Times on the Tapes

I haven’t read Klingman’s article; perhaps he cites questionable correspondence or remarks made by Kutler. But the Times article implies that Klingman’s claims about Kutler’s allegedly improper motives stem from disagreements over Kutler’s transcripts.

In this respect, I’m inclined to agree with the one clearly neutral source the article cites: my former Miller Center colleague Ken Hughes, who probably knows more about the Nixon tapes than anyone around. Ken told the Times that the attacks on Kutler were “misguided,” adding, “I was very critical of errors in the transcripts and I thought he had left out some important conversations, but they are entirely honest and predictable mistakes that anyone who would try to make a transcript from extremely difficult tapes could make.”

Digitized copies of the Nixon tapes area available at the Miller Center’s website; with the exception of the phone calls, they’re not at all easy to hear. I don’t know what sort of audio software Kutler used in the production of his book, but it clearly would have been something less sophisticated than what’s available now. It’s therefore not at all surprising to learn that transcription errors were made.

There are, to be short, lots of non-malevolent explanations for mistakes in Kutler’s transcripts—ranging from honest errors in attempting to transcribe the tapes without a good editorial process in place to (perhaps) his choosing to exclude transcripts of one or two conversations not for sound editorial reasons but because they were particularly difficult to hear, and thus transcribe.

If the thrust of the Times article—errors as part of a pro-Dean conspiracy—seems misguided, that doesn’t absolve Kutler of the professional obligation to have corrected errors when those were brought to his attention, perhaps through an errata section on a website. And some of the errors attributed to Kutler in the article—listing a Nixon-Dean meeting and a later telephone conversation of the same day as one, continuous meeting—were, at best, very sloppy mistakes.

In that respect, Joan Hoff’s comments in the article should be treated as a caution: “The book,” she said, “is used authoritatively as the official transcript of the event.” Historians using the tapes should always go back to the source—especially since the tapes now are all available, in digitized form, on the Miller Center website—rather than rely on published transcripts. Kutler’s book definitely shouldn’t be considered an “official transcript” in that respect.