National Archives Nixon Library to Release Documents and Oral Histories

WASHINGTON, June 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Friday, July 2, 2010, the National Archives Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, will open nearly 100,000 pages of Presidential records and 80 hours of video oral histories.  The materials will be available in the newly reopened Nixon Library research room at 9 a.m. PDT.  The Library is located at 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd., Yorba Linda, CA, 92886.  Selected materials will be available online at: http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/ at 9 a.m. PDT [Noon EDT].

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The bulk of the newly released documents come from the White House office files of former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who served in the Nixon administration from January 1969 to December 1970. The Moynihan papers detail his role in shaping administration policy on welfare reform, population control, civil rights, the environment and drug control.

Also in this release are 5,000 pages of formerly classified national security records. These include U.S. intelligence assessments before and during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.  Also in this release are materials relating to US-UK relations, including correspondence between President Nixon and Prime Minister Edward Heath; backchannel Soviet-Israeli relations; the status of Berlin; Soviet strategic weapons; and the Vietnam War.

The Library will also release 47 video oral histories.  These will be available in the Library's research room.  This is the first release of materials from this collection which was begun in November 2006 after Timothy Naftali became the director of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project and director-designate of the National Archives-administered Nixon Library.  

The Nixon Library's video oral history program, which has produced 126 oral histories thus far, is creating the largest video oral history collection at any Presidential library. Included in this opening are interviews conducted with, among others:  former Vice President Richard Cheney, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of Interior Walter Hickel, former Secretary of Commerce Barbara Franklin, U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, Senator Lamar Alexander, former Senators Bob Dole and Trent Lott, former U.S. Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, Justice Stephen Breyer, Judge Robert Bork,  former Watergate prosecutors Richard Ben-Veniste and Jill Wine-Banks, Carl Bernstein, astronaut Frank Borman, Dwight Chapin, Charles Colson, Sir David Frost, Leonard Garment, Herbert Klein, Egil "Bud" Krogh, entertainer Art Linkletter, Jeb Stuart Magruder, Frederic Malek, Raymond Price, William Ruckelshaus, Daniel Schorr, and William Safire.  

This release also includes 4 and 1/2 hours of audio recordings of briefings given by Donald Rumsfeld, Herbert Stein and others to summer interns in the Nixon White House.  These will also be available in the Nixon Library research room.

For press information, contact the Nixon Library at 714-983-9120.

SOURCE National Archives