Federal Player of the Week: Bringing Richard Nixon back to life

For the past 15 years, William Cowell, Jr. has been listening in on the Nixon White House.

As an audiovisual preservation specialist with the National Archives, Cowell works day-in and day-out to make the more than 2,600 hours of conversations secretly taped by President Nixon accessible to the public.

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In February 1971, Nixon began taping conversations and telephone calls in the Oval Office, his office in the Old Executive Office Building and at Camp David. The system was sound-activated and tied to the Secret Service’s presidential locator system. When Nixon entered a recording

area, the beeper that he carried signaled the recorders to go on.

Cowell is part of a six-person team responsible for preserving the Nixon tapes, which are part of the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum. His role is to process the tapes for public release and upgrade the audio level.

“Bill is an essential part of the team that is ensuring that the Nixon tapes are properly preserved and available to researchers and the general public, said Tim Naftali, director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Because the tapes were recorded for Nixon’s use, Cowell said, the audio quality and volume of some are very poor. Audio noise such as clattering glasses, coughing and the shuffling of papers can obstruct the sound and audibility of words.

Cowell’s challenge is removing as much of this noise as possible, and in some cases raising the volume of the tape to make the audio product usable. According to Cowell, this must be done without changing the quality of the voices on the tape so that all participants in a conversation are recognizable.

It’s a painstaking process, and can take on average four to six hours to review and listen to one tape. Cowell can even spend as much as week working on a tape.

For Cowell, the favorite part of his job is “finding a particularly difficult tape and being able to make it available for the researcher.” And the most interesting part of the tapes, he said, is “when historians listen to them, they see how our country is run. It shows you what a president has to do run the country and the inside workings of Congress.”

Out of the 950 Nixon tapes, there are approximately 95 left to be reviewed and then released to the public. The tapes cover a wide-range of events and subjects, including the ceasefire in Vietnam, Nixon’s trip to China, U.S. policy in the Middle East, the state visits of King Hussein of Jordan and Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel.

There are also the infamous Watergate conversations, including the so-called “Smoking Gun” tape from June 23, 1972 in which Nixon plots with aides to cover-up the White House-inspired break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Nixon is not the only president who secretly recorded conversations in the Oval Office. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson also recorded meetings and telephone conversations. However, Cowell said Nixon was the only president to record everything and he did so to ensure that everything he said was properly chronicled.

Upon retiring from the Army after 30 years, Cowell said that fate and his interest in history led him to his second career with the Nixon presidential materials staff in 1996.

“The Nixon Tapes are a national historical treasure. The tapes illuminate our Nation’s history as seen from the Oval Office during one of the most tumultuous eras in American history,” Cowell said.

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference.