recording conversations in the White House was discontinued. To address issues that arose during and in the aftermath of Watergate, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act of Beginning with the Reagan Administration, all official Presidential and Vice Presidential records are considered public records and are managed by the National Archives and Records Administration.

To learn more about the recordings of the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations, please explore the links below:. Presidential Recordings Project. Nixon's First Week of Taping.

Breadcrumb Home News. Whereas commercial recordings usually have a signal-to-noise ratio between 40 to 60 decibels, many of the Nixon tapes range between only six and ten decibels.

For the most part, the White House Telephone tapes are audible. However, some recordings made in the Lincoln Sitting Room are not. The automatic gain control AGC occasionally failed on the recording machines at this location.

The AGC automatically adjusted the sound levels of the differing conversations. When this failed, the person speaking from the Lincoln Sitting Room is barely audible.

The person he is speaking with is completely inaudible. The Secret Service opted to use thin 0. A single reel of tape could record up to six and a half hours of conversation.

Because Nixon desired a voice-activated system which required little maintenance or supervision, the Secret Service had little alternative. The original tapes are very thin and fragile. The tape thickness and recording speed are far from ideal for use in recording spoken sound. The placement of the microphones also caused many problems. In some cases conversations are not audible because the participants who were speaking were not near the microphones. In the EOB, four microphones were installed in the President's desk.

Meetings taking place near this desk are audible. However, no microphones were installed in the sitting area. As a result, conversations in this area are faint and difficult to hear. Extraneous room and background noises are evident throughout the entire collection. These noises tend to obscure portions of meetings and conversations. Although the Oval Office series of recordings are the easiest to comprehend, there are some individual conversations that are difficult to understand.

Because five microphones were placed in the President's desk, they picked up the sound of anyone writing on the desk, or setting down a coffee cup or a glass. Furthermore, they picked up the sound of Nixon's chair banging into the desk, his feet banging on the desk when he put his feet up, and the sound of his knees knocking against the kneewell of his desk. One microphone was placed next to the telephone. The telephone ringing frequently blocked out small portions of conversations.

For example, the President kept a ticking clock on his desk in the EOB. Unfortunately, the Secret Service technicians installed one of the microphones right next to the clock and the ticking is recorded very clearly. At Camp David, the President often had a fire lit in his study while he worked. The snapping and crackling of wood burning in the fireplace interfered with the recordings of some of his conversations.

There were other extraneous noises that affected the quality of the recordings. On occasion, the helicopter rotor blades from Marine One completely obliterated conversation taking place in the Oval Office. Doors opening and closing briefly interfered with conversations. Unlike his predecessors who consciously made the decision to record a meeting or conversation and manually controlled their recording systems, Nixon opted to use a voice-activated system that would record virtually everything that was said while he was present.

This meant that, in addition to recording formal meetings, briefings, telephone conversations, and long stretches of miscellaneous room noise, informal daily meetings between Nixon and members of his immediate staff were recorded as well.

These meetings were often unstructured and free-flowing. They answered questions before they were elucidated and repeatedly changed conversation topics.

Moreover, participants alluded to conversations and meetings that took place at unknown times in the past. These factors, at times, render some conversations difficult to interpret. As a result of all of these factors, the overall quality of the recordings are relatively poor.

Machine malfunctions, volume fluctuations, inferior equipment and tape quality, and extraneous noise all hinder the intelligibility of the tapes. In addition, the voices in the meetings and conversations themselves, sometimes further obscured what was being said. These consist of twelve and a half hours of segments of conversations and meetings which were introduced as evidence by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force WSPF and played in court during the Watergate trials of members of Nixon's staff.

This group consisted of forty-seven and one half hours of segments of conversations and meetings subpoenaed by the WSPF but never used in court. Staff members of the WSPF prepared transcripts for most of the conversations and meetings included in these two file segments. The third public release of Nixon's White House tapes consisted of segments of Watergate-related conversations for the months of May and June which total three hours. These conversations, although not subpoenaed by the WSPF, were determined by the Nixon Project archivists to contain Watergate-related information.

Although there are no transcripts for these segments, the National Archives did prepare descriptive tape logs to correspond to the conversation. The tape logs include the date, time, location, names of conversation participants, and an outline of the contents of the conversation.

The Archives released the May-June segments and their corresponding tape logs in and plans on releasing all remaining Watergate-related segments as early as November See also: H.