Microforms Research Collections: Papers of the Nixon Whitehouse

Location: The hundreds of fiche in this collection can be located in Fiche Cabinet 42-B.

Scope: Papers of the Nixon White House contains previously unavailable primary source material that will shed new light on all of the major events of the Nixon era—Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the bombing of North Vietnam and the invasion of Cambodia, antiwar demonstrations, the imposition of wage and price controls, race relations, and many more. All of the files in this series are reproduced exactly as they exist at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project and have not been edited in any way.

Part 1 of these papers include Official Inventories of Papers and Other Historical materials of the Nixon White House. Each of the 95 official inventories included in this collection contains a scope and content note, a biographical or organizational note, and a box-by-box, folder-by-folder description of the papers that make up a given file. The following is a list of just some of the finding aids that can be found in this collection; the White House Papers of Patrick Buchanan, Charles Colson, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, Alexander Haig, Egil Krogh, Ron Zeigler: President Nixon’s Office Files, Personal Files, Daily Diary, and White House Central Files.


Part 2 contains the President’s Meeting File, 1969-1974 and consists of detailed memoranda describing the numerous official sessions in which President Nixon met with key political figures and members of his administration. The President’s meetings with Republican and Democratic leaders, the Cabinet, and the Quadriad (the administration’s economic policy makers) are particularly well documented. Among the chief authors of the memoranda are Patrick Buchanan, Charles, Colson, Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger, and Caspar Weinberger. The following are among the hundred of meeting sessions detailed in this collection: with Roy Wilkins on civil rights; Nelson Rockefeller on urban affairs; the Cabinet on welfare reform, legislative leadership on the nomination of Judge Haynesworth to the Supreme Court; Senator Dole on the new Republican leadership in the Senate; the deans of major universities on Kent State and campus disorders; George Meany on political support from the AFL-CIO; and Robert Byrd on school busing.

Part 3 contains John Ehrlichman: Notes of Meetings with the President, 1969-1973. Since he was President Nixon’s chief assistant in dealing with domestic policy matters, his access to Nixon was second only to H.R. Halderman’s. Ehrlichman’s contemporaneous handwritten notes for approximately one thousand meetings and telephone conversations with Richard Nixon shed valuable light on White House attitudes and strategies toward a host of domestic issues, such as inflation, crime, the budget, the ITT case, Wounded Knee, the drug problem, the new federalism, environmental legislation, wage and price controls, and draft reform. In addition, Ehrlichman’s notes recount dozens of conversations with Nixon and administration officials concerning various aspects of Watergate.



How to search the collection:
On the Multimedia Index Table is a black binder marked Papers of the Nixon White House. The loose leaf pages in the binder contain descriptions of items in Part 1 of the collection which are inventories of papers and other historical materials. A subject index can be found in the back. The guides to Parts 2 and 3 described above are paperbound with subject indexes in the back. These can also be found within the black binder. After using these indexes, you can locate the exact fiche you need in cabinet 42-B.