Last Look

O’Connor (Political Philosophy, Policy and Law ’08)
Photo by Stephanie Gross.

I’ll always remember the first time I got on the phone with Richard Nixon. It was a cool April evening in Washington in 1971 and the president was in an unusually good mood, plotting Vietnam strategy with Henry Kissinger, his unmistakably deep-voiced national security adviser. As the two men joked back and forth about the press (Nixon’s nemesis) and Kissinger’s dinner guests, I took down every word, transcribing the conversation between the two historical giants for the very first time.

Although neither man could have guessed that a 21-year-old college undergraduate from Virginia would be listening to their private exchange some 36 years later, I’m one of a handful of students and professors doing just that. As an intern at U.Va.’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, I’ve spent the past year sifting through a tiny portion of the 3,700 hours of secretly recorded telephone conversations that Nixon ordered during his time in the White House — conversations that are just now being discovered and catalogued for public use.

Many of these taped discussions took place after hours in the Lincoln Sitting Room on the third floor of the White House. There, Nixon would often sit down with a yellow legal pad and a stiff drink (which, incidentally, he can be heard sipping on some tapes), his feet propped up in front of a roaring fire, even in the summer when he had his staff crank up the air conditioning. Then the president would pick up the phone and ask one of his loyal switchboard operators to connect him to whatever aide, confidant or world leader with whom he wished to speak. Beginning in April 1971, Nixon had every word recorded on voice-activated Sony TC-800B tape reels that were far from state of the art, even at the time, but which generally came out clearer than his Oval Office hidden-microphone recordings made famous by the Watergate scandal.

When I first signed on to help organize and transcribe these tapes, I was expecting the same dry, rehearsed policy-speak that is the norm in so many political speeches today. Instead, I found myself listening to the 37th president swear, rant, joke and preen very candidly in the typically gruff and profane manner that characterized Nixon in private. In a 1971 conversation with White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, for example, Nixon complains about being challenged by an aide in front of a group of senators. “I mean, I’ve forgotten more about politics than [congressional liaison Clark MacGregor] will ever learn,” the president gripes before concluding that “if [the senators] are going to be just a bunch of old farts, screw ’em. That’s my attitude.” On the other end of the line, you can almost hear Haldeman cringe.

The surprising thing is to hear how informal some of the conversations are that ended up shaping American policy. It was pretty surreal to leave my class on the history of the Cold War last semester and hear the same historic decisions I had just learned about being mulled over by an undecided and emotional president. “If [the U.S.’s attempt at peace] doesn’t work, I don’t care,” Nixon told Kissinger the day after announcing that 100,000 U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam before 1972. “I mean, right now, if it doesn’t work ... I’m going to turn right so goddamned hard it’ll make your head spin. We’ll bomb those bastards right off the earth. I really mean it.”

For the interns working on the Nixon project, this rare opportunity to listen in on history is made possible by the hard work and open mindedness of the Presidential Recordings Program scholars, a group led by Miller Center historian David Coleman. The team’s treatment of the Nixon tapes (publishing them online in easily changeable Wiki format rather than in print) has allowed students to become an integral part of the process, from cutting up the original digitized versions to decoding the Texas twang of former Treasury Secretary John Connally.

On a personal level, getting familiar with the man behind Watergate has taught me more than any history book about the pressures and imperfections at the top of the American political ladder. Although Nixon vowed on the first day of recording that he would “not be transcribed,” it’s been an incredible experience proving him wrong.

Read the Nixon telephone transcripts.