Wednesday, July 12, 2000
WRITER: Jean Cleveland, 706/542-8079, [email protected]
CONTACTS:
Bill Potter, 706/542-0621, [email protected]
Frank Gannon, 212/387-7817, [email protected]
Jesse Raiford, [email protected]
NIXON TAPES GIVEN TO MEDIA ARCHIVES AT UGA LIBRARIES
ATHENS, Ga. -- More than 30 hours of videotaped interviews with former President Richard Nixon, most of them unseen outside of the group that produced them in 1983, will find a permanent home in the Media Archives at the University of Georgia Libraries.
Conducted by writer and historian Frank Gannon, the tapes, valued at $900,000, are being given to the Libraries by Raiford Communications Inc.
The interviews are of "incalculable value from a scholarly/research point of view," according to Fred Guida, a professor of mass communications at Quinnipiac College who appraised the tapes as part of the donation process. "The Nixon/Gannon interviews are, in fact, priceless in terms of their scholarly/historical value," he said.
"Richard Nixon is undeniably a key figure in our nation's history, being an active player in national politics for decades. These tapes will make it possible for generations to study and experience him in ways that are not possible with the printed word," said William Gray Potter, university librarian. "Given the adversarial relationship President Nixon had with the media, these tapes are all the more valuable as an opportunity to see him unfiltered through the lenses of the media establishment.' This is a vital addition to our collection."
Jesse Raiford, president of Raiford Communications, selected the UGA Libraries as the recipient of the tapes because he wanted them to be housed at an educational institution that would make them accessible to the public.
"The UGA Libraries has a terrific staff, the facilities to preserve and protect the tapes, the resources to make them available to scholars and the public, and the ability to offer the materials to news and documentary producers. The Nixon Library and Birthplace, another obvious choice, simply doesn't have the same resources," Raiford said.
Guida called the gift "a major untapped resource," saying that while there is an abundance of film and video available covering and/or featuring Nixon in the years prior to his presidency, he made relatively few post-resignation television appearances. The Gannon interviews represent his most substantial and lengthy post-presidency television appearance.
Taking place nearly a decade after Nixon's resignation, the interviews were conducted with the benefit of some historical perspective and without media hype. The interviews were conducted in four groups of two- and three-day sessions spread over seven months. Each two-hour interview was organized around a specific topic, including Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation as president, U.S. domestic policies, U.S. presidents, foreign leaders and Nixon's reflections on his political career. A sense of trust exists between Nixon and Gannon, a friend and former employee, allowing Nixon to be more candid than he was in any other interview setting.
"These interviews present a Nixon that is several layers of the onion skin closer to the core than the guarded, paranoid, media-hater that we know from television news," Raiford said.
Guida addresses concerns about the objectivity of the interviewer by noting that "it is precisely because Mr. Nixon trusted Mr. Gannon that the interviews are as revealing and substantive as they are. Perhaps more to the point, the interviews contain no evidence that Mr. Gannon gave Mr. Nixon any sort of preferential treatment; there are no evasions nor are there any softball' questions," Guida said.
Nixon addresses many issues in great detail that are covered only peripherally, if at all, in other interviews. About two-thirds of the interview material can be considered rare to unique in terms of subject matter, according to Gannon, who served in the White House as a special assistant to the president, and flew with Nixon to California aboard Air Force One following his resignation in 1974. Gannon spent the next four years organizing the researching and writing of the former president's memoirs, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, 1978.
Gannon returned to Washington and served as administrative assistant to U.S. Sen. John Heinz. Over the course of seven months in 1983, he conducted the videotaped interviews with Nixon before becoming editor of Saturday Review magazine. Prior to joining the Nixon staff, Gannon assisted Randolph Churchill on the official biography of Sir Winston Churchill and taught at the London School of Economics.
During a number of instances in the course of the interviews, a given exchange is stopped so that Nixon can expand, modify or rethink an answer.
"Such instances would obviously be unusable in a commercial context. However, in an historical/scholarly context, they often offer an added degree of insight into Mr. Nixon's thought process," Guida said.
While the Nixon-Gannon relationship led to a "congenial spirit" to the interviews, "the overall tone is quite serious and at times almost scholarly," Guida said. "Mr. Gannon, who, significantly, has an academic background in history, has indicated to me that the academic world was in fact one of the target audiences of the interviews."
Originally intended to be broadcast and marketed in a variety of ways, much of the material remains unseen due to a lack of available capital to fund such a project.
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