(13 Apr 1996) English/Nat
More of former U-S President Richard Nixon's secret tapes are soon to be released.
Nixon's estate has agreed to make public almost 37-hundred hours of recordings.
Many of the old White House tapes concern the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon's
presidency.
Up until now, only 63 hours of Nixon tapes had been made public. However, the first batch of previously-unheard recordings won't be handed over until November.
The estate of former U-S President Nixon has agreed to release almost 3,700 hours of still-unheard White House tapes.
Many of these were made during the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon's presidency.
Until now, only 63 hours of tapes had been available for public listening.
Until he died in April 1994, Nixon had battled in the courts for nearly 21 years to keep the remaining tapes away from the public.
Historian Stanley Kutler sued in 1992 to have the tapes released.
Advocacy group Public Citizen backed that.
[SOUNDBITE:
"And today we got an agreement for the orderly processing of these tapes and it will ensure very soon probably this November, 201 abusive power tapes popularly referred to as Watergate that have never been heard by the public will be heard."
SUPER CAPTION: Alan Morrison, Lawyer, Public Citizen]
Copies of the first two hundred hours of tapes should be going to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, this November.
Others will follow at, as-yet, unspecified times. Questions like who should hold copies and originals of purely private conversations still haven't been fully settled.
The public has the right to know the truth, say those who've fought for the tapes' release.
[SOUNDBITE:
"Some people there at the archives were quite willing to allow the Nixon people to interpose objections and not fight with them about it. And finally we said that is enough. Professor Kutler, who is a noted historian had written a book about the Nixon years said I've got to go do this not so much for himself but for history."
SUPER CAPTION: Alan Morrison, Lawyer, Public Citizen]
But whether the new tapes will ever show what Nixon's actual role in the Watergate affair was, remains to be seen.
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