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The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of the communications of U.S. President Richard Nixon and various Nixon administration officials and White House staff, ordered by the President for personal records. The taping system was installed in selected rooms in the White House in February 1971 and was voice activated. The records come from line-taps placed on the telephones and small concealed microphones in various locations around the rooms. The recordings were produced on up to nine Sony TC-800B open-reel tape recorders. The recorders were turned off on July 18, 1973, shortly after they became public knowledge as a result of the Watergate hearings. Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; the practice began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and continued under Presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. It also continued under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. 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. The Watergate tapes are interspersed among the Nixon White House tapes. The tapes gained fame during the Watergate scandal of 1973 and 1974 when the system was made public during the televised testimony of White House aide Alexander Butterfield. Only a few White House employees had ever been aware that this system existed. Special Counsel Archibald Cox, a former United States Solicitor General under President John F. Kennedy, asked District Court Judge John Sirica to subpoena eight relevant tapes to confirm the testimony of White House Counsel John Dean. On August 20, 2013, the Nixon Library and the National Archives and Records Administration released the final 340 hours of the tapes that cover the period from April 9 through July 12, 1973.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57599436/final-nixon-tapes-to-be-released/ )〕 == History of the Nixon White House taping system == 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.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=History of the White House Tapes )〕 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 3,000 hours of conversation. Hundreds of hours are 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 3,500 contain references to Watergate〔 and less than 5% of the recordings have been transcribed or published. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nixon White House tapes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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