Now, technicians are slicing them up with a razor blade. Not that they want to. A judge ordered the archives to cut out personal, private and some political conversations from the 3,280 hours of conversations the public still hasn't heard. Nixon discusses his daughter Tricia's Rose Garden wedding. Nixon plans a political campaign trip.
Family members talk about their health, or one another.
Some days, they hear a Nixon tirade or National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger's low-toned drones on foreign policy. Other days, they get an earful of someone vacuuming the Oval Office. There are no transcripts, only conversation logs cued with the first and last words of talk to edit out. The tape experts mark the beginning and end of each edit with a special archival pen. Then they slide the tape off the machine, thread it into a splicing block and cut it with a razor blade.