Primary Sources: U.S. Presidents

Vice-Presidential Candidate Richard M. Nixon
Television Speech, September 23, 1952

Audio of the first US televised presidential debate from the BBC

Audio provided by the BBC "President-elect Richard Nixon: "Winning is a lot more fun""

Video of President Nixon and his wife, Pat, celebrating an overwhelming victory provided by the BBC

"The article presents the text of an address made by United States President Richard Nixon on April 30, 1970, on the United States' military and political position in the Vietnam War. "

"The article presents the text of an address made by United States President Richard Nixon on November 3, 1969, regarding the state of American involvement in the Vietnam War."

"Presents an exchange of letters between the president of the United States and the president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, concerning the peace process in Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War in 1969. "

one photographer's account of President Richard Nixon's years in office

This video features five critical speeches: Winston Churchill's two wartime speeches; Adlai Stevenson's Cuban Missile Crisis speech to the UN; Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech; Barbara Jordan's statement on impeachment; and Golda Meir's "Peace in the Middle East" speech.

"Transcript-like records, and the notes from which they were prepared, of President Nixon’s and President Ford’s conversations with heads of state and foreign officials, senior intelligence and national security officials, American ambassadors, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and other distinguished foreign and American visitors. The memoranda of conversations (memcons) cover a wide variety of foreign affairs and national security topics, including the Middle East peace process, East-West relations, NATO and Europe, normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China, Angola, foreign aid, arms control, energy, foreign economic affairs, investigations of the intelligence community, and much else."

Audio-Visual materials related to Nixon provided by the History Channel.

"The Richard Nixon-Frank Gannon Interviews consist of more than 30 hours of a videotaped oral history with former president Richard Nixon. The interviews took place nearly a decade after Nixon's resignation, and were conducted with the benefit of some historical perspective and without media hype. They were made in four groups of two- and three-day sessions spread over seven months in 1983. "

Includes primary resources related to Nixon and Ford including: President Nixon's Trip to China, The Vietnam War, Environmentalism, etc.

Records released in digital format in 2011 from the National Archives. Access is provided by the Federal Digital System.

"The Nixon Library makes available almost 50 million pages of documents, over 300,000 photographs, thousands of motion pictures and videos, and the Nixon White House Tapes."
Click the Virtual Library link to see the materials available online.

"The Richard Nixon Presidential Library holdings include more than 150 oral history interviews with many individuals who worked in the Nixon Presidential administration or were significant figures during the time."

This site makes freely available the best-quality digital audio and selected transcripts for people who can not go to the NARA's Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland, or to the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. It also makes "the NARA-created tape logs (summaries of conversations), time codes, the president's daily diary, as well as pertinent information about each conversation that makes your listening experience better and to make the collection more accessible."

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 195

"... the online portal for annotated transcripts of the White House tapes published by the Presidential Recordings Program (PRP). Created by a team of scholars and researchers at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, these transcripts are presented in PRDE alongside the corresponding audio, enabling users to read and listen to these conversations simultaneously. This effort at deciphering the presidential recordings and decoding their meaning allows these extraordinary documents, many of which would remain otherwise inaccessible, to come alive, providing an intimate view of life inside the Oval Office. (Read more about PRP in “The Presidential Recordings Program,” by Philip Zelikow, Ernest May, and Timothy Naftali)."

"Elvis Presley met President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970. This is the behind-the-scenes story of how and why the meeting occurred told through the original photographs, letters and memos created by Presley and the White House staff." An online exhibit from the National Archives.

Dirck Halstead, a photojournalist who was Nixon in China in 1972, recalls the trip.