The Nixon White House Staff Super 8 Motion Picture Film Collection

 

The Nixon administration notoriously documented everything. Everybody knows about the secret Nixon White House tapes, which led to Nixon's resignation. But they are just one collection of Nixon White House documents among many. One of the lesser-known collections is the Nixon White House Staff Super 8 Motion Picture Film Collection, housed at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.

Between 1969 and 1973, three Nixon staffers filmed about 14 hours of Super-8 home movies, while working for and traveling with the president: Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, White House Counsel and Domestic Policy Advisor John Ehrlichman, and Deputy Assistant to the President Dwight L. Chapin. (Haldeman's assistant Lawrence Higby also shot some of the films.) Haldeman obtained Super-8 film from the U.S. Navy Photographic Film Center, which also processed the exposed film and made prints. When the FBI confiscated the contents of Ehrlichman's office during the Watergate investigation, they included a print of the Super-8 home movies.

When Nixon resigned, he tried to take personal possession of all of the documents created by his administration, as was his right according to long historical practice and an Attorney General opinion. In response, the subpoenaed the secret tapes and other documents, and Congress passed the Presidential Records and Materials Preservation Act, which nationalized all documents created by the Nixon White House.

The result was a pair of Supreme Court opinions. In the first, United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), the Court ordered Nixon to produce the secret tapes and other documents, rejecting his claim of executive privilege. In the second, lesser-known case, Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), the Court held that Congress could nationalize the documents, but that it was a 5th Amendment taking, requiring compensation. In 2000, the government finally agreed to pay $18 million in compensation, most of which went to Nixon's lawyers and the Nixon Foundation.

In any case, the Super-8 home movies were included among the confiscated documents, and therefore entered the public domain. However, access was limited by the fact that they were unique objects in a legacy format, with a low priority for preservation and access.

I first learned about the Nixon home movies in about 2001, via my friend Bill Brand, who had been contracted by NARA to preserve them on 16mm film. In 2010, I paid to have the first video transfers of the home movies made, and began working on the feature documentary Our Nixon (2013), which was directed by Penny Lane and which I co-produced. Later, we had very high-quality scans of the original films created by Jeff Kreines of Kinetta. The film premiered at SXSW and was broadcast by CNN several times. It is available in all the usual places.

However, access to the full collection of Nixon White House Super-8 films remained limited. So, in anticipated observance of Home Movie Day 2017, the Kentucky Amateur Film Archives is making the whole collection available on its YouTube page. The Kentucky Amateur Film Archives is a 501(c)(3) organization based in Lexington, Kentucky. Its mission is to collect, preserve, and provide access to home movies and amateur films, with a focus on films made in Kentucky and its surrounding states, or by people from those states. Several Nixon staffers were from Kentucky or moved to Kentucky later in their lives.

We hope you enjoy watching these home movies!

Comments

[Matt]

From the "headline" I thought, for a minute, this was going to be about Nixon making staff members stay at a chain of semi-budget motels while traveling...

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

And I thought the film might be about unabashed war criminals in their prime.