History of The Nixon White House Taping System
Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; the tradition began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and continued under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. What differentiated the Nixon system from the others, however, is the fact that the Nixon system was automatically activated by voice as opposed to being manually activated by a switch.
On February 16, 1971, the taping system was installed in two rooms in the White House: the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room. Three months later, microphones were added to President Nixon's private office in the Old Executive Office Building, and the following year microphones were installed in the presidential lodge at Camp David. The system was installed and monitored by the Secret Service, and tapes were kept in a room in the White House basement. Significant phone lines were tapped as well, including those in the Oval Office and the Lincoln Sitting Room, which was Nixon's favorite room in the White House.
Only a select few individuals knew of the existence of the taping system. The recordings were produced on as many as nine Sony TC-800B machines using very thin 0.5 mil tape at the extremely slow speed of 15/16 inches per second.
The tapes contain over 3,500 hours of conversation. Hundreds of hours of discussions on foreign policy, including planning for the 1972 Nixon visit to China and subsequent visit to the Soviet Union. Only 200 hours of the 3500 contain references to Watergate.
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