The National Archives has finally begun cutting some 820 hours from President Richard Nixon's White House tapes, which have been preserved there in a cold storage vault. The action follows an August 10 court order that ended 21 years of resisting a 1977 Supreme Court ruling that private conversations had to be expunged.
"After all these years of protecting the tapes, it was really a traumatic moment to actually begin cutting them," Sharon Fawcett, deputy assistant archivist for presidential libraries, said in a November 29 Associated Press report. The work is expected to cost $600,000 and take at least six years to complete. An estimated 17,000 edits will be made.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the Nixon estate asked a U.S. district court December 2 for $210 million to compensate for the 1974 seizure of the tapes and presidential papers and photos following the president's resignation.
Posted December 7, 1998.