W.W. Norton and the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia have signed an agreement to publish books and CD-ROMs covering the White House tapes recorded secretly during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, with Norton releasing 10 books of such material next year alone.

The program, to be edited by Philip Zelikow, director of the Miller Center, and Harvard historian Ernest May, will also call for Norton to publish an unprecedented series of CD-ROM companions to the books, which will locate the tapes in their historical contexts.

Zelikow said of the project: "Only about one percent of the contents of these tapes has been published so far. No one in history has ever before had this kind of evidence about the top-level decision making of any government." He and May published The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis with Harvard University Press in 1997. He told PW the same standards would be applied to the Norton series.

Norton president W. Drake McFeely said the company was "delighted to be a part of this great and exciting effort" that would help toward "a public understanding of the past and how the government works at its highest levels."