Talk:Nixon White House tapes

message: I could only find one source supporting this statement (http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/community_pulse/1999_Mar_10.LEADOBIT.html). However, the official Advisory Panel report does indicate how the panel was selected, so have removed the statement. Obviously, if someone knows the details of how the White House and the Special Prosecution Force determined the nominees... Rodiger 01:22, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Franklin S. Cooper...was selected by the U.S. Federal Court to assemble a group of six experts to examine the tapes"

message: Although the edit history may indicate that I was fixing a spelling error, I noticed that there was a change (see this diff) that appears to be "sneaky" vandalism (see Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types_of_vandalism).  The change stood for an entire month before it was corrected.  DRAGON 280  (TALK/CONTRIBS) 12:56, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Surreptitious vandalism? 

message: There's a lot of good historical fact in here...but nothing about the contents of the tapes? Come on wikipedia.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.103.238.225 (talk) 07:10, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Contents of the tapes

message: Article should state when the recording system was dismantled, by whom, and what was said publicly about it.  Tempshill (talk) 06:06, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recording system dismantling 

message: This article does not say why nixon taped conversations. Can this information be added?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.99.132.30 (talk) 18:42, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why did Nixon tape conversations? 

message: There is a part mentioning a movie, National Treasure: Book of Secrets that Riley Poole says the contents of the missing tapes are in the book. Is that really something worth putting there? It doesn't really seem professional to add information based off a fictional movie. wikipedia is supposed to have reputable knowledge, not stupid crap like that.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.219.227.74 (talk) 05:15, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  National Treasure? 

message: Should this information be added? It seems very relevent.
http://www.forensicmag.com/print/4980  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.244.41.251 (talk) 01:10, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Research on 18 1/2 Minute Tape Gap 

message: Now, I was just reading about these, and the second sentence stood out to me for one reason, it called Nixon evil, reading "the very evil U.S. President Nixon". Why is this said? Or is it just someone's opinion and added it in? --194.83.93.50 (talk) 17:47, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: A POV/vandalism edit, it's been removed, thanks for pointing it out. Shearonink (talk) 19:47, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Evil? 

message: A bullet point should be inserted here mentioning that the tapes are referenced in the new X-Men Days of Future Past movie, which partially takes place in 1973.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.239.177.26 (talk) 18:08, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It might also be worth adding a mention of the story told by Arlo Guthrie, and included on the page about his album, Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited: “At the end of the re-recording of "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", Guthrie launches into a postscript story about attending Jimmy Carter's inauguration in 1977. He meets Carter's son Chip, who tells him of the discovery of an opened copy of Alice's Restaurant left behind by the Nixon family when they left the White House, leading to speculation around the fact that the title song and the gap in the Watergate tapes are both 18½ minutes in length”. Jock123 (talk) 13:54, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nixon tapes in popular culture 

message: I just found that the Nixon White House tapes are here and are in the public domain if anyone wants to migrate them.Victor Grigas (talk) 05:55, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Good idea. I have added your links to the text of the article in 'Post Presidency' section. --- Professor JR (talk) 15:45, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The actual recordings are public domain 

message: This paragraph appears at the end of the "Post-Presidency" section of the article:
In August 2015, Washington Post associate editor and investigative journalist Bob Woodward, compared Hillary Clinton's handling of her email controversy to Nixon's handling of the matter of the tapes, saying Clinton's emails "remind him of the Nixon tapes".[25]
Why is this information included in this article? Even if Woodward did say that and even if the quote is cited, it's simply not relevant to the article. Who cares if a present-day scandal "reminds" Bob Woodward of the Nixon tapes? I think if should be removed as it's not relevant to the article and un-encyclopedic. If anyone wants to include this info in an article about the Clinton emails, that would be more appropriate.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.162.111.188 (talk) 03:34, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. Pundits state things all the time. There is no secondary coverage of Woodward's quote indicating any relevance. - Location (talk) 20:23, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

text: You know better than that. Consensus is required to modify articles, not to reject disputed material. Even if your claim were true that consensus was reached elsewhere — which does not seem to be the case — editors rejecting content on one article cannot force editors to accept the content in a different article. I've removed the disputed material as POV, irrelevant, and poorly sourced. Don't add this again, as you know you are on thin ice generally with respect to politics-related edits. - Wikidemon (talk) 08:42, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Extraneous Clinton Reference

message: In under the header "History of the Nixon White House taping system" on the 3rd paragraph it is stated that the tape machines ran at an extremely slow speed of 15/16 inches per second. I suggest review of the listed sourcebeing number eight. 15 inches per second was generally used in broadcast and professional use due to the better quality it offers and is generally considered the FASTEST speed reel-to-reel tape recorder run at, with other speeds on systems like compact cassette (first common use being dictation) using only 1 7/8th inches per second. I therefore put it to the editors that the sentence in question is innacurate. 15"/s would only offer 60 to 120 minutes depending on tape size, this being unlikely in a voice-only recording system.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.114.168.252 (talk) 19:59, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: You quoted the "15/16", but then acted as if it was 15. It's 1/16th of 15. In other words, half of the standard "low-quality" speed of 1 7/8. At that speed, you get 16 or 32 _hours_ on standard tape. But they weren't using standard tape, they were using 0.5mil tape, which allows you to fit much more tape on the same reel size. Plus, the recorders were sound-activated (and also manually-activated, for residential areas of the White House), so many of them actually recorded weeks on a single reel. --157.131.246.136 (talk) 09:32, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  History of the Nixon White House taping system 3rd paragraph 

message: From the introduction:  Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; the practice was initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt[4] in 1940.
The Roosevelt reference is misleading. According to the reference (NY Times article), Roosevelt recorded only 8 hours (news conferences, and inadvertently a few private conversations), during a short time (11 weeks). In contrast, while Nixon recorded tapes of all Oval Office conversations for 2 1/2 years. The wording of the article ("the practice was initiated") misleadingly suggests that Nixon's recording was parallel to Roosevelt's. I've revised the wording to characterize Roosevelt's recording efforts more accurately. Omc (talk) 12:47, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Roosevelt taping

message: Added a dispute tag, the primary Watergate article treats the Smoking Gun tape as indeed being about the cover-up, while this article states it was about a smaller matter and mistakenly assumed to be the cover-up. As such, a dispute is born. Editoronthewiki (talk) 17:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I went ahead and added a dispute tag on the Watergate scandal article too. JungleEntity (talk) 22:44, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

text: This seems to have been a POV pushing attempt on the part of one editor, credited to at least one highly dubious source. I have restored the original text and added some more references to back its facts up. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 05:10, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Smoking Gun 

message: From the introduction: “ Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; President Franklin D. Roosevelt recorded Oval Office press conferences for a short period in 1940.”
This makes it appears as though the practice of recording White House conversations was limited to Roosevelt and Nixon, while in reality it was practiced by all the Presidents from Roosevelt to Nixon.https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/history-presidents-conducting-secret-white-house-recordings/story?id=47416563 195.252.198.47 (talk) 16:55, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Roosevelt Tapes 

message: It may be content fit for an In popular culture sub-section, but in Oliver Stone's movie Nixon (1995), it's suggested that not only were the 18 1/2 minutes erased by Nixon on purpose, but that they contained Nixon's paranoia in regards to the JFK assassination as such that in the immediate time before the assassination, he may have been contacted by the conspirators who wanted Kennedy dead due to the Bay of Pigs fiasco as well as because of his liberal stance on civil rights, but Nixon chose to ignore what the conspirators implied to him and later felt guilt over having looked the other way. Nixon had discussed this issue with his White House staff on that specific tape, but didn't want to get in trouble with the racist mob gang leaders and high-ranking businessmen implied to be the conspirators behind the assassination, so on a drunken night haunted by his own demons, he chose to erase that evidence. --2003:DA:CF0A:F272:A088:F077:5563:D663 (talk) 06:17, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oliver Stone's speculations