Nixon's Phone Conversations with Lead Speechwriter Ray Price  Assembled in Single Collection for First Time

Price was among most tenured of Nixon's aides

For the first time, the complete telephone conversations between President Nixon and Raymond K. Price, as captured by the Nixon taping system, are assembled here in a single, easy-to-use collection. 

These files include every phone conversation Price took part in, either placed or received, in which at least one party was using a telephone that was recorded as part of the Nixon taping system. That included telephones in the Oval Office, Nixon's suite in the Executive Office Building, and the White House residence. 

Ray Price was instrumental to Nixon over a long period that stretched from early in the 1968 campaign well into the post-presidency period, when Price collaborated with Nixon on projects such as the Frost/Nixon interviews, Nixon's memoirs, and other Nixon post-presidency books. 

Price, who was known as one of Nixon's more liberal advisers, wrote the New York Herald Tribune's editorial endorsement of President Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1964 presidential election. Price joined the 1968 Nixon campaign staff very early on, when he and campaign staff such as Rose Mary Woods and Pat Buchanan were located at Nixon's law office in New York. Price was Nixon's chief collaborator on his 1967 Foreign Affairs article "Asia after Viet Nam." 

Price, along with Bill Safire and Pat Buchanan, prepared both of Nixon's inaugural addresses, his state of the union speeches, and numerous other speeches mentioned in the conversation below on topics that included Nixon's 1971 "New Economic Policy", various Vietnam speeches, and the 1972 election. The un-cut 1982 interview above makes references to a number of these speeches that Price worked on, and the telephone conversations below provide an excellent window into the complicated process of presidential speechwriting.

This collection does not include conversations that Price initiated or received in other locations. This collection contains conversations from May  26, 1971 to January 23, 1973, which represents all such telephone conversations from the National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA's) declassified and released portion of the Nixon tapes. For more information on the timeline of future Nixon tape releases, click here. 

The participants are as follows:

P = President Richard Nixon

APB = Alexander P. Butterfield

HRH = H.R. "Bob" Haldeman

RKP = Raymond K. Price

Unk = Unknown

WHO = White House Operator