In fact, Nitcher, who is regarded as a somewhat of an expert, was featured last week in articles by The and the British Broadcasting Corp.
The interviews came in the wake of the release of 198 additional hours of audiotape from the Nixon Presidential Library.
“This is such a large volume of material that we’re talking about, almost 4,000 hours of the president’s phone calls and meetings,” Nitcher said.
This latest release was the 12th since the Watergate hearings began in 1973.
With this release, 2,217 hours of tapes have been declassified and released and that came on the heels of a smaller release in 2007.
While the release is historically significant from a purely American standpoint, it is also significant for Nitcher who maintains the largest collection of digitized audio of the Nixon tapes on his Web site: nixontapes.org. The tapes include Nixon’s re-election victory over Democratic challenger George McGovern up to his inauguration in January 1973.
The tapes also include the Paris Peace talks with North Vietnam, as well as diplomacy issues with the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China
The most significant event recorded on the most recently released tapes include discussions with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and their subsequent discussions on what is historically referred to as the Christmas bombing in North Vietnam.
On the audiotape dated Dec. 14, 1972, Nixon is heard spelling out for Kissinger and Gen. Alexander Haig justification for the proposed bombing.
“The rationale for the bombing must be the buildup in the north. Just say that,” Nixon is heard saying to Kissinger and Haig.
Nixon then tells Haig and Kissinger that the bombing would continue through Christmas, then cease.
Historically, the bombing of North Vietnam continued until Dec. 28.
The bombing was discussed and begun shortly after the failure of the Paris Peace accords, as a way of forcing the North and South Vietnamese back to the negotiating table.
During that time, more bombs were dropped on North Vietnam in a 10-day period than in all of Europe during World War II.
Nitcher said the tapes not only provide insight into the kind of pressure Nixon was under, but provide details into just how involved Nixon was in coordinating the war in Vietnam, unlike his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson.
“He was involved in minutiae,” Nitcher said. “He was involved in very technical details ... from the number of sorties that occurred each day, to the payloads of those sorties, so we have the exact records, for the first time, 36 years later, of really a play-by-play from the Oval Office.”
Nitcher said the tapes would do little to change the image that Americans hold of Nixon.
However, it does bring to light a lot that the world would otherwise have never known.
“I think that this shows that Nixon was not just a war president, he was a war leader,” Nitcher said. “We can debate whether the decisions he made were right or wrong, but he was directly involved in those decisions. These tapes are the real source for decision making in the Nixon White House.”
