Foreign Relations Materials and the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff
(presented at the annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations,
College Park, MD, June 1998)
Matt Brown
Archives II, the site of the 1998 conference of Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, houses the presidential materials of Richard M. Nixon. There is a well-known joke among reference archivists and librarians that reference requests can be done quickly, cheaply, and well, and that the requestor can pick any two of these three. Since it seems an impossible challenge to thoroughly summarize this vast collection in less than 20 minutes, my presentation today favors the first two at the expense of the third. My purpose is to give a brief overview of the Nixon materials in order to introduce my colleagues’ reports on specific research topics. I will leave it to my colleagues David and Paul to illuminate you on the possibilities the collection offers for primary research on specific topics in the history of foreign relations.
After a short discussion of the unique history of the Nixon materials, this paper will touch on the collection’s form and issues of access. It will conclude by calling for the collection to remain in the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration at its present location in Archives II. The paper will inform the scholar of US foreign relations considering research in the Nixon materials, and give an idea of their importance and uniqueness.
The documents generated by the White House administration of Richard M. Nixon from 1969-1974 are currently held by the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The staff is commonly known as the Nixon Project, and its offices are in Room 1320 of Archives II. For those who have not yet used this resource, a description of research procedure may be useful. Requests for Nixon textual materials can be made at any time in Room 2000, the Textual Research Room, but boxes are only pulled on weekdays between the hours of 9 AM and 3 PM. Pull slips must contain the researcher’s name, the date of the request, and location information of the requested materials. This information includes record group, shelf, and box numbers. Nixon Project archivists are available for consultation on-site, or at the phone number, World Wide Web site or email address listed on the overhead slide.
Nixon’s Presidential materials came to the National Archives as a result of the Watergate affair. In September, 1972, three months after the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, the White House created the Special Files Unit, which was charged with separating sensitive documents from the White House Central Files. In the interest of security, and to centralize documents Nixon would need to write his memoirs, these documents were removed from the Central Files and placed in the Special Files. In this way, the creation of the White House Special Files made the Watergate investigators’ task easier. When Nixon’s presidential materials were seized as evidence of abuse of governmental power, investigators quickly targeted those materials judged most sensitive by the White House itself.
Upon Nixon’s resignation in August, 1974, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, known as PRMPA, under which the federal government seized the tapes and textual materials of Nixon’s presidency. Because Nixon was under investigation for abuses of governmental power, these materials were regarded as potential evidence to be used against the former president. In order to safeguard these materials, custody was given to the National Archives, which was charged with processing and releasing them for public research as quickly as possible. PRMPA also stipulates that personal or other non-governmental materials not relevant to Nixon’s duties as President were to be immediately returned to him. Under the law, all the materials must be kept in the metropolitan Washington area.
In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. Beginning with President Reagan, presidential materials have been considered public property. Since the Nixon materials are not publicly owned under the Presidential Records Act, and were seized to prevent their destruction, they constitute a very unique case.
The Nixon Project is one of eleven presidential libraries and projects under the oversight of the National Archives. The Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, CA, a privately run organization, is not a part of the presidential library system. Because it is the only Presidential collection that was seized, and whose contents have been frozen in time as their ownership has been disputed in court for nearly 25 years, the Nixon Project is the best-documented and most candid collection of Presidential materials.
It is also one of the largest. The Nixon Project is second only to the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library in size. The formats represented here include textual materials, still photographs, sound and video. Out of the total of 44 million pages of textual materials, 7 million pages, occupying 2,258 cubic feet of space, are currently open for research. In addition, there are 500,000 photographs, 700 hours of film, 4,000 hours of video recordings, 4,000 audio recordings, and 950 White House tapes amounting to approximately 3,700 hours of recorded conversations.
Several factors affect access to the materials of the Nixon Project. The finding aids list the titles of every folder in each box, and the Nixon Project indexes its materials at a lower level than most other record groups in the National Archives. However, eighty percent of the Nixon Presidential Materials remain unprocessed. Only a small portion of the White House tapes are open to the public, and by law, none of these may be reproduced. The White House tapes and papers judged to be private personal or private political under PRMPA were returned to the Nixon estate. These papers and taped conversations concerned matters separate from Nixon’s presidential duties. Researchers are more likely to confront documents removed for reasons of national security. These documents have been removed from the boxes and replaced with withdrawal sheets.
Presidential materials are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, but to Mandatory Review. These requests normally take at least one year to be cleared through Mandatory Review because the National Archives must route each requested document to the agencies with an interest in it, publish an announcement of the opening, and deal with challenges to the opening. Nixon Project archivists are constantly reviewing and opening materials. President Clinton’s Executive Order 12958 makes it more difficult for agencies to keep old records secret. A March 1998 release of 168,000 pages of previously classified White House documents was the largest opening of sensitive material by any presidential library or project.
The non-textual materials include the diaries of H.R. Haldeman, and a number of oral histories and exit interviews with many Nixon aides. Four hundred eighteen hours of White House tapes are available for public listening, although they may not be reproduced. Tape logs and transcripts exist for some of these conversations. Some of the tapes are open to the public because they were used as evidence in the Watergate trials. As a result, they tend to deal with abuse of power rather than foreign relations issues. Eventually, the National Archives will process and open the remainder of the tapes, including those relating to national security and foreign policy.
The structure of the textual materials is that of a pyramid arranged by the sensitivity of the documents contained within. As one moves up the pyramid, the number of documents decreases and their sensitivity increases.
Starting at the bottom of the pyramid, we have the White House Central Files, which are broken down into two groupings: Staff Member and Office File, and Subject File. These documents were never classified, and have the lowest sensitivity in the collection. They originated from outside of the White House, such as correspondence from government agencies or individuals. The Central Files: Subject Files are broken down into categories and then into subcategories using alphanumeric file codes. There are thirty boxes of materials that focus on relations with foreign nations, coded CO (for Countries). Each individual country has its own code under the heading CO; for example, the materials on relations with China are coded CO 34. Other relevant headings include Foreign Affairs (FO), the Departments of State, Army, Navy and Air Force (under Federal Government-Organizations, or FG), Human Rights (HU), International Organizations (IT), National Security-Defense (ND), and Trade (TA).
Moving up one level on the pyramid are the previously mentioned White House Special Files: Subject Files and White House Special Files: Staff Member and Office Files, which were judged to be sensitive and segregated from the rest of the Central Files. It contains six boxes of country files. The Staff Member and Office Files remain just as they were at the time of seizure in 1974. All top aides in the Nixon White House, such as Pat Buchanan, Alexander Butterfield, John Ehrlichman, Alexander Haig, and H.R. Haldeman, are represented in this file. Scholars are advised to find out which aides were most involved in their research topic and then to look in those Staff Member and Office Files.
Two large groupings in the Staff Member and Office Files contain Richard Nixon’s own materials. The President’s Office Files record Nixon’s daily activities, and also contains internal documents that he read. The President’s Personal Files include Nixon’s speech and correspondence files.
The staff directs every researcher to the finding aid for Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, who largely controlled who the President saw and what he read. Haldeman’s Staff Member and Office File is nearly double the size of any other staff member’s. I personally found a wealth of material in the voluminous Haldeman files for a University of Maryland graduate seminar paper on the Nixon administration’s strategies towards antiwar youth from 1969-1971.
At the top of the pyramid, containing the most highly classified material, are the White House Special Files: Confidential Files: Top Secret. This contains one folder of declassified materials on relations with foreign countries.
According to Staff archivists, most research topics at the Nixon Project deal with foreign relations history, or with the related fields of international trade and economic history. Owing to the mass of materials dealing with foreign relations, there is no subject guide on the topic of foreign relations in general. Researchers should ask the Nixon Staff for finding aids on their particular topic. There is, for example, a subject guide to American relations with Germany. The guide, which was prepared by the archivists who processed the materials, lists boxes and folders that include information pertaining to U.S.-German relations. There are references to materials in the Central Files and the Special Files, and within those groupings are listed access by subject and by the name of the relevant staff member.
Since there is no way to adequately express the value of this collection to scholars of foreign relations, a few examples will have to suffice. Scholars of the Vietnam War should start with the White House Central Files: Subject Files for the Army, Navy and Air Force. For POW/MIA issues, see the 41 minutes of conversations (with transcripts) that were opened in September, 1997. These tape segments include conversations between Nixon, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Brent Scowcroft, and the President’s Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler.
For scholars interested in Japanese relations and topics on trade in the Far East, the Staff Member and Office File for Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs Peter Peterson should be consulted. For public opinion polls on foreign relations issues, see H.R. Haldeman’s Staff Member and Office File.
The March 1998 opening consisted mainly of National Security Council documents on topics such as the Paris peace talks and the bombing of North Vietnam. It includes some materials generated by the office of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Over 154 hours of recordings made in the White House Cabinet Room between 1971 and 1973, comprising 436 distinct conversations, were opened last year. Unlike the other tape releases, the Cabinet Room tapes contain full conversations rather than brief excerpts. Some of the conversations record meetings of the Cabinet and of the National Security Council. These tapes are recommended both for content and for sound quality. Computer disks containing transcripts and logs of the recently released Cabinet Room tapes are available to researchers. Consult the indexes to find the dates of conversations most relevant to your research topic, then open the WordPerfect document that contains details for the conversations recorded on that date. The Cabinet Room tape logs list the conversation reference number, the date, time, and length of each conversation, and the participants in each conversation. Transcripts for some conversations are available. The Cabinet Room tapes are systematically being reviewed and opened under Executive Order 12958.
Lately the National Archives and the Nixon estate have negotiated over the transfer of the Nixon presidential materials to the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, CA. Because of a dispute over the compensation due the Nixon estate, such an agreement now seems unlikely. A trial in U.S. District Court to establish the value of the Nixon materials is scheduled to begin in November, 1998.
An anecdote raises the serious doubts that the scholarly community should have about any transfer of Nixon materials to the Richard Nixon Library. Shortly before its opening in 1990, the Nixon Library director was asked if the library would provide access to researchers critical of Nixon. The director answered, "I don’t think we’d ever open the doors to Bob Woodward," the reporter whose Watergate coverage contributed to Nixon’s fall. Researchers are screened much more carefully than at the presidential libraries: in the first year of operation, only 20 scholars met the library’s requirements and gained access to its collection.
Such doubts regarding equal public access dictate against moving the Nixon presidential materials to the Nixon Library, which houses some of Nixon’s pre-presidential and post-presidential papers. The Nixon estate should not be entrusted to provide access to records which may prove damaging to Nixon’s legacy. The writing of history, in particular the history of foreign relations, is sure to suffer if the materials are transferred to the Nixon Library.
In my opinion, the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff of the National Archives is a much better candidate than the Nixon Library for objective maintenance of this highly charged political collection. Researchers are well served by the proximity of Archives II to other related collections in the Washington area. The Library of Congress Manuscripts Division holds sizable manuscript collections of Alexander Haig and Elliot Richardson.
Related record groups at the National Archives include the General Records of the Department of State(Record Group 59), Records of the National Security Council, (RG 263) and Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (Record Group 273). The wealth of related collections in the area is a further inducement to keep the Nixon Presidential Materials at Archives II.
To conclude, I would like to summarize the most crucial things for researchers to know about the Nixon Presidential Materials Project. According to Nixon Project archivists, researchers should formulate a narrowly defined research topic by consulting the guide entitled, "Presidential Records and Historical Materials Available for Research at the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff." Decide which files look most promising, and familiarize yourself with the names of White House staff members and dates of meetings that are particularly relevant to your project. Next, researchers should contact the Nixon Project to request a briefing. The most important resource at the Nixon Project is the highly knowledgeable staff of archivists, some of whom have been with the Project since its inception, who can give expert guidance on which parts of the collection will be most helpful to a research topic. A briefing will get the scholar off to a good start in mining a collection that is invaluable for the history of American foreign relations.