Nixon’s First Week of Taping: The Decision to Tape

Ken Hughes, Research Specialist, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center, University of Virginia

“I will not be transcribed,” Richard M. Nixon said the day he began secretly recording his Oval Office conversations (Conversation 450-010, PRDE Excerpt A). The President’s poor powers of prediction would have unforeseen consequences for all three men in the Oval Office on the morning of 16 February 1971. Less than three years later, Nixon White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield would reveal the recording system’s existence, reluctantly but honestly, in response to a direct question while testifying under oath on live national television, thereby becoming an unexpected star witness before the Senate committee investigating the break-in and bugging of Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington’s Watergate office and apartment complex.1 White House chief of staff Harry Robbins (H. R. “Bob”) Haldeman would go to prison when a tape transcript proved he had perjured himself before the same committee. And transcripts produced by the White House staff at the President’s own instruction would prove Nixon had illegally interfered with the Watergate investigation. Once they were published, he had no choice but to resign or face the likelihood of impeachment, conviction, and removal from office. The evidence that ended Nixon’s presidency came from his own system for documenting it.

So why did he set up the system in the first place? Hindsight, oddly, makes Nixon’s decision harder to understand. From the day the world first learned of Nixon’s tapes and for years afterward, secret White House recording remained linked in public discussion to one particular president and one particular scandal.2 “Nixon Bugged Own Offices,” the Chicago Tribune marveled, connecting the secret taping with the Watergate break-in.3 Through subsequent congressional hearings, investigations, the President’s resignation, and the criminal trials and convictions of many of his men, the phrase “the White House tapes” was used synonymously with “the Nixon tapes.”

But Nixon was not the first president to secretly tape; he was the sixth in a row stretching back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In this context, Nixon’s decision to tape looks less like the self-destructive manifestation of one man’s character and more like part of a trend. This does not eliminate, however, the element of personal responsibility: Nixon—like Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson—made his own conscious, deliberate decision to tape advisers and visitors unawares.4 (FDR intended his system for recording news conferences, which are semi-public events where participants speak for quotation; Truman inherited the system, like everything else, from his predecessor and used it little if at all.) Each president’s decision reflected his individual character as well as the office and the age.

In this context, it would have been more unusual if Nixon had decided not to tape—a break with a precedent set by his immediate predecessors. All five of them, moreover, had managed to keep their recording secret and their tapes under their personal control. It would have required great foresight for Nixon to realize that, for him alone, the decision to tape would backfire so spectacularly.

Context explains why Nixon thought he could record White House conversations and keep it a secret; the tapes themselves reveal his purpose for doing so. Nixon outlined his reasons to Haldeman and Butterfield. “Maybe we need something just to be sure that we can correct the record,” Nixon said (Conversation 450-010, PRDE Excerpt A).

Tapes possess an authority—an objectivity—that memos and memories just cannot equal. Nixon appears to have shared with his predecessors the desire for an incontrovertible record. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s anger over an alleged misquote by the New York Times (“a deliberate lie,” he branded it in a press conference) led to the installation of the first secret White House recording system in 1940.5 While it remains unclear why John F. Kennedy installed a secret recording system, “Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s personal secretary, recalled that the president was enraged after the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba when several advisers who had supported the plan in closed meetings claimed later to have opposed it,” writes historian Sheldon Stern.6 And Nixon knew from personal experience that Lyndon B. Johnson had used his tapes to correct the record. Late in the 1968 campaign, after Nixon campaign aides implied that Johnson had misled the Republican candidate about his efforts to get Vietnam peace talks off the ground, LBJ challenged the allegation by quoting to Nixon a transcript of a telephone briefing he had earlier given to the presidential candidates.7 In seeking an incontrovertible account of his meetings, Nixon once again followed in his predecessors’ footsteps.

Taping was a defensive measure for a president to protect himself from misrepresentation. “Johnson had warned Nixon and me about what would happen. ‘Everybody in this town,’ he said, ‘will call somebody else and say, the President wants this and the President wants that,’” Haldeman recalled in 1988. “We found this was true.” Haldeman’s perjury conviction did not diminish his outrage that (other) people would give false accounts of presidential conversations: “Sometimes the misreporting of fact had a bad intent, sometimes it represented a willful manufacture of false knowledge in order to gain some end.”8 Tapes would trump anyone’s account of a conversation—something Nixon thought would work in his favor both during his presidency and after: “Such an objective record might also be useful to the extent that any President feels vulnerable to revisionist histories—whether from within or without his administration—and particularly so when the issues are as controversial and the personalities as volatile as they were in my first term.”9 The risk that the tapes might protect history from his own revisions was one Nixon did not fully grasp until it was too late.

Another of Nixon’s motives for taping, however, was more personal: he felt uncomfortable with people taking notes in his meetings. The White House had a system for generating “color reports” of formal meetings and ceremonial events. Aides assigned the role of “anecdotalist” would attend and write up publicity-oriented presidential meetings with celebrities, sports figures, performers, and poster children. They would also write detailed memos—sometimes word-for-word transcripts—of substantive meetings with foreign and domestic leaders. The system was one way Nixon made his administration the best-documented in history, but Nixon sometimes found it awkward. At the time of his recording system’s installation, the President viewed it as an alternative to keeping a third party on hand all the time. “I won’t have to have people in the room when I see people, which is much better,” Nixon said (Conversation 450-010, PRDE Excerpt A).

Despite Nixon’s intentions, the tapes did not replace his note takers and anecdotalists, nor did he use the tapes to contradict anyone’s account of a conversation with him—until Watergate. Then the attempt backfired. In sworn testimony at a Senate hearing, White House counsel-turned-informant John W. Dean testified that the President had told him that raising $1 million for hush money payments to the Watergate defendants would be “no problem.”10 To counter the charge, Haldeman testified, “I did listen to the tape of the entire meeting . . . The President said, ‘There is no problem in raising a million dollars, we can do that, but it would be wrong.’” A jury ultimately heard the tape and found that Haldeman, not Dean, had lied under oath. All of the President’s tapes did make it possible to “correct the record,” just not in the way he had hoped.11

Voice-Activated Recording

In one crucial way, Nixon’s taping system did break precedent. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson could turn their Oval Office recorders on or off with a switch. Nixon wanted one of those, too, but his Chief of Staff objected: “I responded, ‘Mr. President, you’ll never remember to turn it on except when you don’t want it, and when you do want it you’re always going to be shouting—afterwards, when it’s too late—that no one turned it on.’ I added, silently, in my own thoughts, that this president was far too inept with machinery ever to make a success of a switch system.”12 Haldeman came up with the technologically advanced (for its time) solution of a voice-activated system—one that would start recording whenever the President or anyone in his presence spoke. The system solved one problem for the President, but created a much larger one. “For want of a toggle switch,” said one White House wag, “the Presidency was lost.”13

On the other hand, for want of a toggle switch, history gained the single most accurate and comprehensive record of a presidency there ever has been or likely ever will be. Between 16 February 1971 and 12 July 1973, Nixon’s recording system captured 3,432 hours of the presidency, raw and unfiltered. All the previous presidents’ tapes added together equal only a fraction of Nixon’s total.

An objective record of any 30-month span of any presidency would be priceless, but this particular period was pivotal in a number of ways for American and world history. In the space of two and a half years, Nixon went to China, negotiated the first nuclear arms control treaty, imposed wage and price controls, took the nation off the gold standard, withdrew the last American ground troops from Vietnam, negotiated the so-called Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, and won a reelection victory that realigned American politics for decades. The tapes take us behind the scenes of these historic events and more.

These recordings provide not just a greater quantity of information, but a greater quality. The tapes allow us into the Oval Office with the president’s top advisers grappling with problems as they arise. Listeners can experience the presidency as Nixon learns of new challenges, weighs alternative responses, and makes (or fails to make) decisions. If an ideal way to study history would be via a time machine that somehow allowed us all to see and hear the events as they had actually unfolded, the tapes provide the next best thing. Instead of history “as told to,” as summarized for the file, as packaged for public consumption, or as remembered years later, the tapes provide the raw sounds of history happening in real time.

Although the tapes make it possible to answer some questions definitively (what exactly did the President say and do on certain dates and at specific times) they do not make the historian’s task simpler. People’s words, whether captured on tape or not, require interpretation, regarding the speaker’s meaning, candor, and historical context. The tapes are a priceless and peerless source, but they do not replace other valuable sources of historical information and methods of interpretation.

The Taping System

The Secret Service accepted the task of installing a secret White House taping system with some reluctance. Its Technical Services Division, after all, had the responsibility of preventing anyone from bugging the Oval Office.14 Nevertheless, it did as the President asked.

Working over the weekend of 13–14 February 1971, a handful of technicians concealed five microphones in the Oval Office desk and two in the lamp fixtures on either side of the fireplace, wiring them to a pair of Sony 800B tape recorders hidden in WT-1, an old telephone frame room in the White House basement. The tape machines powered up whenever the First Family Locator system indicated that the President had entered the Oval Office; then, when someone spoke (or put a coffee cup down on the desk) a voice-activated relay caused the machine to start recording.

The TSD also hid six microphones in the lighting fixtures of the Cabinet Room for a manual recording system that the President could activate by pushing a button under the conference table. Butterfield, who as appointments secretary always knew where the President was, could also turn on the Cabinet Room system from his office.15

Security and secrecy were paramount in the system’s installation and operation. One electrician who helped pull sound cables through the White House walls was not even informed of their purpose. Behind the locked doors of WT-1, the tape recorders themselves operated within a locked metal cabinet with only three keys, each of them held by an employee who took part in setting up or maintaining the system. The Secret Service kept the completed tape reels secured in the cabinet as well, marking the recording date and location on each tape box. Once 10–12 tapes accumulated, they wrapped the tapes in heavy paper and transferred the bundle to a combination safe in Room 43 of the Executive Office Building next door to the White House. Only two officials had keys to the room or knew the safe’s combination. An alarm system further secured the rooms where tapes were recorded and stored.16

Among the President’s inner circle of advisers, Haldeman alone knew about the secret taping system. Haldeman shared that knowledge out of necessity with two aides who were entrusted to arrange the installation, Butterfield and Lawrence M. Higby.17 For 30 months, Nixon’s system remained a secret, one that was well-protected and tightly held. “Over the next two years, Nixon let the asset build, without once drawing on it,” historian Stephen E. Ambrose writes. “He had no transcripts made, nor did he listen to any of the tapes. He just continued to make them.”18

Once Watergate brought the tapes into the spotlight, audio experts found much to criticize. The Sony 800B was an off-the-shelf consumer tape recorder priced under $200, a “middle quality device—not a professional machine,” according to Ed Myers of the Acoustical Society of America. Setting the recording speed at 15/16ths of an inch per second meant each tape could hold up to six hours of conversation, but the slow speed meant lower sound fidelity. (Professionals, by comparison, recorded at 7.5 inches per second or faster.) With a four-track tape machine, the inputs of four distinct microphones could have been recorded independently, making it possible to separate the voices of speakers when they overlapped. Nixon’s Oval Office system, however, combined the inputs of seven microphones into a single, monaural track on which every voice and sound ran together. Having a voice-activated system saved tape, but whenever anyone began speaking, it took a second or so for the recorder to reach full speed. As a result, the first few words out of the speaker’s mouth might be lost, replaced by a “whipping” sound. Since the voice-activated relay stopped recording after a few seconds of silence, the whipping sound pops up not just at the start of conversations, but repeatedly within them. The use of five-inch reels made it possible to play the tapes back on a variety of available consumer devices, but the size limited recording time to six and a half hours per reel. Technicians replaced the tapes on the Oval Office and Executive Office of the President machines every day except on weekends, so sometimes the tape ran out on Sunday.19

Other sound problems reflect the system’s furtive nature. Microphone placement was dictated by stealth, not by sound quality, and visitors to the Oval Office rarely spoke directly into a lamp or the President’s desk. Coffee cups, cutlery, pens, papers, knees, elbows, slapping palms, and rapping fingertips—all these come through loud and clear. The office tapes are noisy.20

The sheer volume of Nixon tapes poses a challenge to historians. As of 21 August 2013, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had declassified 2,658 hours of recordings. NARA does not furnish transcripts with the recordings, having calculated that it can require 100 hours of work to transcribe an hour of conversation.21 At that rate it would take 132 years of work just to handle the Nixon tapes currently available. Archivists have helped researchers by preparing invaluable tape logs listing the date, time, location, participants, and major topics covered in each conversation—and even those finding aids total more than 30,000 pages. In the absence of lavish resources, however, transcribing all of the Nixon tapes has been an impractical goal.

Yet they are too valuable to ignore. In 2000, the Presidential Recordings Program (PRP) of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center hired me to start listening to the Oval Office tapes in chronological order, to summarize each conversation, and to identify those of historic value. By the time I made it through February and March of 1971, it appeared that we would have the resources to undertake a multiyear project to bring 20 hours of Nixon Oval Office transcripts to publication. To make the selection as comprehensive and objective as possible, PRP decided to take an all-or-nothing approach. Rather than evaluate each passage individually for its historic merit, we chose the topics of greatest historical value and selected every passage of every Oval Office tape from February and March 1971 in which they were discussed. Although some topics—China, SALT, Vietnam—have universally acknowledged historical interest, the selection process involved some editorial triage. The judgment and guidance provided by Taylor Branch, Patrick J. Garrity, Irwin F. Gellman, Max Holland, Timothy Naftali, Robert Schulzinger, Philip D. Zelikow, and the late Ernest R. May, ensured that the best made the cut.

Although many months of effort then went into preparing transcripts, the money ran out before the work did. To ensure the highest quality of transcripts with the fewest mistakes, at least four PRP scholars review each transcript separately prior to publication, a costly and time-consuming process whose payoff is the highest possible standard of accuracy. While first and sometimes second drafts for most of the transcripts were completed, none had advanced through all the necessary stages of review to meet PRP standards for publication.

For years the transcripts languished, unread and unused. Rather than let this valuable work go to waste, former PRP chair David G. Coleman decided that the program would marshal the resources to ready a portion of the draft transcripts for publication—those from Nixon’s first week of secret taping. The work of two eminent scholars with expertise in Nixon’s administration and his tapes proved an invaluable addition to my own efforts in refining and clarifying these seven days of transcripts: Erin Mahan, the chief historian of the Office of Secretary of Defense, and former chief of the Arms Control Asia and Africa Division of the Office of the Historian at the Department of State; and Patrick J. Garrity, a Miller Center research associate who has written extensively on American foreign policy and nuclear strategy. Current PRP chair Marc J. Selverstone and Assistant Editor Keri Matthews brought vast experience with the White House tapes to bear as they reviewed and revised the transcripts. Building on the work we had done (along with former PRP colleague W. Taylor Fain, now a professor at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington) in the first phase of the project, we completed the necessary reviews to make the following transcripts as complete, accessible, and accurate as possible for the reader.

The resulting week of transcripts reveals only a fraction of a fraction of the potential of the Nixon tapes to illuminate the presidency and the man who held that office during a pivotal era, but even this glimpse of “the biggest job in the world” is revealing. We hear the President’s initial optimism that the new White House taping system will solve some of his long-standing problems (Conversation 450-010, PRDE Excerpt A; and Conversation 452-017, PRDE Excerpt A). (The new problems it would cause him only became apparent later.) The President and National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger start out speaking optimistically about Lamson 719, a South Vietnamese ground offensive aimed at disrupting the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia.22 Their “decent interval” exit strategy for Vietnam, one that would put a year or two between their final withdrawal of American ground forces and the South’s final collapse, is visible as Kissinger briefs the President on his hopes to achieve a settlement that will give Saigon “a year without war” (Conversation 451-023, PRDE Excerpt A).23 We listen as Kissinger gives the President new information about the USSR’s most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile, the SS-9, explaining that a recent slowdown in the Soviet missile silo-building program may be intended by the Kremlin to signal restraint, or to prepare the SS-9 for a more lethal warhead system that could accurately strike multiple U.S. targets (Conversation 450-011, PRDE excerpt B). The United States would have to take both possibilities into account as it negotiated the first strategic nuclear arms control treaty.

In this first week of recordings and transcripts, Nixon also orders a secret review of his National Security Council staff for “traitors” after learning that one former member had gone to work for Common Cause (Conversation 452-017, PRDE Excerpt A). Later, the leak of the Pentagon Papers would inspire a full-blown conspiracy theory, and the Special Investigations Unit he created to investigate it would bring together the men who would later organize the Watergate break-in. The President complains about the “disdain” of Federal Reserve chairman Arthur F. Burns, a Nixon appointee who sometimes criticized the administration’s economic performance (Conversation 455-022, PRDE Excerpt A). Nixon’s displeasure with Burns would erupt later in the year when he planted false stories in the news media that the Fed chair had requested a $20,000 pay raise to his $42,500 salary.24 We hear the President reject wage and price controls, but acknowledge that he might have to impose them in the future, as he ultimately did later in the year (Conversation 455-022, PRDE Excerpt A).

Richard Nixon’s first week of taping provides only a glimpse of his presidency, but in it we see the shape of things to come.

Notes

[1]

Butterfield later recalled that he had made a conscious decision not to reveal the secret “unless, I want to repeat that, unless I were asked a very direct question pertaining to such a system. And of course I have to tell you I felt that that was highly unlikely.” “Conversations Between Alexander P. Butterfield and David Thelen About the Discovery of the Watergate Tapes,” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (1989): 1253.

But Butterfield was asked when the Senate Watergate Committee’s staff interviewed him on 13 July 1973. The key question was posed by a Republican staffer trying to check a suspicion of secret presidential taping raised in the testimony of the committee’s star witness, former White House Counsel John W. Dean. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein captured the pivotal moment in The Final Days: “Don Sanders, the deputy counsel to the Republican minority, thought there might be some way to document the President’s innocence. He led to his question cautiously. ‘Dean indicated that there might be some facility for taping. He said that on April 15 [1973] in the President’s EOB office he had the impression he was being taped, and that at the end of the meeting the President walked to a corner of the room and lowered his voice as if he was trying to stay off the tape himself . . . Is it possible Dean knew what he was talking about?’” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (New York: Avon, 1976), 45.

[2] In the days immediately following Butterfield’s testimony, Americans read reports that Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, JohnF. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson secretly taped as well, but only the Nixon tapes remained the subject of daily discussion for more than a year. Chalmers M. Roberts, “Bugging the Oval Office,” Washington Post, 18 July 1973; Jules Witcover, “Kennedy Archives Yield 193 White House Recordings,” Washington Post, 18 July 1973; and Jules Witcover, “LBJ White House Bugging Reported,” Washington Post, 19 July 1973.
[3] Arthur Siddon and Jim Squires, “Nixon Bugged Own Offices,” Chicago Tribune, 17 July 1973.
[4] Eisenhower recorded an unknown number of Oval Office meetings and had staff transcribe at least two dozen. Kennedy recorded about 260 hours of conversation in the Oval Office, in the Cabinet Room, and on the telephone. While Kennedy began recording in the middle of his second year in office, his successor started almost immediately upon assuming the presidency. Johnson limited his taping to telephone calls until December 1967, when he had recording systems installed “in the President’s private lounge next to the Oval Office” (which produced 5 tapes) and in the Cabinet Room (which yielded 138 tapes). The Johnson tapes total 800 hours. John Powers, “The History of Presidential Audio Recordings and the Archival Issues Surrounding Their Use,” CIDS paper, National Archives and Records Administration, 12 July 1996.
[5] Ibid., 4–7.
[6] Sheldon Stern, “The JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes,” chap. 1 in The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), Kindle edition.
[7] See Richard Nixon to Lyndon Johnson, 3 November 1968, Conversation WH6811-02-13710. Shortly after the 1968 election, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told Nixon that Johnson “had taping facilities which recorded his Oval Office conversations.” H. R. Haldeman and Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power (New York: Dell, 1978), 119. It is unclear whether Nixon knew about taping during earlier administrations, including Eisenhower’s, in which he served as vice president.
[8] H. R. Haldeman, “The Decision to Record Presidential Conversations,” Prologue Magazine (Summer 1988), http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1988/summer/haldeman.html.
[9] Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Touchstone, 1978), 501.
[10] Lawrence Meyer and Peter Osnos, “Fired Aide Details Talks on Payoffs, Clemency Offer,” Washington Post, 26 June 1973.
[11] “Grand Jury Indictment Spells Out Cover-Up,” Washington Post, 2 March 1974.
[12] Haldeman, “The Decision to Record Presidential Conversations.”
[13] Haldeman and DiMona, The Ends of Power, 120.
[14] The Secret Service personnel that routinely swept the President’s offices for listening devices were subsequently informed that parts of the Oval Office and Executive Office of the President were “off limits.” Louis Sims to Eugene P. Dagg, “Secret Service Participation in Tapings,” 6 December 1973, “RG 87 Records of the U.S. Secret Service, Memoranda, CO-1-23206—WH Taping System 1971–1974, 4” folder, RG 87 Records of the U.S. Secret Service, Installation, and Maintenance of the White House Sound Recording System and Tapes, CO-1-23206—WH Taping System … to Rm 522, Box 1, Richard Nixon Presidential Library; Ken Hughes, Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 76.
[15]

Later, the White House expanded the taping system. In April 1971, technicians put taps on one phone line in the Oval Office, on another in the Executive Office of the President (the hideaway office Nixon kept next door to the White House), and on a third extension in the Lincoln Sitting Room. The telephone taping system was also tied to the First Family Locator system, so it only recorded calls from rooms where the President was physically present. That same month, technicians placed four hidden microphones in the EOP office desk and wired them to voice-activated recorders in Room 175 1/2 of the Executive Office Building. The TSD further secured these machines, like the ones in WT-1, in a locked cabinet with only three keys.

In May 1972, the Secret Service added a voice-activated recording system with a single microphone to the study of Aspen Lodge at Camp David. It also tapped two telephones in that room, one on the President’s desk and another on the table. At Butterfield’s instruction, the Secret Service removed the room recording system in March 1973 and the two telephone recording systems in June 1973.

Following Butterfield’s public testimony before the Watergate Committee, the Secret Service disconnected all of Nixon’s other recording systems on 18 July 1973. Eugene P. Dagg to H. Stuart Knight, 1 March 1974, “Secret Service Participation in Tapings,” http://www.governmentattic.org/docs/Secret_Service_Nixon_taping.pdf; Powers, “The History of Presidential Audio Recordings,” 75; R. Gregory Goodell et al., “Scope and Content Notes, White House Tapes: First Chronological Release, February 1971–July 1971,” National Archives and Records Administration, October 1999.

[16] Eugene P. Dagg to H. Stuart Knight, 1 March 1974.
[17] When Butterfield left the White House early in 1973 to become head of the Federal Aviation Administration, he informed Stephen B. Bull, who took over Butterfield’s duties as appointments secretary, of the existence of the recording system.
[18] Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician 1962–1972 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 425.
[19] Richard M. Cohen, “Nixon Bug System Simple; Expert Calls Devices Hardly Professional,” Washington Post, 12 May 1974.
[20] The telephone tapes, in contrast, are generally of high sound quality, since both parties are speaking directly into a microphone.
[21] George Lardner Jr., “Nixon to Get Day in Court on Tapes Compensation,” Washington Post, 29 March 1998. During the 1970s, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force made transcripts for the 60 hours of tapes subpoenaed for the criminal investigation and trials.
[22] Within a week, however, Kissinger shared with Nixon doubts about whether the reports of success in the field were accurate, and by the end of the month they had lowered their hopes for what the South Vietnamese army could accomplish. See Conversation 450-010, PRDE Excerpt A, note 1.
[23] For more on Nixon’s decent interval exit strategy, see Ken Hughes, Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).
[24] Kenneth J. Hughes Jr., “Nixon vs. the Imaginary ‘Jewish Cabal,’” History News Network, 23 September 2007, http://hnn.us/articles/42970.html.