Nixon Tape To Reveal Secrets at Last?

jonerik writes: "As part of its inevitable 30th-anniversary-of-Watergate coverage, ABC News has this article on the National Archives' search for someone who can recover part or all of the missing 18 ½ minutes of President Nixon's Oval Office tapes, whose existence had been unknown until the Watergate hearings. The famous tape - recorded on June 20th, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in - was last examined in 1974, but Nixon tape archivist Karl Weissenbach is hoping that nearly thirty years of technological progress can make the difference this time, saying 'We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered.' Stephen St. Croix, one of several forensic audio experts who is interested in taking on the job, says 'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'" There's another article in Wired on this quest as well.

Comments

Watergate still??

[EastCoastSurfer]

I realize the technical merits of the article, but why is the general media still harping on something that happened 30 years ago? Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...? These things are much more current and still have real implications to people in power (not to mention someone is dead).

Re:Watergate still??

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you being serious?

The identity of Deep Throat is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the last quarter century.

It has historical value, and always seems to come up.

I mean, look at your examples. Two of them were named after Watergate!

Re:Watergate still??

[Lysander Luddite]

Maybe because it is attributed to a President resigning his office?

Re:Watergate still??

[Chasuk]

Watergate overshadows all of the other manufactured "scandals" that you mention above. It was easily the biggest scandal of the last 50 years, and will be discussed by historians centuries hence, long after the name "Vince Foster" had faded from memory.

Re:Watergate still??

[Anonymous Coward]

The media is composed of Democrats raised on Watergate. That's why they only care about scandals in Republican administrations.

Uhh.. if that's the case, then why don't i ever hear anyone in the media talking about the scandals of the Reagan years? Ever? Even though it's topical, and it would probably be fascinating to see a media review of "here is what the Eisenhower through Reagan administrations did covertly as foreign policy in the name of fighting Communism, and this is how it affects the current geopolitical climate, which is important becuase the U.S. is currently fighting an open-ended war against a number of nations whose current political situation is a direct result of U.S. actions"?

People keep going back to watergate because it's clear, it's dramatic and theatrical, and it's morally unambiguous. The whole thing is almost a greek epic on the Great Man Corrupted by Power. That's about it. It appeals to people's love of drama without challenging any of their held beliefs or making them understand complicated geopolitical context.

Re:Watergate still??

[startled]

Why doesn't the media cover anything of consequence any more? At least in the American media, it appears the assumption is that we don't care about international events, and we're too stupid to understand anything of consequence domestically.

Travelgate? Filegate? Vince Foster? WTF? Those are barrel-scraping attempts to dumb something down for general consumption. How about no TV coverage of genocide in Yugoslavia for almost two years after they knew it was going on? Hell, domestic current events haven't been covered substantively on TV for a good decade or so, and not in newspapers aside from the NYTimes and Washington Post.

No, the general media nowadays has no respectability. They cover nothing of substance. When's the last time I saw a mention in the paper about a bill going through my state's legislature? I'm lucky to see a mention of a federal bill outside of the budget, Medicare, or "terrorism". Meanwhile, there are giant cover stories on last year's dog mauling.

The media is covering Watergate for two reasons. One, of course, is they think it'll sell. This is a big thing that a lot of their audience lived through.

The other, more interesting, reason is that they're covering a time when they had respectability and impact. When investigative journalist meant something other than Geraldo Rivera. When journalistic careers were made by covering big events in a dangerous foreign country, or uncovering something big in political dealings at home. Now, foreign reporters get 5 minutes a day on CNN. Domestic reporters follow the police scanner to the site of the latest rich white babynapping or Chandra Levy's remains.

Nostalgia, then. Followups on a time when they had a function other than exposing sex scandals. Why would they follow up on something current, if no one cared about it in the first place? Yes, there are still respectable reporters doing significant work. But they're quite fringe, and mostly read by academics, politicians, "experts", and the tiny portion of the population that actually cares enough to read intelligent coverage on what's going on in the world. It's enough to support two newspapers and a handful of magazines.

Re:Watergate still??

[commodoresloat]

Uhh.. if that's the case, then why don't i ever hear anyone in the media talking about the scandals of the Reagan years? Ever? Even though it's topical, and it would probably be fascinating to see a media review of "here is what the Eisenhower through Reagan administrations did covertly as foreign policy in the name of fighting Communism, and this is how it affects the current geopolitical climate, which is important becuase the U.S. is currently fighting an open-ended war against a number of nations whose current political situation is a direct result of U.S. actions"?

Not to mention it is topical because a lot of the same creeps who committed what amounts to high treason during the Reagan Administration are back in office again (e.g. Poindexter, Reich, Negroponte, Abrams) except now they have an even better excuse than the "war on communism" to trash the Constitution and send the U.S. military all around the world. We've heard more about Monica Lewinsky than anyone could ever want and yet we've never had a real accounting of the crimes of the Reagan Administration. This video is enlightening for folks who want to be more educated on the topic....

Re:Watergate still??

[Paul Komarek]

"Reagan's alleged crimes were done for the expressed purpose of helping those fighting for their freedom against communism."

When was the last time you saw America do something for the pure, unadultered sake of helping someone fight for "freedom", "against communism"? Our government doesn't give a damn about communism -- we attack *ANY AND ALL* governments that don't bow down to our whims. It's as if our government is the Microsoft of governments.

"Congress had no authority to prevent the commander in chief from giving military arms to whomever he wishes."

Bullshit. We have laws, as well as policies, governing how we distribute and sell arms. The commander-in-chief is not God.

"That power is vested in the President in the constitution."

You'll have to quote a section and paragraph number for me. I don't recall reading this in our Constitution. If you can show it to me, I'll back down immediately. And then I'll work on an amendment.

"Nixon. Some two bit espionage done by an underling, that very likely occured without his knowledge. What was he guilty of? covering up a stupid move by someone acting without his authority."

Oh, really? Maybe this is exactly what we'd like to know. Maybe this is why we're still interested in Watergate.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Watergate still??

[Vermithrax]

Future historians are more likely to look back on it as only the first and most significant of a trail of republican electoral frauds.
1. Nixon (this is the only one to be admitted)
2. Regan/Bush meetings with Kidnappers representatives to ensure that hostages were not released until after election and so ensure their election over Carter
3. The last election taking electoral corruption to new extremes.

that's not countingthe political corruption, drug running,and other assorted crimes committed by these administrations.

compared to this Clinton's only crime appears to be that he had sex (or some variation on a sexual act) with someone who wasn't his wife. Big Deal

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[Alsee]

>You never completely erase a tape.
I have a blowtorch that says magnetic tape can be erased.

Maybe, maybe not. We'll have to wait another 30 years and see what the nanotech experts have to say about that.

-

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Edmund Blackadder]

Themost worryingthing isthat the same bob woodward is now busy writing puff pieces for the president.

There were plenty of potential scandals today much bigger than watergate that have not been investigated.

Theory + practice

[ocie]

You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.

Bull puckey. If you record over a tape enough times you will erase the original information. Otherwise, a length of tape could hole an infinite amount of information.

OTOH, just because you 'can' erase a tape, doesn't mean that it was done in this case.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[squiggleslash]

From the right, there seems to be plenty, as the muckraking over the last presidency seemed to reveal. From the left, not a lot.

There's an active campaign to change that, but it's arguable all it will do is, together with the long time attacks by freepers on percieved left wing bias, simply batter journalists into a sort of don't-offend-anyone submission. Still, arguably, that's what we have right now: Especially if the right is right and most journalists position themselves left of center, they're definitely not writing as if they're left of center.

Not that I believe they are, or at least, not to the same extent as conservatives believe they are. FAIR did a survey in which they polled journalist's positions on various issues and compared them to the national average. They found that while journalists leant to the left/center in terms of the causes they supported - Medicare, Social Security, Taxes, etc, they were generally to the right of what studies generally showed were the American public's positions on the same issues. This probably goes some way towards explaining why even some of the more intelligent right wingers are convinced of a left wing bias to the press - it's to the left of them.

Why is this relevent? Well, right now criticising government means, by definition, being critical of and willing to question right wing Republican policies. And, except for a burst for the last month or so, there's been very, very, little criticism of the government. Even before 9/11, CNN was devoting something in the order of 50% of its TV coverage (evidence from memory) of a scandal involving a Democratic congressman where he lied to police during a murder investigation, and there simply was no news on that score - he lied, that was it. Nothing came in, but the same story was repeated and excuses were found to repeat it, over and over again. And Condit (for it is he) isn't exactly an important figure.

The press, at the moment, is in the hands of people who do not want powerful forces challenged. Right now, those powerful forces are those in government. Until and unless there's a change of hands, and journalists feel they can breath and be more free, there will not be another Woodward and Bernstein.

In practice what he says is correct.

[Chuck Chunder]

In practice people don't erase/record over a tape enough to erase the original information. The effort and time involved in doing so is non-negligable so in practice people don't do it.

If the data on the tape were that important, if you had the opportunity and if you knew that recording over the top would not work unless you did it a lot and with the right sort of sounds you'd simply destroy the tape, ie by converting it to a pile of ash and smoke, dissolving it in acid or otherwise rendering it chemically different from it's original state.

It may be possible to record over a tape to the degree that the original data becomes unrecoverable with any degree of certainty, but it remains impractical to do so.