How the Nixon taping system worked

A secret system, February 1971 to July 1973

In February 1971 the Secret Service's Technical Security Division installed a recording system in the White House at President Nixon's request, arranged through his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and Haldeman's deputy, Alexander Butterfield. The first recordings in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room date from February 16, 1971. Only a handful of people knew it existed — among them Haldeman, his assistant Lawrence Higby, Butterfield and the Secret Service technicians who maintained it. Henry Kissinger did not.

The system grew over the following year. Telephones and the President's hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building were added in April 1971, and the presidential lodge at Camp David in May 1972. It ran until July 18, 1973, two days after Butterfield revealed it to the Senate Watergate Committee. In that time it captured about 3,700 hours of conversation.

What it recorded

The tape recorders were Sony reel-to-reel machines running at a very slow speed to fit many hours on a reel, fed by small microphones hidden in the rooms — in the Oval Office, several in the President's desk and two in lamps by the fireplace; in the Cabinet Room, two under the table near the President's place. Telephone calls were recorded by taps on the President's own lines. The slow tape, cheap microphones and room noise — clinking cups, a ticking clock, several people talking at once — are why the recordings are so hard to hear, and why every transcript of them, including the ones on this site, contains errors.

In the Oval Office and the Executive Office Building the system switched itself on: it was tied to the Secret Service's locator that tracked where the President was, and the recorders started when someone spoke. That is why it captured so much that was routine — and so much that Nixon later wished it had not. The Cabinet Room recorder was switched on by hand.

How it was discovered

On Friday, July 13, 1973, Senate Watergate Committee staff interviewing Alexander Butterfield asked whether the President's conversations might have been recorded. Butterfield confirmed it, and repeated it in public testimony on Monday, July 16. The system was disconnected on July 18. The tapes became the central evidence of Watergate: after a year of subpoenas and litigation, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to surrender them in United States v. Nixon on July 24, 1974, and the release on August 5 of the June 23, 1972 “smoking gun” conversation led to his resignation four days later.

How the recordings were released

Congress placed the tapes in federal custody in December 1974 with the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, and the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1977. Archivists then had to listen to every hour, log who spoke about what — the finding aids quoted on each conversation page — and remove passages that concerned national security, other people's privacy or the Nixon family's purely personal matters. Those removals are why some recordings on this site are silence or a tone.

Release came slowly. In 1996, after a lawsuit by the historian Stanley Kutler and Public Citizen, the Archives released the conversations about “abuse of governmental power”, mostly Watergate. The rest followed in chronological releases from 1999 to 2013.

Counts are of conversations by the release that first opened them; the 1996 Abuse of Governmental Power release overlaps the chronological ones.

Using the recordings here

Easy Nixon brings together the released audio, the archivists' finding aids and machine transcripts for all 22,725 conversations the National Archives has catalogued. Start with the famous conversations, browse by month or by topic, or read about the data and how to cite it.