The Nixon Tapes

The Nixon tapes are recordings of conversations that President Richard Nixon had with others between the years 1971 and 1973. The system was installed in February of 1971 in the Oval Office. The audio was recorded from the phones in the office and by hidden microphones elsewhere in the office. After three months, microphones were installed in the President's private office in the White House and then the presidential lodge at Camp David the year after. 

The Secret Service kept track of the system and the full tapes were hidden in the White House basement. The system was turned on manually when the President entered a room and was also triggered by sound. Only a handful of people were aware of the recording system's existence until it became public knowledge during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings on July 16, 1973. Two days later, the system was turned off.

Nixon's initial refusal of the congressional order to release the tapes was one of the many offenses that eventually led to his resignation on August 9, 1974. However, the tapes in their entirety were only released just on August 19, 2013. On that day, the Nixon Library and the National Archives and Records Administration released the last 340 hours of the tapes, which covered all the audio from April 9 to July 12, 1973. In all, the tapes cover over than 3,000 hours of conversation, including material about everything from foreign policy to Watergate references. With this abundance of content, less than 5% of the audio has been transcribed or published.