Inside the Oval Office

The Sunday Times Books, August 22, 1999

What did we tell the president?

Nixon was not the first to secretly record White House meetings, finds TONY ALLAN-MILLS

In the age of the television soundbite, history is reduced to epitaphs and American presidential history becomes a series of clichéd picture captions. John F Kennedy? The golden boy. Richard Nixon? The sweaty crook. And everyone knows Bill Clinton: the slippery Little Rock Lothario with dynamite down his trousers. Rare is the book that seriously disturbs these comfortable presidential profiles, yet William Doyle springs some powerful surprises in Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (London House £18.99), an ingenious account of hidden microphones, covert taping and long-lost recording transcripts from the world's most famous executive suite.

The world may remember Nixon's Watergate tapes as the most malign example of presidential bugging, yet Doyle's exhaustive researches reveal that Tricky Dicky was far from alone in rigging up the Oval Office as a private recording studio. The guilty men turn out to include such previously revered presidential icons as Franklin D Roosevelt, who installed a mike in his desk lamp; Dwight Eisenhower, the morally unimpeachable military genius who considered taping a valuable management tool; and Nixon's former nemesis, JFK, who did plenty of bugging of his own.

Born of Doyle's researches for an acclaimed American television documentary, this strikingly original book examines the past 60 years of White House politics through the narrow but revealing prism of presidential attitudes to taping. Doyle is not always convincing in his attempts to draw broader conclusions about the administrative styles of individual presidents, but some of his tape transcripts, published here for the first time, leap off the page.

Indeed, it is a shame he does not include more of them, because even the most mundane exchanges throb with a drama and immediacy that is inevitably lacking in Doyle's potted biographies of the past 11 presidents. You can almost hear the rich Texan drawl of Lyndon Baines Johnson as he declares in characteristically blunt terms how he plans to proceed at a White House Christmas party for congressmen who will not do what he wants: "Let's be over there and smile and shake hands and thank everybody, and then just cut their dicks off and put it [sic] in your pocket."

Nixon attracted so much flak for his secret bugging habits that it comes as something of a shock to learn that the first chief executive to ignore moral qualms about secret taping was FDR, the revered champion of the New Deal, victor in the war against Adolf Hitler and a wheelchair-bound polio victim who successfully concealed his disability until the end of his widely admired presidency. It was in the late summer of 1940 that an inventor named J Ripley Kiel started drilling holes in Roosevelt's desk to accommodate the wires that led from a microphone hidden in a lamp to an early version of a tape recorder concealed in a room below.

FDR's recordings make riveting reading. Doyle focuses on a discussion in the White House about discrimination against blacks in the military, and the lazy, patrician racism that came so naturally to the white elite in the early 1940s is here laid startlingly bare. FDR jokes about having separate white-and black-crewed ships, refers to black men as "boys" and actually suggests that the best way of promoting blacks in the navy might be through ships' bands. "We are training a certain number of musicians on board ship…there's no reason why we shouldn't have a coloured band, because they are darn good at it."

Doyle's biggest scoop was to dig out from the Eisenhower library archives some long-buried Dictaphone recordings revealing for the first time that the brilliant second world war general was also a keen bugger. Taping "saved me hours of work in the dictations of notes and directives and relieved my mind of the necessity of remembering every detail of fact and opinion that was presented to me", Eisenhower once said.

The surviving recordings portray Eisenhower as a sharp and diligent executive, relaxed in the exercise of supreme political power. He complains of his workload: "I have to sign so much goddamned paper I haven't had a chance to read these days." And he also complains about wildlife in the White House garden: "The next time you see a squirrel go near my putting green, take a gun and shoot it."

For most presidents, Doyle claims, the taping was for self-protection. FDR used to hold press conferences at his Oval Office desk, and initially started recording to ensure that reporters did not misquote him. Eisenhower told a cabinet meeting in 1954: "You know, boys, it's a good thing when you're talking to someone you don't trust to get a record made of it. There are some guys I just don't trust in Washington, and I want to have myself protected so that they can't later report that I said something else."

When JFK installed what Doyle describes as "the White House's first fully fledged secret recording network", some staff thought Kennedy wanted to protect himself against officials who told him one thing in private and said something different in public. Others thought he was merely saving a reliable record for his memoirs.

"Every president since FDR has had to confront one of the central executive dilemmas of the office," concludes Doyle. "How to get an accurate record of what is said in the White House, but at the same time not restrict the flow of candid and confidential advice by telling people they are being recorded." After Nixon, of course, the dilemma receded: presidents became terrified of taping for fear that anything they said would one day turn up in evidence against them (a lesson that Clinton seemed to have forgotten when he started video-taping fund-raising coffee mornings. Several embarrassing exchanges soon appeared in the media).

'There is noble talk in the Oval Office to be sure, high-minded and disinterested," Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs. "But there are also frustration, worry, anxiety, profanity and above all, raw pragmatism when it comes to politics and political survival."

All these aspects are explored in Doyle's absorbing chapters, and it soon becomes clear that, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, no modern American president has satisfactorily balanced the need to preserve a reliable record of sometimes historic decision-making with the need for the decision-makers to voice their opinions freely and without the fear of taped retribution.

Carter hit upon a unique but ultimately unfortunate solution. To general ridicule, he invited his wife, Rosalynn, to come along to cabinet meetings, where she sat near the door taking notes. It is also clear that Clinton's legal problems have done almost as much damage as Nixon did to White House record-keeping techniques. Doyle concludes: "Today the White House operates under the dangerous absurdity that almost no one who works there keeps good records, since everybody is afraid of being subpoenaed."

THEY HAD IT TAPED

When Franklin D Roosevelt had secret recording machines installed in the White House, they were intended as a presidental protection device against misquotation. Lyndon B Johnson, ever a fan of the sound of his own voice, used them regularly to record his telephone calls, of which he sometimes made 100 a day. He recorded 92,000 hours of phone conversations.

John F Kennedy peppered the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room with bugs: the elegant pen and pencil set on his desk was in fact the on/off button for a network of wires and mikes. With no apparent records of meetings, conversations would flow freely and frankly, and Kennedy could later listen to the proceedings to assimilate the information.

However, it was the Watergate scandal that was to hoist a president by his own petard: speaking to H R Haldeman in April, 1973 in the Oval Office, Richard Nixon mused, "I always wondered about that taping equipment, but I'm damn glad we have it, aren't you?" By August 1974, he was to think very differently, when the enforced handover of the infamous "smoking gun" tape, recorded six days after the break-in at the Watergate hotel, revealed the full extent of the presidential involvement and his attempted coverup. With the threat of impeachment looming, he later resigned.

In the post-Watergate era taping procedures at the White House have come out into the open, but it was secret tapes, again, that were almost to bring down a president. Key evidence in the Kenneth Starr report against Bill Clinton was secret recordings of long telephone calls made between the enamoured White House intern Monica Lewinsky and her supposed friend, Linda Tripp. A perfectly legal recording also played its part: four words left by Clinton on Lewinsky's answermachine, "Come on. It's me," could have brought down the most powerful man in the world.