Where Are Those Tapes?

If the White House tape-recorded practically every bit of presidential business that took place at either the Executive Mansion or Camp David between the spring of 1971 and the summer of 1973, what has it done with all the tapes? Are they scattered all over the White House basement like a setting for Krapp's Last Tape, the Samuel Beckett play in which the wizened old man is surrounded by the tapes--and voices --of his past?

Well, not exactly. The tapes are stored in several "security areas" in the White House basement and the Executive Office Building next door. The central repository is a converted broom closet in the E.O.B. basement, a high-ceilinged niche that was furnished with fireproofing material and an iron gate before the first tapes were stored there in 1971. These rooms are under heavy lock and key, so the Secret Service needs only a minimal staff to guard them.

Each of the hundreds of reels of tape is labeled by date. The ones that Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the Ervin committee are so vigorously seeking are not kept apart from the rest. Most of the tapes have never been replayed, so far as anyone knows, although former White House Aide Alexander Butterfield told the Ervin committee that he occasionally borrowed some of the tapes and sampled them to make sure the system was operating properly. In addition, both the President and former White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman have said that they have listened to some of the taped Watergate conversations.

Butterfield also testified that as the pile of tapes began to grow, he urged the White House to set up a crew of stenographers to transcribe the material, but this was never done. Since the tapes were supposedly made for "historical purposes," the President apparently hopes to leave that mountainous job to a still to be created Nixon library, which will have all the time in the world to sort out the raw materials of the Nixon era.

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