First the White House spinmeisters said it would cost thousands of dollars or they said it s just mundane correspondence that replicates what already has been delivered under subpoena. And then there is executive privilege. Nixon claimed executive privilege would save him from turning over the tapes, but of course it didn t save him or Clinton. It is more than a quarter of a century after the establishment of controlling legal authority on these matters, with historians, authors and researchers licking their chops about juicy material that might evolve from the lost Nixon tapes. And it comes just as Clinton s lost e-mails have been discovered.
Technology works in mysterious ways.
One slight problem exists in the case of the Nixon gap. The U.S. National Archives has not yet made a firm commitment to revisit this mystery of the past, but a team of experts is gathering to discuss the possibility. Of grave concern is whether the investigators might damage the original tape, says former Nixon archivist Chris Beam, director of the Edward Muskie archives at Bates College in Maine. The tape is pretty frail, Beam says. They are going to have to be very careful.