Nixon Library releases previously classified audio

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Newly declassified segments from the diary of President Richard Nixon's chief of staff provide a detailed, subtle portrait of the disgraced president as H.R. Haldeman recounts both moments of high-stakes diplomacy and unscripted daily life that would never make a White House memo or official document.

More than 40 years after Haldeman made his last audio diary recording, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda on Thursday released 285 segments from entries spanning from 1970 to 1973. At the time, Nixon was engaged in delicate diplomacy that would lead to treaties to limit nuclear armaments and a reopening of China to the world.

The segments include a reference to top-secret intelligence briefings the Nixon administration provided to China, and reveal Nixon's private musings as he wrangled with the then-Soviet Union over limiting nuclear weapons.

Among the accounts of top-level diplomacy, however, are revealing nuggets of daily life: Haldeman surprising Nixon as he smoked a Russian cigarette after long negotiations with Soviet leaders, for example, and Nixon's team struggling to stay sober at a Chinese banquet as they felt obligated to drink toast after toast with top communist officials.

This combination makes the diaries unique and reveals almost as much about Nixon as it does about Haldeman, said Luke Nichter, a Nixon expert and history professor at Texas A&M University.

"It adds to this tapestry that we have on Nixon that we don't have on anyone else," he said. "These are not the White House talking points. This is what was really going on."

Much of Haldeman's account of Nixon's February 1972 trip to China was made public earlier. But the declassified segments show the tension that was building between national security advisor Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers as they tried to draft a communique about Taiwan that would satisfy China and conservatives back home. Kissinger set the stage for Nixon's groundbreaking China trip with secret diplomatic meetings, while Rogers essentially was cut out.

As talks on Taiwan drew to a close, Rogers insisted on presenting changes to the communique that almost derailed the process, the entries show.

"Henry said that we now have a massive problem, because he took Rogers' alterations in and the PRC really blew up," Haldeman said on Feb. 26, 1972. "So, poor Henry's had to struggle with that situation now."

The declassified recordings also include an entry from a cabinet meeting Nixon held the day the U.S. and former Soviet Union announced a breakthrough in nuclear arms talks in 1971, material on the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam talks, and diplomatic negotiations with India, Pakistan, and Israel.

Haldeman, who died in 1993, kept a diary from 1969 to 1973, but switched from written to audio recordings in 1970.