Watergate and the Nixon Tapes

In the early morning hours of June 17, 1971, five men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in downtown Washington, D.C.  The episode came to dominate public attention in the early 1970s and was intertwined with other concurrent events, notably the Vietnam War, the 1972 presidential election, and the partisan configurations of the era.

The Watergate story is complex, perhaps more convoluted than many today or even at the time realize. There were many defining events relating to the episode, but the most significant was the discovery in July 1973 of a comprehensive, and until then secret, audio recording system that captured almost all of President Nixon’s White House conversations for two and a half years.  The Nixon White House tapes contain an estimated 3,700 conversations involving the former president from February 1971 to July 1973, including several that proved to be President Nixon’s undoing. 

The speaker, Chris Beam, worked from 1977 to 1988 at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and from 1978 to 1982 was on the staff that processed the Nixon tapes. Of the estimated 3,700 hours of conversation in the collection, he has listened to about 1,500 hours, mostly in the 1972-1973 period, when the scandal was unfolding. 

From 1988 to 2005, he was director of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates College and, since 1989, has taught U.S. history at Bates and other local institutions in an adjunct capacity. Every year until his retirement in 2020 he has led a course on the Vietnam War, of which he is a veteran.

He has been interviewed many times by local and national media on the Nixon tapes and related topics and published many commentaries on the Nixon presidency and the White House tapes.  His slide presentation will cover the set-up of the taping system, its technical characteristics including its many deficiencies, and the historical significance of its contents. 

A resident of Lewiston and a native of Brunswick, Chris graduated from Williams College, served in the U.S. Marine Corps including a tour in Vietnam, and earned a doctorate in U.S. History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This program will take place in person; no registration is required.