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46 Years Ago Today; Alexander Butterfield reveals the existence of WH taping system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes
Richard Nixon's Oval Office tape recorder
The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Nixon administration officials, Nixon family members, and White House staff, produced between 1971 and 1973.
In February 1971, a sound-activated taping system was installed in the Oval Office, including in Nixon's Oval Office desk, using Sony TC-800B open-reel tape recorders to capture audio transmitted by telephone taps and concealed microphones. The system was expanded to include other rooms within the White House and Camp David. The system was turned off on July 18, 1973, two days after it became public knowledge as a result of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings. Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; the practice was initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.
The tapes' existence came to light during the Watergate scandal of 1973 and 1974, when the system was mentioned during the televised testimony of White House aide Alexander Butterfield before the Senate Watergate Committee. Nixon's refusal of a congressional subpoena to release the tapes constituted an article of impeachment against Nixon, and led to his subsequent resignation on August 9, 1974.
On August 19, 2013, the Nixon Library and the National Archives and Records Administration released the final 340 hours of the tapes that cover the period from April 9 through July 12, 1973.
Revelation of the taping system
Watergate scandal
The existence of the White House taping system was first confirmed by Senate Committee staff member Donald Sanders, on July 13, 1973, in an interview with White House aide Alexander Butterfield. Three days later, it was made public during the televised testimony of Butterfield, when he was asked about the possibility of a White House taping system by Senate Counsel Fred Thompson.
On July 16, 1973, Butterfield told the committee in a televised hearing that Nixon had ordered a taping system installed in the White House to automatically record all conversations. Special Counsel Archibald Cox, a former United States Solicitor General under President John F. Kennedy, asked District Court Judge John Sirica to subpoena nine relevant tapes to confirm the testimony of White House Counsel John Dean.
Saturday Night Massacre
President Nixon initially refused to release the tapes, for two reasons: first, that the Constitutional principle of executive privilege extends to the tapes and citing the separation of powers and checks and balances within the Constitution, and second, claiming they were vital to national security. On October 19, 1973, he offered a compromise; Nixon proposed that U.S. Senator John C. Stennis review and summarize the tapes for accuracy and report his findings to the special prosecutor's office. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused the compromise and on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned instead, then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was asked to fire Cox but refused and was subsequently fired. Solicitor General and acting head of the Justice Department Robert Bork fired Cox. Nixon appointed Leon Jaworski special counsel on November 1, 1973.
The 18 1?2-minute gap
According to President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the June 20, 1972, recordings when she made "a terrible mistake" during transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to 18 1?2 minutes. She later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.
The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, three days after the Watergate break in. Nixon claimed not to know the topic or topics discussed during the gap. Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel. White House lawyers first heard of the gap on the evening of November 14, 1973, and Judge Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, was not told until November 21, after the President's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer.
Rose Mary Woods attempting to demonstrate how she may have inadvertently created the gap
Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her posture during the demonstration, dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch", resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation.
In a grand jury interview in 1975, Nixon said that he initially believed that only four minutes of the tape were missing. He said that when he later heard that 18 minutes were missing, "I practically blew my stack."
Nixon's counsel, John Dean, in his 2014 book The Nixon Defense, suggests that the full collection of recordings now available "largely answer the questions regarding what was known by the White House about the reasons for the break-in and bugging at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as what was erased during the infamous 18 minute and 30 second gap during the June 20, 1972, conversation and why."
A variety of suggestions have been made as to who could have erased the tape. Years later, former White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig speculated that the erasures may conceivably have been caused by Nixon himself. According to Haig, the President was "spectacularly inept" at understanding and operating mechanical devices, and in the course of reviewing the tape in question, he may have caused the erasures by fumbling with the recorder's controls; whether inadvertently or intentionally, Haig could not say. In 1973, Haig had speculated aloud that the erasure was caused by an unidentified "sinister force". Others have suggested that Haig was involved in deliberately erasing the tapes with Nixon's involvement, or that the erasure was conducted by a White House lawyer.
Investigations
Nixon himself launched the first investigation into how the tapes were erased. He claimed that it was an intensive investigation but came up empty.
On November 21, 1973, Sirica appointed a panel of persons nominated jointly by the White House and the Special Prosecution Force. The panel was supplied with the Evidence Tape, the seven tape recorders from the Oval Office and Executive Office Building, and the two Uher 5000 recorders. One Uher 5000 was marked "Secret Service". The other was accompanied by a foot pedal, respectively labeled Government Exhibit 60 and 60B. The panel determined that the buzz was of no consequence, and that the gap was due to erasure performed on the Exhibit 60 Uher. The panel also determined that the erasure/buzz recording consisted of at least five separate segments, possibly as many as nine, and that at least five segments required hand operation; that is, they could not have been performed using the foot pedal. The panel was subsequently asked by the court to consider alternative explanations that had emerged during the hearings. The final report, dated May 31, 1974, found these other explanations did not contradict the original findings.
The National Archives now owns the tape, and has tried several times to recover the missing minutes—most recently in 2003—but without success. The tapes are now preserved in a climate-controlled vault in case a future technological development allows for restoration of the missing audio. Corporate security expert Phil Mellinger undertook a project to restore Haldeman's handwritten notes describing the missing 18 1?2 minutes, though that effort also failed to produce any new information.
The "smoking gun" tape
Nixon releasing the transcripts
In April 1974, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes of 42 White House conversations. At the end of that month, Nixon released edited transcripts of the White House tapes, again citing executive privilege and national security; the Judiciary Committee, however, rejected Nixon's edited transcripts, saying that they did not comply with the subpoena.
Sirica, acting on a request from Jaworski, issued a subpoena for the tapes of 64 presidential conversations to use as evidence in the criminal cases against indicted former Nixon administration officials. Nixon refused, and Jaworski appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to force Nixon to turn over the tapes. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the tapes. The 8–0 ruling (Justice William Rehnquist disqualified himself owing to having worked for Attorney General John Mitchell) in United States v. Nixon found that President Nixon was wrong in arguing that courts are compelled to honor, without question, any presidential claim of executive privilege.
In late July 1974, the White House released the subpoenaed tapes. One of those tapes was the so-called "smoking gun" tape, from June 23, 1972, six days after the Watergate break-in. In that tape, Nixon agrees that administration officials should approach Richard Helms, Director of the CIA, and Vernon A. Walters, Deputy Director, and ask them to request L. Patrick Gray, Acting Director of the FBI, to halt the Bureau's investigation into the Watergate break-in on the grounds that it was a national security matter. The special prosecutor felt that Nixon, in so agreeing, had entered into a criminal conspiracy whose goal was the obstruction of justice.
Once the "smoking gun" tape was made public on August 5, 1974, Nixon's political support practically vanished. The ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced that they would now vote for impeachment once the matter reached the House floor. He lacked substantial support in the Senate as well; Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott estimated no more than 15 Senators were willing to even consider acquittal. Facing certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and equally certain conviction in the Senate, Nixon announced his resignation on the evening of Thursday, August 8, 1974, effective as of noon the next day.
</snip>
Richard Nixon's Oval Office tape recorder
The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Nixon administration officials, Nixon family members, and White House staff, produced between 1971 and 1973.
In February 1971, a sound-activated taping system was installed in the Oval Office, including in Nixon's Oval Office desk, using Sony TC-800B open-reel tape recorders to capture audio transmitted by telephone taps and concealed microphones. The system was expanded to include other rooms within the White House and Camp David. The system was turned off on July 18, 1973, two days after it became public knowledge as a result of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings. Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; the practice was initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.
The tapes' existence came to light during the Watergate scandal of 1973 and 1974, when the system was mentioned during the televised testimony of White House aide Alexander Butterfield before the Senate Watergate Committee. Nixon's refusal of a congressional subpoena to release the tapes constituted an article of impeachment against Nixon, and led to his subsequent resignation on August 9, 1974.
On August 19, 2013, the Nixon Library and the National Archives and Records Administration released the final 340 hours of the tapes that cover the period from April 9 through July 12, 1973.
Revelation of the taping system
Watergate scandal
The existence of the White House taping system was first confirmed by Senate Committee staff member Donald Sanders, on July 13, 1973, in an interview with White House aide Alexander Butterfield. Three days later, it was made public during the televised testimony of Butterfield, when he was asked about the possibility of a White House taping system by Senate Counsel Fred Thompson.
On July 16, 1973, Butterfield told the committee in a televised hearing that Nixon had ordered a taping system installed in the White House to automatically record all conversations. Special Counsel Archibald Cox, a former United States Solicitor General under President John F. Kennedy, asked District Court Judge John Sirica to subpoena nine relevant tapes to confirm the testimony of White House Counsel John Dean.
Saturday Night Massacre
President Nixon initially refused to release the tapes, for two reasons: first, that the Constitutional principle of executive privilege extends to the tapes and citing the separation of powers and checks and balances within the Constitution, and second, claiming they were vital to national security. On October 19, 1973, he offered a compromise; Nixon proposed that U.S. Senator John C. Stennis review and summarize the tapes for accuracy and report his findings to the special prosecutor's office. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused the compromise and on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned instead, then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was asked to fire Cox but refused and was subsequently fired. Solicitor General and acting head of the Justice Department Robert Bork fired Cox. Nixon appointed Leon Jaworski special counsel on November 1, 1973.
The 18 1?2-minute gap
According to President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the June 20, 1972, recordings when she made "a terrible mistake" during transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to 18 1?2 minutes. She later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.
The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, three days after the Watergate break in. Nixon claimed not to know the topic or topics discussed during the gap. Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel. White House lawyers first heard of the gap on the evening of November 14, 1973, and Judge Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, was not told until November 21, after the President's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer.
Rose Mary Woods attempting to demonstrate how she may have inadvertently created the gap
Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her posture during the demonstration, dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch", resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation.
In a grand jury interview in 1975, Nixon said that he initially believed that only four minutes of the tape were missing. He said that when he later heard that 18 minutes were missing, "I practically blew my stack."
Nixon's counsel, John Dean, in his 2014 book The Nixon Defense, suggests that the full collection of recordings now available "largely answer the questions regarding what was known by the White House about the reasons for the break-in and bugging at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as what was erased during the infamous 18 minute and 30 second gap during the June 20, 1972, conversation and why."
A variety of suggestions have been made as to who could have erased the tape. Years later, former White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig speculated that the erasures may conceivably have been caused by Nixon himself. According to Haig, the President was "spectacularly inept" at understanding and operating mechanical devices, and in the course of reviewing the tape in question, he may have caused the erasures by fumbling with the recorder's controls; whether inadvertently or intentionally, Haig could not say. In 1973, Haig had speculated aloud that the erasure was caused by an unidentified "sinister force". Others have suggested that Haig was involved in deliberately erasing the tapes with Nixon's involvement, or that the erasure was conducted by a White House lawyer.
Investigations
Nixon himself launched the first investigation into how the tapes were erased. He claimed that it was an intensive investigation but came up empty.
On November 21, 1973, Sirica appointed a panel of persons nominated jointly by the White House and the Special Prosecution Force. The panel was supplied with the Evidence Tape, the seven tape recorders from the Oval Office and Executive Office Building, and the two Uher 5000 recorders. One Uher 5000 was marked "Secret Service". The other was accompanied by a foot pedal, respectively labeled Government Exhibit 60 and 60B. The panel determined that the buzz was of no consequence, and that the gap was due to erasure performed on the Exhibit 60 Uher. The panel also determined that the erasure/buzz recording consisted of at least five separate segments, possibly as many as nine, and that at least five segments required hand operation; that is, they could not have been performed using the foot pedal. The panel was subsequently asked by the court to consider alternative explanations that had emerged during the hearings. The final report, dated May 31, 1974, found these other explanations did not contradict the original findings.
The National Archives now owns the tape, and has tried several times to recover the missing minutes—most recently in 2003—but without success. The tapes are now preserved in a climate-controlled vault in case a future technological development allows for restoration of the missing audio. Corporate security expert Phil Mellinger undertook a project to restore Haldeman's handwritten notes describing the missing 18 1?2 minutes, though that effort also failed to produce any new information.
The "smoking gun" tape
Nixon releasing the transcripts
In April 1974, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes of 42 White House conversations. At the end of that month, Nixon released edited transcripts of the White House tapes, again citing executive privilege and national security; the Judiciary Committee, however, rejected Nixon's edited transcripts, saying that they did not comply with the subpoena.
Sirica, acting on a request from Jaworski, issued a subpoena for the tapes of 64 presidential conversations to use as evidence in the criminal cases against indicted former Nixon administration officials. Nixon refused, and Jaworski appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to force Nixon to turn over the tapes. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the tapes. The 8–0 ruling (Justice William Rehnquist disqualified himself owing to having worked for Attorney General John Mitchell) in United States v. Nixon found that President Nixon was wrong in arguing that courts are compelled to honor, without question, any presidential claim of executive privilege.
In late July 1974, the White House released the subpoenaed tapes. One of those tapes was the so-called "smoking gun" tape, from June 23, 1972, six days after the Watergate break-in. In that tape, Nixon agrees that administration officials should approach Richard Helms, Director of the CIA, and Vernon A. Walters, Deputy Director, and ask them to request L. Patrick Gray, Acting Director of the FBI, to halt the Bureau's investigation into the Watergate break-in on the grounds that it was a national security matter. The special prosecutor felt that Nixon, in so agreeing, had entered into a criminal conspiracy whose goal was the obstruction of justice.
Once the "smoking gun" tape was made public on August 5, 1974, Nixon's political support practically vanished. The ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced that they would now vote for impeachment once the matter reached the House floor. He lacked substantial support in the Senate as well; Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott estimated no more than 15 Senators were willing to even consider acquittal. Facing certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and equally certain conviction in the Senate, Nixon announced his resignation on the evening of Thursday, August 8, 1974, effective as of noon the next day.
</snip>
Lordy, I hope there are tapes TODAY of Trump's crime spree!
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
From the OP:
Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; the practice was initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.
The difference between Nixon's and FDR's taping was that Nixon's visitors were never advised that they were being recorded in the Oval Office. Possibly Haldeman or Erlichman knew, but it's likely they didn't. Certainly John Dean didn't know and he was a frequent visitor to the Oval Office. The recording system was designed by Butterfield to operate in stealth, and that's just how Nixon wanted it.
When FDR taped meetings, it was done with the knowledge and consent of the people involved. That was never true for Nixon.
https://www.americanheritage.com/fdr-tapes
Secret recordings made in the Oval Office of the President in the autumn of 1940
February/March 1982
Volume 33 Issue 2
INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
What an astonishing discovery! Rumors had long circulated about a recording device in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. But these rumors were denied for years by archivists who had custody of the Roosevelt papers. This denial was understandable. Shortly after Roosevelt’s death, his stenographer Jack Romagna confidentially informed National Archives officials of the existence of such recordings, and arrangements were made to send them to the FDR Library at Hyde Park. This was done in December, 1947. The overworked archivists at Hyde Park quickly established that the recordings were of certain press conferences in 1940, apparently made as an experiment but of such poor quality as to be practically indecipherable. But they contained other material that the archivists were never able to puzzle out. Regarding the matter as an experiment that had not worked, the library staff accessioned the recordings and duly opened them to researchers, but the recordings were little remarked among the mass of other audiovisual materials at Hyde Park until Professor R.J. C. Butow came on them in 1978.
Professor Butow faced two problems: to decipher the recordings and to establish their provenance. This account of his quest deserves to become a new chapter in Robin W. Winks’s enjoyable anthology Historian as Detective .
The first problem, even with the later assistance of Geoffrey Ward, the editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE , and Professor Mark Weiss of Queens College, the acoustical expert, has not been entirely solved. But a substantial number of the forty-year-old words have been recovered. Future technological advances may bring back still more from the vaults of the past.
In his search, Professor Butow had the good fortune to track down the two men who knew most about the tapes—the late Henry Kannee and Jack Romagna, the official White House stenographers in the Roosevelt years. The Kannee-Romagna account is persuasive. FDR was angered when he was quoted after a meeting with the Senate Military Affairs Committee in 1939 as having said that America’s frontier was on the Rhine. In fact, Kannee’s transcript showed that the word “Rhine” had not been uttered; and to protect the President against future misquotation, Kannee cast about for some means of what we would now call taping such meetings. The White House recording machine was in use for eleven weeks during the tense 1940 campaign—from late August to early November. Its function was to record press conferences. At the same time, a number of private conversations were also recorded. Kannee told Professor Butow that he was never instructed to turn on the machine for this purpose, and he could not explain the informal talks. Their stop-and-go mode as well as their generally inconsequential character suggests that they may have been recorded by accident. Someone just forgot to turn the machine off.
With all their technical imperfections, the tapes add a fascinating dimension to our sense of the Roosevelt Presidency. They offer the historian the excitement of immediacy: FDR in casual, unbuttoned exchange with members of his personal staff. One is struck by how little the private voice differs from the public voice we know so well from the speeches. The tone is a rich and resonant tenor. The enunciation is clear, the timing is impeccable. The voice’s range is remarkable, from high to low in register and from insinuatingly soft to emphatically loud in decibel level. One appreciates more than ever FDR’s histrionic gifts, his relish, for example, in acting out imagined dialogues, as between Wendell Willkie and J. P. Morgan.
One understands, too, both FDR’s easy authority and the frustration of his visitors when they have messages of their own to impart. To a considerable degree, the tapes (apart from the press conferences) consist of FDR monologues. The listener almost feels the anxiety with which Sam Rayburn and John McCormack, the House Democratic leaders, wait for an opening so that they can slip in their own points. The President, imperturbable, deliberately oblivious, always in command, turning aside interruptions with his enigmatic “Yeah’p,” talks everyone else down; while at the same time, one feels, he absorbs through mysterious antennae the points they are trying to make.
Since FDR himself consumes most of the tapes and since the private chat—with the exception of one meeting that included black leaders—is with intimates, one must agree with Professor Butow that the conversations were probably recorded inadvertently and plainly not for purposes of entrapment.
Professor Butow’s evidence suggests that Roosevelt himself, despite his interest in history, disliked the machine. He would not even use it for such a historic occasion as the Cabinet meeting after Pearl Harbor. Further evidence sustains Professor Butow’s conclusion.
In 1943 Roosevelt learned that the State Department was about to publish in its historical series the notes of the meetings that Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando held in Paris in 1919. On September 7 he asked his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to speak to him about this. “I have a distinct hesitation… because notes of these conversations ought not to have been taken down.”
Nine days later, after thinking it over some more, FDR sent Hull a second and still more forceful memorandum: “In those meetings of the Big Four in Paris no notes should have been kept. Four people cannot be conversationally frank with each other if somebody is taking down notes for future publication. I feel very strongly about this….”
Secret recordings made in the Oval Office of the President in the autumn of 1940
February/March 1982
Volume 33 Issue 2
INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
What an astonishing discovery! Rumors had long circulated about a recording device in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. But these rumors were denied for years by archivists who had custody of the Roosevelt papers. This denial was understandable. Shortly after Roosevelt’s death, his stenographer Jack Romagna confidentially informed National Archives officials of the existence of such recordings, and arrangements were made to send them to the FDR Library at Hyde Park. This was done in December, 1947. The overworked archivists at Hyde Park quickly established that the recordings were of certain press conferences in 1940, apparently made as an experiment but of such poor quality as to be practically indecipherable. But they contained other material that the archivists were never able to puzzle out. Regarding the matter as an experiment that had not worked, the library staff accessioned the recordings and duly opened them to researchers, but the recordings were little remarked among the mass of other audiovisual materials at Hyde Park until Professor R.J. C. Butow came on them in 1978.
Professor Butow faced two problems: to decipher the recordings and to establish their provenance. This account of his quest deserves to become a new chapter in Robin W. Winks’s enjoyable anthology Historian as Detective .
The first problem, even with the later assistance of Geoffrey Ward, the editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE , and Professor Mark Weiss of Queens College, the acoustical expert, has not been entirely solved. But a substantial number of the forty-year-old words have been recovered. Future technological advances may bring back still more from the vaults of the past.
In his search, Professor Butow had the good fortune to track down the two men who knew most about the tapes—the late Henry Kannee and Jack Romagna, the official White House stenographers in the Roosevelt years. The Kannee-Romagna account is persuasive. FDR was angered when he was quoted after a meeting with the Senate Military Affairs Committee in 1939 as having said that America’s frontier was on the Rhine. In fact, Kannee’s transcript showed that the word “Rhine” had not been uttered; and to protect the President against future misquotation, Kannee cast about for some means of what we would now call taping such meetings. The White House recording machine was in use for eleven weeks during the tense 1940 campaign—from late August to early November. Its function was to record press conferences. At the same time, a number of private conversations were also recorded. Kannee told Professor Butow that he was never instructed to turn on the machine for this purpose, and he could not explain the informal talks. Their stop-and-go mode as well as their generally inconsequential character suggests that they may have been recorded by accident. Someone just forgot to turn the machine off.
With all their technical imperfections, the tapes add a fascinating dimension to our sense of the Roosevelt Presidency. They offer the historian the excitement of immediacy: FDR in casual, unbuttoned exchange with members of his personal staff. One is struck by how little the private voice differs from the public voice we know so well from the speeches. The tone is a rich and resonant tenor. The enunciation is clear, the timing is impeccable. The voice’s range is remarkable, from high to low in register and from insinuatingly soft to emphatically loud in decibel level. One appreciates more than ever FDR’s histrionic gifts, his relish, for example, in acting out imagined dialogues, as between Wendell Willkie and J. P. Morgan.
One understands, too, both FDR’s easy authority and the frustration of his visitors when they have messages of their own to impart. To a considerable degree, the tapes (apart from the press conferences) consist of FDR monologues. The listener almost feels the anxiety with which Sam Rayburn and John McCormack, the House Democratic leaders, wait for an opening so that they can slip in their own points. The President, imperturbable, deliberately oblivious, always in command, turning aside interruptions with his enigmatic “Yeah’p,” talks everyone else down; while at the same time, one feels, he absorbs through mysterious antennae the points they are trying to make.
Since FDR himself consumes most of the tapes and since the private chat—with the exception of one meeting that included black leaders—is with intimates, one must agree with Professor Butow that the conversations were probably recorded inadvertently and plainly not for purposes of entrapment.
Professor Butow’s evidence suggests that Roosevelt himself, despite his interest in history, disliked the machine. He would not even use it for such a historic occasion as the Cabinet meeting after Pearl Harbor. Further evidence sustains Professor Butow’s conclusion.
In 1943 Roosevelt learned that the State Department was about to publish in its historical series the notes of the meetings that Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando held in Paris in 1919. On September 7 he asked his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to speak to him about this. “I have a distinct hesitation… because notes of these conversations ought not to have been taken down.”
Nine days later, after thinking it over some more, FDR sent Hull a second and still more forceful memorandum: “In those meetings of the Big Four in Paris no notes should have been kept. Four people cannot be conversationally frank with each other if somebody is taking down notes for future publication. I feel very strongly about this….”
Somewhat related, a friend of mine has an old wire recorder with a wire that contains Truman's 1949 Inauguration speech (recorded from radio). I collect old technologies such as radios, telephones and TV's (all mid-century or before). Fascinating stuff!
