Inside the Oval Office

The New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1999

Just Speak Into the Lamp
An account of the irresistible urge of American Presidents to tape their conversations.

By RON ROSENBAUM

It is, the Oval Office, the private stage for our most public dramas, the functional equivalent of the inner stage of the Globe Theater, a highly charged enclosure reserved for soliloquies and confidences that have powerful reverberations for the globe beyond the Globe. If for Freud the glimpse of the parental bedroom was the primal scene of sexuality in character formation, the Oval Office is the primal scene of power. Presidents can't resist bugging it, we can't resist listening in, and the mutual shame has inevitably had consequences for our national character.

Some have been good: demystification, demythologizing, cleansing the accretions of knee-jerk, knee-bending reverence that the longing for royalty and the cult of celebrity have plastered over the Presidency. Some of the consequences have been more than a little scary, when it turns out that the Man Behind the Curtain, the great and mighty Oz, is not a lovable schnook but a figure far more venal, scheming and vicious than we could have imagined.

But there's also a sense of loss: the loss of the illusion, of pure uncomplicated heroism and pure uncomplicated villainy. And there's the loss of one of the last preserves of privacy: yes, it's a staged privacy, a public kind of privacy, which the President doing the taping violates himself, but in some ways in a democracy it's in part our privacy. In a surveillance-intensive culture it's the loss of one of the last putatively surveillance-free zones. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

''Inside the Oval Office'' is a valuable history and comparative survey of Presidential taping styles from F.D.R. (who had a microphone hidden in a desk lamp in 1940) to Bill Clinton (whose videotapes of fund-raising kaffeeklatsches deepened the trouble he was already in), and a more ambitious but somewhat less successful attempt to find, in their taping practices, some larger truths about each President's governing style.

The fact that Presidents other than Nixon have secretly taped themselves and others is not new. Revelations about J.F.K., L.B.J. and F.D.R. have emerged in the past decade, but such revelations still have the power to disturb. While researching ''Inside the Oval Office'' and a 1997 documentary based on the same material, William Doyle made an impressive discovery about one of the few modern Presidents who had seemed to be free from the urge to bug: Dwight D. Eisenhower, long regarded as one of the most straight-shooting, plain-dealing of Chief Executives. Back in the early 80's a Dictaphone Corporation technician told a Time magazine writer that he had installed concealed mikes in the desks of Eisenhower's wartime headquarters and later in his office at Columbia University, where he served as president not long before going to the White House. But the story only appeared in Time's International Edition. It was overlooked there and, besides, there was no reference to the existence of any White House taping. But Doyle prodded the Eisenhower Library archives to search its audiovisual department, where they found, finally, in 1996, 10 creased Dictabelts that proved that Ike had imported his taping habits (which Doyle charitably calls ''an executive tool'') into the White House.

It's not clear just what percentage of Ike's taping these 10 represent. Doyle regrettably publishes only a partial transcript of one of them -- a conference with Senator Walter George, over the Bricker amendment, which would have limited the President's treaty-making powers. Doyle protectively suggests that the taping came to an end when Ike returned to the White House after his heart attack in the fall of 1955, ''saw how smoothly his Government functioned in his absence,'' and decided he didn't need his ''executive tool'' anymore. But that's just a supposition, the unprovability of which illustrates the problem with generalizing from the few tapes we have to the character that might emerge if we had that historian's dream and nightmare -- total access and the godlike perspective it might afford.

The problem with trying to generalize even about Richard M. Nixon, from the hundreds of hours we have, is the thousands of hours we don't have that could be harboring far more dreadful or mundane and human Nixons than we can yet imagine. It's the old paradox about historical evidence: looking for the lost key under the street lamp, not because it's there but because that's the only place you can see.

But the facts on the tapes may be less revealing than the fact of taping, the fact that so many Presidents have succumbed, have exhibited the combination of sneakiness and contempt for the unwitting that clandestine taping represents. Only Harry Truman appears to have resisted, at least after a few test recordings with F.D.R.'s mike. Presidents after Nixon appear to have been inhibited by his spectacular exposure.

One can almost hear, as one reads about Ike the taper, the voice of Richard Nixon whispering in one's ear: ''I told you so. See, everybody does it. Even Mr. Clean, Eisenhower, even the sainted F.D.R.'' Indeed, the brief excerpts Doyle gives us of the F.D.R. transcripts explain why they make such fascinating reading, why they're so seductive to historians. Here, as elsewhere, one wishes Doyle had included many more pages of transcripts instead of, or in addition to, his analysis of Presidential leadership styles, much of which feels warmed-over. Because it is in the texture, the feel of the language and speech rhythms, as much as what is said, that one feels one is really learning something new. Such is the case in a dramatic taped confrontation Doyle excerpts that took place in the Oval Office on Sept. 27, 1940, when the mike hidden in the lamp picked up a meeting between F.D.R. and black civil rights leaders, among them the visionary A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Walter White of the N.A.A.C.P. It's thrilling to hear, or to imagine one can hear, the civil rights advocates refuse to be put off by F.D.R.'s bluster, to witness them interrupting his blandishments, refusing to defer to the President or the Presidency, to listen as they quietly but firmly insist that empty pledges to desegregate the armed forces and the defense industries will not suffice. And it's dismaying to hear the language with which F.D.R. responds, with condescending stories about ''boys'': ''In the last Navy Department, in the old days, I had a boy… He used to be my colored messenger…I gave him to Louis Howe.''

But again, this talk of having and giving ''a boy''- is it just a relic of ''the old days'' or does it betoken a deeper strain of racism? The tapes alone can't resolve that.

If they don't always offer certainty, they do give us drama. The high points of the book are the transcripts of two crisis moments in J.F.K.'s Presidency. One, from the Cuban missile crisis, is relatively familiar now, but there's an equally chilling, less familiar one from the night on which rioting broke loose at the University of Mississippi when unarmed Federal marshals faced an armed mob of racists trying furiously not just to prevent the integration of the college but, it seemed at the time (certainly in the Oval Office), to lynch the lone black student, James Meredith, who was attempting to register.

In each case what one experiences reading the transcripts is not the cool hand of rationality of the Kennedy myth but a sickening sense of panic, the impression that for all its pretensions to power, the Presidency has been rudely shoved out of the driver's seat and history is spinning out of control in a plunge toward catastrophe. One that in retrospect was averted by luck, rather than rationality, at the very last moment. Consider this exchange at the height of the Mississippi crisis:

R.F.K.: (on phone) Hello? Hello? Well, I think they have to protect Meredith now…They better fire, I suppose. They gotta protect Meredith…Is Meredith all right?

Voice: Well, I don't know if they can.

J.F.K.: He [Gov. Ross Barnett] wants us to move him. And I said, ''Well, we can't move him if the situation's like this.''

R.F.K.: I can't get him out. How am I gonna get him out?

One can almost feel the fear that Meredith is close to being murdered by the mob, just as one can sense the dread in the Cuban missile crisis transcripts that any move on the missiles in Cuba will touch off a countermove by the Soviets in Berlin, which will begin a general apocalyptic nuclear war.

Such glimpses into the abyss make the marathon venal maunderings of the Nixon crew seem almost comforting by contrast. Doyle's chapter on Nixon is perhaps his most disappointing, giving us only a few brief fragments of such well-known greatest hits as the ''smoking gun'' tape. He fails to do justice to the deepening and darkening picture of the Nixon Presidency that has emerged with the release of hundreds of hours of new tapes since Nixon's resignation, most recently those transcribed and published by Stanley Kutler last year.

But it may be true that no single chapter, no single book can ever do justice to the encyclopedic dimensions, the fathomless depths of the Nixon character. He contains multitudes and complexities, and the more we read of his tortured conversations and his tormented soliloquies, the more he becomes not just another beleaguered President but a dark mirror of the American character. It is worth noting that any citizen can - and really should -- pay a visit to the National Archives repository in suburban Maryland, just outside Washington, and listen in to Nixon's Oval Office tapes. On a recent trip, I found myself mesmerized listening to the President's tearful, shaken, half-slurred (you can hear the ice rattling in his whisky glass) appeal to Billy Graham for absolution of his guilt for firing those closest to him (Haldeman and Ehrlichman) to protect himself from the consequences of crimes he ordered them to commit. The experience confirmed for me a feeling about Nixon and his tapes: the window they offer into the poisonous alchemy of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing that led to his destruction makes Nixon, more than anyone, the author of the great American novel of this century.

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of ''Explaining Hitler'' and a columnist for The New York Observer.