Nixon Tape Transcripts 'Interpretations'

It likely is impossible to produce a perfect transcript of the infamous Nixon tapes because audio fidelity was not taken into consideration in designing the White House tape-recording system, reports Steven Aftergood, author of an e-newsletter and blog on government secrecy published by the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists.

Aftergood was commenting on the State Department's recent acknowledgment in a volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States series that the official government transcripts of the recordings are only "interpretations."

The volume in the FRUS series - which is the official historical record of major foreign policy decisions -- released in July states, "The audiotapes include conversations of President Nixon with his Assistant for National Security Affairs Henry Kissinger, other White House aides, Secretary of State Rogers, other Cabinet officers, members of Congress, and key foreign officials."

It adds, "Readers are advised that the tape recording is the official document, while the transcript represents solely an interpretation of that document."

The FRUS volume covers the formulation of U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean between 1969 and 1972.

The office of the Historian of the Department of State has enhanced the recordings "through the use of digital audio and other advances in technology" and, over time, produced more accurate transcripts, so "some transcripts printed here may differ from transcripts of the same conversations printed in previous Foreign Relations volumes," the preface to the volume states.

Maybe this revelation will push present-day techies in the Obama administration to ensure today's White House audio, video and social media records are captured in machine-readable formats for future generations.