Serving the UMN community since 1900

The Minnesota Daily

Serving the UMN community since 1900

The Minnesota Daily

Serving the UMN community since 1900

The Minnesota Daily

Daily Email Edition

Get MN Daily NEWS delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday!

SUBSCRIBE NOW

By demonizing pleasure, we set ourselves up for unfulfilling sex lives.
Opinion: Let’s talk about sex
Published March 27, 2024

ational Archives shreds and burns notes documenting

WASHINGTON (AP)– The National Archives on Tuesday burned 70,000 pages of notes about the contents of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes. The archives said it had no choice since a court has ordered that the secrets contained in the notes were never to be made public.
In the years after Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid impeachment, the government seized Nixon’s tapes. The former president — and later his estate — went to court to get them back.
The Supreme Court ruled that the portions of the 2,900 hours of tapes which contain personal and private conversations, such as talks with his wife and daughters or conversations of a purely political nature, would have to be returned.
Over the years, archivists made notes of what each tape segment contained. It was those notes that were shredded this week, then put in 126 bags and burned in an archives’ incinerator, according to Gerald George, archives director of policy and communications.
“We had a bunch of duplicate logs, partial logs, stuff that we have made over a long period of time…” George said. “That’s what we destroyed.”
“It sounds dramatic to say we shredded and burned, but when you’re dealing with material that you are legally instructed not to make public, you have to make sure it doesn’t become public.”
R. Stan Mortenson, a lawyer for Nixon’s estate, said he was not disturbed by news of the notes’ destruction. “It is something that clearly should have been destroyed,” he said.
Meantime, the estate and the government are independently putting price tags on the value of the tapes as well as 44 million documents that the government seized after Nixon’s resignation. Both are consulting archivists, records appraisers, collectors and historians.
After the Supreme Court upheld the law under which the tapes and documents were seized, Nixon sued for “just compensation” on the grounds that the law amounted to an unlawful taking of his property rights. In 1992, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Nixon and a district judge has set a trial for November for fixing a fair compensation amount.
Estimates of the value run in the millions of dollars and the two sides are understood to be far apart in their separate valuations.

Leave a Comment

Accessibility Toolbar

Comments (0)

All The Minnesota Daily Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *