Watch the unreleased 1993 footage of Presidents Nixon and Clinton meeting, a video made public for first time

A never-before-seen video of former President Richard Nixon‘s 1993 visit to the White House, hosted by then-President Bill Clinton, has been made public.

The roughly 2-minute video, uploaded recently to the Richard Nixon Foundation‘s YouTube channel, shows Nixon and Clinton meeting at the president’s residence on March 8, 1993. The footage was originally recorded by the White House television unit during the Clinton administration and had never been made publicly available until now.

In the video, Nixon tells Clinton, “It’s strange we never met,” and Clinton responds, “I had one chance to meet you, we were once in the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong at the same time. I was coming in and you were leaving.”

Clinton then introduces Nixon to Chief Official White House Photographer Bob McNeely, who jokes that Clinton is the first president he’s older than. Clinton, who was 46 when he took office, was one of the youngest presidents in U.S. history.

Nixon, first elected in 1968, became the first U.S. president to resign from office on August 9, 1974, amid the Watergate scandal.

Clinton’s presidency was also marred by scandal. He was impeached by the House in 1998 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice related to his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Senate later acquitted him.

The Nixon Foundation said it reposted the footage to its own audience after spotting the video online.

“We saw the video posted as new content on the YouTube channel of the Clinton Library. It was footage we had never seen before, so we shared it with our audience,” said Carrie Anderson, a marketing project manager for the Nixon Foundation.

The Clinton Library processed the video in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2023. According to a National Archives spokesperson, “any member of the public can submit a FOIA request to gain access to the records and holdings of the National Archives, and requests are processed by archivists on a case-by-case basis.”

The 25-minute video uploaded to the Clinton Library’s YouTube channel includes Nixon’s White House meeting with Clinton, as well as Clinton’s meetings with the House Budget Committee in the Cabinet Room, the Congressional Black Caucus in the Roosevelt Room and the arrival of then-French President François Mitterrand at the White House.

“Digitization is an additional and very important aspect of sharing records and demonstrating transparency, and the National Archives is making important strides in digitizing and uploading records like this one to the internet,” the National Archives spokesperson said.

Herbert Ragan, audio and visual archivist at the Clinton Library, said the full video received about 23,000 views in four and a half days.

The shorter version posted by the Nixon Foundation to its own YouTube channel on Monday, April 21, has since drawn nearly 14,000 views.