On Tuesday, June 1st, barnesandnoble.com welcomed William Doyle to discuss INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE: THE WHITE HOUSE TAPES FROM FDR TO CLINTON.

Moderator: Welcome, William Doyle! Thank you for taking the time to join us online this evening to chat about your new book, INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE. How are you doing tonight?

William Doyle: I'm doing great. And thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Pac87@aol.com from xx: What initially prompted you to write about this subject? How did this book come together?

WD: I had heard various scattered reports over the years of tapes existing in the presidential libraries, and I was intrigued by the concept of listening in to Oval Office conversations, but I was most astonished to find that there were actually some tapes available, not only for Richard Nixon and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but also FDR, Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and even some material from Truman and Clinton. Even though some of the material is very fragmentary and it's not always "secret," I found all this material compelling and fascinating because it puts you in the room with presidents -- in action. I then went to many of the presidential libraries, sat down with the headphones on, and listened to what happened.

JWC901@aol.com from New Jersey: Hello, William Doyle! How were you able to get these tapes?

WD: In some cases, these tapes were literally sitting more or less lost or forgotten in some of the presidential libraries. A perfect example of that is the Eisenhower recordings, which were only discovered in 1996, during the research for this book, by the terrific archivists at the Eisenhower library in Abilene, Kansas. Believe it or not, they found the Eisenhower dictabelts in envelopes in a storage vault 41 years after they were made! Other recordings, such as Kennedy and Johnson, are regularly released by the presidential libraries over the years. I was also rather astonished to find in early 1996 at the Reagan library a collection of previously unseen videotapes of Reagan in action in closed presidential meetings. And I was very impressed by how impressive Reagan was on these videos, not too surprising because that was his favorite medium.

Terrence from Atlanta, GA: Do you think past presidents have recorded what went on in the Oval Office out of some sense of self-conscious posterity? Do you think they knew later generations would hear them, and do you think that changes the way they conducted themselves?

WD: What a magnificent question. It's impossible to answer because presidents were rarely, if ever, questioned on that point. Only Nixon ever spoke to that directly and he gave conflicting responses. I believe that...most of the presidents who recorded were primarily motivated by self-protection. They wanted to get an accurate record of what goes on in the world's most dangerous office. I do suspect, however, that Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and quite possibly Roosevelt, in his recording experiments, were motivated secondarily by the possibility of using recordings to help write their memoirs, and therefore shape our perceptions today. Eisenhower, I'm convinced, recorded the few important meetings strictly as an executive habit. Eisenhower was above all a superb chief executive, and his recording machine, while infrequently used, was an executive tool.

Gus from New York City: What was your biggest surprise on the Cuban missile crisis tapes and JFK?

WD: The biggest surprise of the Cuban missile crisis tapes is how superbly John Kennedy's cautious and pragmatic executive approach fit that crisis. The second surprise was the level of face-to-face tension between President Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In fact, there's one incredible moment where Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis Le May says to the president about his blockade plan, "This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich!" History doesn't get any more powerful than that because you are in the room while the action unfolds. After that exchange, in fact, the President left the room and the Joint Chiefs spoke among themselves, not realizing they were being recorded, and they said to each other, "You're screwed, screwed, screwed!"

Just_Joe from San Jose: Who was the most interesting president (from the tapes you've listened to)?

WD: Fantastic question -- and to me every president is interesting in his own way. Franklin Roosevelt is perhaps the greatest performer of the 11 I studied and the most compelling because he is not only facing the greatest military clash in history, but he seems to be having a wonderful time doing it. I've never heard a person more in love with their job or having more fun than FDR in the Oval Office. The fragments of Truman on tape are extraordinary because you can hear him very alone and very vulnerable and very humble at the controls of the world's first nuclear superpower. Eisenhower is incredibly interesting because on tape he sounds very much like the tremendous chief executive that he was. That never comes through in his public appearances, but when the door was closed, he was very much the general in charge of that office. Kennedy of course is incredibly interesting because he is Kennedy, and you're also never sure if he is purely being president or if he has an eye on the tape recorder and is manipulating us as we listen to him. Perhaps he was doing both, but we can never tell. His recordings of the Oxford, Mississippi, riots of 1962 vividly show us the flip side of his pragmatic executive style because the crisis runs away from him, and people start getting killed. LBJ is a gargantuan personality, and his tapes are wonderful performance pieces, and they show the duality of a spectacular domestic executive and a horrible military executive. Nixon's tapes show him to be a superb strategist and a dysfunctional executive. I'm sorry to go on and on, but I really find each president to be fascinating. I'll stop with Reagan, who is perhaps the greatest visionary executive that office will ever see. And on the White House TV tapes of him in closed meetings, he is spellbinding.

Macey from Rome, NY: Every president I've seen in my life -- from Ford up to the present day -- has seemed pretty artificial in public. They talk in a magisterial tone. They speak in generalizations. They complain about nothing. Did you get a sense of a different type of person from listening to their private tapes?

WD: I must agree largely with your assessment of the public presidents, with the exception perhaps sometimes of Reagan and Clinton, who in public are capable of connecting very effectively with the audience. Speaking of Ronald Reagan, however, there is a wonderful tape of Reagan during a closed National Security Council meeting on April 1, 1985, where you can see him getting quite emotional in his quiet way over a message smuggled to him from 100 Russian women political prisoners. He appears quite stunned by this tiny message and says, as he holds the message in his hand, "Golly, how could anyone write that small? Good Lord, oh Lord. Dammit, it is an evil empire!" The feeling I get from listening to most of the tapes from 1940 on is of how utterly alone these men are and how tremendous the pressure must be every hour of the day.

Vincent Maxim from California: Mr. Doyle, what inspired you to write INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE?

WD: When I thought about it, the Oval Office is a place that directly affects my life and the life of all Americans in a very immediate and literal way. But most of us are never invited there, and these tapes, as incomplete and fragmentary and biased as they sometimes are, provide an absolutely mesmerizing historical experience.

John from Montpelier, VT: With all the scrutiny a president is under, can't these recordings get him into trouble, and aren't the presidents -- especially the past three presidents -- aware of that? How accurate are these recordings after Nixon left office?

WD: Fascinating question. Of course, Richard Nixon captured the desolate agony of his own accidental self-crucifixion on tape, and he remarked how stupid it was of him to do that. But what surprised me was, for example, that Bill Clinton allowed the White House television video crews to follow him around "donor maintenance events" that were open for criticism as being on the edge of the law. You would think that presidents would learn the lesson by now. And what those coffee tapes show us is a president micromanaging his own reelection and explaining how to exploit campaign finance law loopholes. Rather incredible. Of course, some presidents did learn the lesson. One aide to George Bush told me that anyone who taped in his White House would have been shot!

Darius from Rockville, MD: Will there be an audiotape released where we can hear these presidents?

WD: Yes, Blackstone Audio Group is working on the unabridged audio version of this book, and that should be available in the near future. Thank you for asking about that.

Gus from New York City: In the Reagan tapes, did you have any indication or early signs that he might have already been experiencing Alzheimer's in office?

WD: That is an absolutely fascinating question. I reviewed hundreds of hours of White House videotapes of Reagan from 1982, when the taping started, to January 1989. I noticed a very slow, gradual, but nevertheless distinct slowdown of his overall appearance and performance. But it's a mystery to me as to whether or not it was simply the aging of a man in his 70s or the early signs of Alzheimer's. But I will tell you this, an aide whom I interviewed for the book told me of translating private summit discussions between Reagan and Gorbachev at the 1988 Moscow summit, and he told me, "I was absolutely awestruck because there is no one who could have spoken with greater forcefulness then Ronald Reagan. This was representation at a presidential level of our country in as fine a fashion as you could ever find it. That's not the Reagan a lot of people dismissed him as, but it's certainly the Reagan that he was behind the scenes very often to me." I should add that INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE is not simply a book of transcripts but includes the results of interviews with over 100 Oval Office insiders as far back as Franklin Roosevelt's personal secretary, a wonderful woman named Dorothy Jones Brady, who was a wonderful help me. I also interviewed people like Henry Kissinger, Douglas Dillon, Clark Clifford, James Baker, and Dan Quayle to get a picture of what it was really like to be inside the Oval Office with these extraordinary men.

Kate from New York City: Given the chance, which president/administration would you most liked to have worked for or with, and why?

WD: What an astonishing question. Harry Truman strikes me as the best boss of the whole group because he was the most decent human being. He seemed to truly care about how his people felt in addition to what they thought. An incredibly decent man inside the Oval Office. Franklin Roosevelt may have been the toughest because he often made his people fight each other to see who would win and who had the best ideas. Under no circumstances would I want to work for Lyndon Johnson. While he accomplished great things domestically, he looked like the toughest boss of all, and he would chew your head off for no apparent reason. He played a lot of mind games with his staff, and he burned a lot of his people out. John Kennedy impresses me as a very good boss to have because, like Truman, he stimulated intellectual competition among his staff. Kennedy also seemed relatively unafraid of being challenged or criticized, which is an absolutely critical job requirement for the Oval Office.

Asterisk*** from Seattle: Have you found any sort of evidence that presidents have destroyed any of this material?

WD: That's a terrific question. There are two famous examples. Number 1 is the famous gap on Richard Nixon's tape. One interpretation of that is that he sat down and fumbled with the recording switches and tried to erase incriminating taped evidence. We don't know whether that is true, and we probably never will. The Boston Globe reported in 1993 that there may have been withdrawals of some of JFK's tapes by representatives of the Kennedy estate. It may have been material of a personal or private nature. That, to my knowledge, has not been confirmed in any detail, and my personal opinion is that we have no right to listen to anything personal or private as long as no laws are being broken. I'm not aware of any other examples of attempted destruction or withdrawals of tapes, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. I should add, by the way, that presidents, by law, have the right and their estates have the right to properly withhold tapes of a family nature.

Simone Havers from Brooklyn, NY: Was there any one thing that surprised you the most following your interviews with 100 Oval Office insiders?

WD: What surprised me was the vivid feeling you get from the personal impressions of the people working with the presidents. For example, FDR's secretary, Ms. Brady, told me that "he had a compassion that was like a magnificent obsession. Every day you were there you knew that your number one job was to help people in trouble." Harry Truman's staff members, many of whom are still alive, all said that they almost literally loved the man. And that's a testament to his humility and his decency as a human being and as an executive. I was surprised by several of Eisenhower's senior executives explaining to me about how powerful a presence he was in meetings when the door was closed, much unlike his public image, which was -- to my mind, at any rate -- that of a fairly befuddled grandfather figure. One of John Kennedy's officials told me, "When he came into the room, he was like the sun. He radiated confidence and victory." And finally, one of LBJ's men told me, "LBJ was an emasculator, an egocentric son of a bitch.... I think he was a rat, pure and simple. There was a real screw loose there. Vindictive. Kooky. He enjoyed administering pain to people. He loved it." I must tell you that came as quite a surprise to me!

Peach from New York: I was surprised to learn by reading your book how funny, real, and human the presidents are. Do you have any comments?

WD: That's a very good point. I found the Oval Office to be one of the greatest theaters in the world. It can be a very funny place. For example, one of Jimmy Carter's officials is on record as saying that his White House was "like a set for a Marx Brothers picture, only instead of four brothers, there were about a dozen." Carter was unintentionally hilarious in his obsessive attention to detail. It wasn't just the tennis courts -- it was a lot more, as I discuss in my book. But only as dedicated a negotiator and technocrat as he was could have achieved what he did with the Camp David accords, the benefits of which we still enjoy today. Several of the audio clips in my book have been posted by barnesandnoble.com, and one of them is of Gerald Ford on a phone call to Yitzhak Rabin, and you can hear Gerald Ford, in his rather flat and halting and earnest midwestern voice, congratulate Rabin on the Sinai II Accords, which set the stage for Camp David. The Oval Office is an absolutely electrifying place to visit, and the tapes are proof of that.

Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us this evening, William Doyle. It's been a fascinating chat, and we wish you the best of luck with your book. Before you go, do you have any closing comments for your online audience?

WD: Thank you very much for having me. Having heard all these terrific questions, I almost feel like rewriting my book. But thank you very much. I've sure enjoyed the discussion.

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