August 22, 1974: Ford, Legal Advisers Discuss What to Do with Nixon Files

President Ford, with Attorney General William Saxbe and Ford’s counsel Philip Buchen, discuss what to do with the ever-accumulating boxes and crates of Richard Nixon’s presidential documents. Mostly stored on the third floor of the Executive Office Building, their weight is so heavy that the Secret Service worries the floor might cave in underneath them. No one is sure how many documents William Gulley, the director of the White House military office, managed to spirit out to the Nixon residence in California (see August 8, 1974), but the White House tape recordings and most of the important documents remain in White House custody. Ford wants to be rid of the documents once and for all, but he has so far yielded to the advice of his lawyers to keep them. Ford’s attorney Benton Becker will later write, “I suggested to President Ford, not too diplomatically… that American history would record his transmittal of the records and tapes to California as the final act of the Watergate cover-up—an act initiated and carried out by Gerald Ford.” Ford asks Saxbe to get a firm legal opinion on exactly who owns the Nixon files, Nixon or the government. [Werth, 2006, pp. 157-158]