July 16, 1973

Nixon White House tapes

Alexander Butterfield publicly reveals Nixon's White House taping system

Butterfield had already told committee staff three days earlier. What made 16 July matter was that this time the question came on live television.

The question about listening devices

At a public, televised hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities on 16 July 1973, former Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield confirmed that presidential conversations in the Oval Office and elsewhere had been secretly recorded at Nixon’s direction. Minority counsel Fred Thompson asked the public question; Samuel Ervin chaired.

It was not the first telling. Butterfield had disclosed the system to committee staff in a private interview on 13 July, after staff went looking for evidence that might corroborate John Dean’s account.

Wider than the Oval Office

The system Butterfield described covered meetings and telephone calls in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Executive Office Building, the Lincoln Sitting Room and Camp David. Most locations were sound-activated and tied to the presidential locator system; the Cabinet Room installation was operated manually.

The National Archives puts the resulting collection at roughly 3,700 hours of listening across 950 reels, with metadata covering 22,723 conversations recorded between 16 February 1971 and 18 July 1973.

A week to the subpoenas

Butterfield did not testify that particular conversations were known to be incriminating. What he established was that recordings existed and could corroborate or contradict Dean’s allegations, which made the tapes an evidentiary target.

The recording system was shut down on 18 July. On 23 July both the Senate committee and special prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed tapes and documents.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

July 16 is securely the date of the public revelation. The first disclosure to committee staff occurred privately on July 13, a distinction often lost in abbreviated timelines.