As fitas de Nixon

Em quatro anos, o presidente americano Richard Nixon gravou mais de 3000 horas de áudio de suas chamadas telefônicas e encontros de gabinete. A única forma de escutá-las era ir ao National Archives, em College Park (Maryland). Mesmo assim, 1/3 das fitas ainda está classificado como secreto, de maneira que estão inacessíveis a pesquisadores.

Hoje, com o apoio do National Security Archive, todas as fitas desclassificadas já podem ser acessadas eletrônicamente em formato mp3, no sítio http://www.nixontapes.org. Também há transcrições e textos de apoio que contextualizam a gestão de um dos presidentes americanos mais controversos de todos os tempos. Vejam, abaixo, o trecho de um desses textos:

In his memoirs, Nixon listed several reasons behind his decision to record his conversations throughout the executive offices. The primary reasons were administrative and historical, part of the president’s desire to make his administration “the best chronicled in history.” Nixon recalled that he “wanted a record of every major meeting” and that an earlier system of taking notes, “ranging from verbatim transcripts of important national security sessions to ‘color reports’ of ceremonial events…proved cumbersome, because it was not always convenient or appropriate to have someone in the room taking notes.” [3] From the revelation of the taping system in 1973 until his death in 1994, Nixon consistently argued that his reasons for taping were primarily historical. Nixon emphasized that the secrecy of the system overrode any objections related to right to privacy concerns of those taped, and that the benefits he perceived in terms of later writing his memoirs and having a record of major meetings overrode the costs and staff time to maintain the system. That the taping system had other potentially useful political functions should not be doubted, and Nixon did not deny such alternatives.