Theme music This is Sound School. I’m Rob. In just a few days, President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn into office. As the ceremony approaches, I’ve been thinking about a radio broadcast from just over 50 years ago. I heard it for the first time recently. And, initially I thought, “Hoo, this is going to be a slog. Unbearable.” See if you can guess what it is. Clip – NPR reporters reading transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes. Nixon talks about cutting losses. Dean and Haldeman talk about how, so far, there are no ties (from the Watergate break-in) to the White House. (fade under) It’s possible, if you know your history, you figured out that this recording is related to Watergate – the political scandal that shook the United States. In 1972, members of President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee and planted bugs – listening devices. Later, the White House attempted to cover up its involvement with the break-in. The whole affair led to a massive political convulsion in the U.S. – including Nixon’s impeachment and resignation. The most obvious clue that this broadcast pertains to Watergate is, perhaps, the names of the people speaking – names that have echoed down through the decades – Haldeman, Dean, and Mitchell. Clip – Nixon takes a phone call from John Mitchell. We only hear Nixon’s side. He says this will blow over. And at the end of the call, he asks Mitchell not to bug anything. So maybe you guessed this is Watergate-related. But what exactly is being read? And who’s reading? That may not be so obvious. The narrators are NPR reporters. And they’re reading transcripts of secret recordings. President Nixon installed hidden mics and reel-to-reel tape recorders in several rooms at the White House, including the Oval Office. Phones were tapped and recorded, too. The system captured a few thousand hours of conversations between Nixon and his staff. About 200 hours pertained to Watergate. The existence of the recordings was revealed during a Senate Watergate Committee hearing. A subpoena for the tapes was issued. The White House refused to hand over the recordings. Instead, in late April of 1974, the White House released transcripts of some tapes. Bob Malesky worked at NPR at the time. In an email, he told me he was a “lowly production assistant.” Bob later became NPR’s senior producer for Weekend Edition Sunday. But, when he was a “gofer,” as he put it, he was sent to the Government Printing Office to pick up NPR’s copies of the transcripts the day they were released. He said, “They were heavy!” No doubt. There were 1,200 pages of transcripts. Clip – Just a few days later, the transcripts were read word for word on the air. Clip – It was a massive undertaking for a young radio network that had only started a few years before. It involved NPR staff plus reporters at several local stations. Bob described it as an “all hands on deck” approach. Clip – The broadcast went on for hours and hours. Ernie Sanchez, who was NPR’s general counsel at the time, told me in an email that the readings lasted more than 25 hours over two days. Here’s how the broadcast began. Clip – Mike Waters identifying himself and saying he’s in “the nation’s capital.” He says all weekend they’ll be reading 48 transcripts of tapes secured from a subpoena issued by the House Judiciary Committee. The big question at the time was this: How involved was Nixon with the Watergate break-in and the cover-up? Or, as one senator famously put it: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” It was thought the secret recordings might hold the answer. The problem was, the White House didn’t provide complete transcripts. Clip – Mike Waters talks about how the transcripts were edited by the White House. I should mention that Mike Waters, who’s reading this intro to the broadcast, was a host of NPR’s All Things Considered back at the start of the network, from 1971 to 1974. Susan Stamberg of NPR once said his voice is so rich and deep “it was like he had a cathedral in his head.” Clip – A little bit more from Mike. After Mike set the stage for the broadcast, he passed the baton to Bob Zelnick, who introduced each segment of the transcripts. Clip – Bob gives the date and time of the White House recording and provides some details like who is talking. He also says that Dean later disclosed to a Senate committee that he believed Nixon was aware of the cover-up of the operation. (fades under) Bob was an accomplished reporter who worked at NPR as well as the Christian Science Monitor and ABC News. He also wrote several books about politics. Bob’s introductions to the readings are dense. And long. This first one runs three and a half minutes. And this is what I mean by “slog.” I have difficulty imagining listeners could follow all the details – even though Watergate was front and center in the country. Clip – Bob talks about the contents of the meeting. Pressure tactics to oppose hearings. How the president wants to use his office against political foes. Next in the broadcast, Mike Waters introduced the people who would be reading the transcript. Bill Dowell reads H. R. Haldeman’s lines. Joe Gwathmey (rhymes with swath-me) reads John Dean’s words. And the reading starts with Paul Anthony taking the role of President Nixon. Clip – Reading begins. (fades under) How are you doing? You following this? It’s not easy. The quick bouncing back and forth between Dean and Haldeman and the president. Plus more names – Liddy. Hunt. MacGregor. And we’re only two minutes into the reading of the first transcript. Which runs 22 minutes!! And, don’t forget, the broadcast basically goes like this for about two days! Clip – Fade up of reading. Hangs out for a bit then fades under. As I listened to these recordings, I was thinking “How is it possible NPR thought this was a good idea? It’s stultifying.” I listened to two full hours of this, and you know how your leg can fall asleep if you sit a certain way? That’s what happened to my ears. Clip – Fade up of reading. Hangs out for a bit then fades under. One thing about these recordings I found perplexing is the reading style. I realize this is 1974 and news presenters at the time employed a “voice of God” approach. But I wondered why the performance was so flat. I figured it’s because they’re reporters, not actors. Then, during the broadcast, Mike Waters explained. Clip – Mike says the readers are purposefully using a dispassionate style to avoid dramatic interpretation since they don’t know how the words were actually spoken and how words are spoken creates meaning. Bill, Joe, and Paul, the readers, they didn’t read the whole time. Others took over. Which gave them a break and the listeners, too. NPR partnered with six member stations – WGBH, WOI, WUHY, WBFO, KBAI, and KCUR. Staff at those stations also took turns reading. Clip – Reporters from KCUR read the transcripts. With all due respect to these reporters, I’m not sure a change in voices really helped matters. Listening is still a slog. But my perspective on the broadcast began to shift when I asked myself this question: If this is not great radio, why do it? Why dedicate this amount of airtime and resources for a lengthy broadcast that was not at all radiophonic? One reason: NPR’s willingness to go out on a limb. Experiment. Even if it tested the network’s capacity. Old timers at NPR have told me there was a “we’ll figure it out as we go” spirit back then. So, it would seem this broadcast was part of that. Of course, there’s another more practical reason: newsworthiness and public service. I mentioned earlier how Watergate was front and center in the country at the time. That may be an understatement. News of the break-in triggered deep, investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post. They uncovered a tangled web of political spying and sabotage and illegal finances that regularly made headlines across the United States. I checked the online archive at Time Magazine, an iconic weekly publication at the time. I counted Nixon and Watergate on the cover 11 times during the Watergate years. Clip – Audio from Senate hearings of H. R. Haldeman being questioned about the subpoena for audio tapes. (fades under) The Senate launched an investigation into Watergate in 1973, a year before the White House released transcripts. The Senate hearings were broadcast daily on television. Clip – Audio from Senate hearings of H. R. Haldeman being questioned about the subpoena for audio tapes. (fades under) Not that my personal experience should make the point about how prevalent Watergate was in the life of America in the early ‘70s, but my very apolitical mother was glued to the TV every afternoon when I came home from school. She encouraged me to watch. So, I did. While eating my after-school snack, of course. I had zero idea what was happening. But, my point is, Watergate was like oxygen. You couldn’t breathe without taking it in. Clip – Audio from Senate hearings of H. R. Haldeman being questioned about the subpoena for audio tapes. (fades under) NPR broadcast those Senate hearings I watched in 1973. Gavel to gavel coverage, as they say. So, when the transcripts of the tapes were released, Bob Malesky told me reading them on-air was a continuation of that kind of public service. As another former reporter put it: “There were news stories about the tapes, but few could hear or read them. So we read them to the nation.” Clip – Short bit of reading from the transcripts broadcast (fades under) Buried in the jumble of voices and unexplained references and the sedate delivery are little moments that jump out. Like this one where John Dean, White House Counsel to the president, predicts the future. Clip – John Dean tells Nixon that he thinks this will all be forgotten in coming weeks and “nothing will come crashing down to our surprise.” Dean got it completely wrong. Watergate was not forgotten. And everything came crashing down. Nixon was impeached on May 9, 1974 – partly because of his refusal to release the actual tapes. Then, exactly three months later, Nixon resigned. Here’s another moment in the transcripts that pops out. Where Nixon thanks his staff for their work covering up the wrongdoing. Clip – Nixon says “You have been very skillful at putting your fingers in the leaks that have sprung here and have sprung there.” One exchange in particular stood out to me. In fact, I backed it up and listened three times. Nixon’s words sound eerily like the present. Clip – Dean says he’s keeping a list of people who are “less than our friends… We shouldn’t forget the way some of them have treated us.” The President: “... They’re asking for it and they’re going to get it. We’ve not used the power in these first four years, as you know. We’ve never used it. We’ve not used the Bureau. We’ve not used the Justice Department. Things are going to change now. And they’re either going to do it right, or go.” Dean: “What an exciting prospect.” Nixon: “Thanks.” I have faith in NPR. Faith they will doggedly pursue reporting on the new administration with vigor – as they should with any administration. And my hope is that from time to time NPR will throw their predictable reporting voice to the wind and reach back into the network’s DNA for inspiration. To the spirit of NPR’s first reporters and this groundbreaking broadcast – though maybe not a full weekend of tedious transcript reading. The network has certainly grown a great deal since those early days and isn’t likely to do that again. But my point is my ears are eager for “all hands on deck” approaches to storytelling that seek truth, report it, and hold the powerful accountable. Nixon – “It has to be done.” Theme music It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it. PRX and Transom give me a long leash. And the opinions expressed on Sound School are mine. They don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of PRX and Transom. I first heard about NPR’s broadcast of these transcripts last year from Sean Corcoran. Sean’s the Executive News Director at KUNC in Greely, Colorado. Thanks, Sean. I immediately started hunting for recordings. Thanks to former NPR reporter Howard Berkes along with Will Chase and Laura Soto-Barra of NPR’s Research, Archive, and Data Strategy team. They helped me along the way. The recording featuring the first hour of the broadcast was provided by the Special Collections and University Archives of the University of Maryland Libraries. The brief excerpt featuring reporters from KCUR came from the archive of community radio station KRAB in Seattle. Thanks also to Bob Malesky, Ernie Sanchez, Flawn Williams, and Susan Stamberg for providing a bit of historical context. This is Sound School from PRX and Transom. Happy New Year to my colleagues Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, Jennifer Jerrett, and my good friends at WCAI. Even though it remains a question, currently WCAI is still located in Woods Hole, the radio center of the universe. This is Rob Rosenthal. Thanks for listening.