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The Watergate Tapes -- Er, Discs

July 31, 1994

By Scott Rosenberg

If you lived through the Watergate era you probably remember the moment you heard about the existence of the Watergate tapes. You might have said, as I did, "They what? They recorded everything?"

At the time it seemed both ludicrously self-destructive and crazily narcissistic for the Nixon White House to have automatically taped every presidential meeting -- particularly in light of the kinds of things that were being said in the Oval Office.

Thanks to the Watergate transcripts, we've known for a long time that the proceedings of the Nixon White House were considerably more paranoid than anything Hunter Thompson might ever have made up -- and more overtly contemptuous of Jews, blacks, women, even rank-and-file Republicans than even Nixon's opponents might have imagined.

The recent publication of H.R. Haldeman's robotically impersonal diaries have helped fill in further details of this sorry picture. The Haldeman Diaries are a valuable source for historians, and they've also served as a useful corrective to the sickeningly forgetful atmosphere of eulogy that surrounded Richard Nixon's demise. But they're not exactly home entertainment.

Thus my puzzlement at The Haldeman Diaries CD-ROM, recently issued by Sony Electronic Publishing -- a strange offering indeed in a medium that till now has been largely devoted to kids' "edutainment," space games, music videos and reference works.

The CD-ROM format's vast capacity allows the publication of the full million words, or 2,200 diary pages, that Haldeman either wrote or dictated during his five years as White House chief of staff. (The book version of the diaries, by comparison, is a measly 700 pages long.) In addition, the CD offers 45 minutes of Haldeman's home movie footage and 700 still photos. There's even a presidential appointment book that you can scroll through alongside the diary.

Um, big deal. Is there anyone, outside of Watergate buffs and professional historians, who needs or wants instant living-room access to all that detail? Sure, the grainy movies can be diverting in a campy sort of way. Here's Nixon with Ceaucescu! Nixon with Tito! Nixon with Franco! Nixon with Hirohito! Nixon with the Pope! Nixon with Red Skelton! In one emblematic video of a White House staff meeting, Haldeman turns his movie camera on John Ehrlichman -- who's got a camera of his own pointed at then-speechwriter William Safire.

The Haldeman Diaries CD-ROM is a vast array of footnotes and marginalia -- but it is only one side of the story of the digitization of contemporary history. While Sony was packaging Haldeman's archives, years of more recent White House records nearly wound up in the dustbin of history. In 1989, as it took office, the Bush Administration decided to erase the entire file of White House electronic mail from eight years of the Reagan administration. Only a lawsuit by the National Security Archive preserved the information.

The archive -- a non-governmental research institute and library for records released under the Freedom of Information Act -- fought a five-year legal battle to establish the principle that governmental e-mail deserves to be preserve as a vital part of the historical record.

Tom Blanton, the archive's director, says, "The Bush administration's defense was that if it was an important piece of e-mail, they'd already printed it out. So we said to the judge, let's order them to produce every print-out they have. They came up with maybe 1000 individual messages." With 1200 people using the White House mail system, that might have been a half-day's worth of e-mail.

The National Security Archive finally won its case last summer. This coming December, Blanton says, it plans to issue a combination book and floppy disk, featuring annotated texts of some osome of the more significant White House e-mail missives. "There's sometimes a higher level of candor in e-mail," he notes. "You get people cursing at each other, and you also have these long sober substantive discussions -- like, how're we going to sell Star Wars to the American public?"

The archive has already ventured into CD-ROM publishing, with a disk that contains scanned images of a quarter of a million pages of formerly secret government documents -- including papers relating to the Cuban missile crisis, the Iran hostage crisis and other sensitive foreign-policy matters. You won't find the archive's CD at your neighborhood software shop next to The Haldeman Diaries; the customers for this kind of data are mostly university libraries.

Recent advances in digital technology are beginning to eliminate the kinds of paper trails that historians have always relied on. That's why the work the National Security Archive and similar institutions are doing today is so important.

In 1984, George Orwell imagined the ironically titled "memory hole" as a kind of dead-letter office for pieces of history that Big Brother's government had decided were no longer of use. The "memory hole" comes a little closer to reality today every time a public institution decides to wipe its databanks clean.

Preserving this kind of bureaucratic information is difficult and sometimes dull work, and we could all pretend it doesn't matter. But -- as Richard Nixon himself put it so succinctly -- that would be wrong.

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