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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Nixon Tapes To Be Released This Fall

New York Times

A determined historian won a legal victory Friday that will lead to the slow but steady release of more than 3,000 hours of secretly recorded Nixon White House tapes.

In a deal struck with Nixon’s estate and the National Archives, the first set of the tapes - more than 200 hours chronicling the abuses of power known collectively as the Watergate scandals - are to be released by November.

The agreement came 21 years after Congress ordered that those tapes be made public.

The historian, Stanley I. Kutler; his lawyer, Alan Morrison of the advocacy group Public Citizen; and the national archivist, John Carlin, said that the rest of the tapes, which cover almost everything of importance that Nixon and his aides said at the White House, at the Old Executive Office Building next door and at Camp David, Md., from February 1971 to July 1973, will gradually be released in the coming years.

“I am elated,” said Kutler, a professor of history, law and American institutions at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He said the tapes would reveal a history far different from what he called the “self-serving memoirs” of Nixon and his aides.