Budget cuts at Archives to hold up Nixon tapes

Severe budget cuts for the National Archives will give Richard Nixon a victory he was denied in the courts -- delaying the public release of thousands of hours of his Watergate tapes.

More than 17,000 people have listened to the first 31 tapes made available, but because the tapes project is one of the Archives' newest, and its researchers the most junior, firings will hit it the worst of all programs, deputy archivist James Hastings said Monday.

So the project will take twice as long as planned, delaying full disclosure until at least 1987.