The Arrogance of Power (60 page)

Butterfield, a military man, had a different interpretation. “You assume that when the president is busy behind the closed door, great affairs of state are being discussed,” he said later. There was, however, “a lot of leisure time,” during which Nixon pondered other matters, which included a number of “typical items” that Butterfield recalled.

“The President,” he testified, “often was concerned whether or not the curtains were closed or open, the arrangement of state gifts, whether they should be on that side of the room or this side of the room . . . social functions. . . he debated whether we should have a U-shaped table or round table. . . . He was very interested in whether or not salad should be served . . . the details of the drive up the walkway [to the South Portico] . . . whether or not the Secret Service would salute during the Star Spangled Banner and sing . . . the plants in the south grounds and whether or not we should retain the tennis court or move it. . . .

It was in this testimony that Butterfield recalled the peculiar memorandum the president had dictated while in Yugoslavia, pointing out the poor standard of the restroom facilities on the Mall back in Washington. “I thought it strange that he would dictate a letter from Belgrade about the lousy restroom facilities. . . . And the dog [Nixon's red setter, King Timahoe]—a lot of time with the dog and when the dog was going to have his hair cut, all that sort of thing. . . .

“He seemed to me,” Butterfield said, “to be preoccupied with his place in history, with his presidency as history would see it . . . the concept is normal, but the preoccupation is not. My honest opinion is that it was a bit abnormal.”

To satisfy his desire for a thorough record, Nixon at first tried using note takers. Senior staff members, however, ordered to prepare long notes on every meeting, failed to capture what Haldeman called “the human intangibles, the subtle nuances.” The chief of staff then asked the assistance of Nixon's old interpreter, General Vernon Walters, whom the president considered the “perfect” scribe. The general pushed his medals under Haldeman's nose and declared: “I am a commander of troops. I am not a secretary to anybody.”

According to Nixon, he eventually opted for the taping system on the advice of his predecessor. “Johnson said the recordings of his conversations had proved to be exceedingly valuable in preparing his memoirs,” Nixon recalled. “He urged that I reinstall the recording devices.”

Others ascribed less lofty motives for the taping, among them Nixon's concern that Henry Kissinger would steal his thunder. “Haldeman once explained to me,” Ehrlichman recalled, “that Nixon had particularly wanted the White House taping system installed in order to demonstrate that the foreign policy initiatives of his presidency were in fact his own, not Henry's. At times he despaired of Henry.”

Nixon obsessed about making a record of everything, everywhere, for its own sake. “Great consternation,” Haldeman noted early on when Nixon complained after making a speech, “because it wasn't recorded.” It was against that background that the new system was installed at the White House in 1971.

Seven microphones were placed in the Oval Office, five embedded in the president's desk and one in each of the wall lamps beside the fireplace. Two were concealed beneath the table in the Cabinet Room. Not long afterward four more were hidden in Nixon's hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building. Others were later planted in his study at Camp David.

The phones were wired, too, in all the rooms that were miked and in the Lincoln Sitting Room. The tape recorders, Sony 800B reel-to-reel models, were sited elsewhere—at the White House the collection center was a locker room in the basement—and engaged automatically each time a phone was picked up and a conversation begun.

That feature was the crucial, and in the long term so damaging, difference between the Johnson system and Nixon's. Johnson's recorders had gone into action only when he turned them on via a switch. Except in the Cabinet Room, where the device had such a switch, the Nixon microphones were voice-activated, and recording began the moment a person spoke.

“Haldeman asked me to make it voice-activated,” Haldeman's aide Larry Higby said, “because the president was an absolute klutz when it came to things mechanical.” Without a control system, however, the mikes simply picked up
everything,
including material that no man could sensibly wish to preserve for posterity. Nixon had created a monster that preserved his every word, words that one day, when publicly revealed, were to sweep him away on a wave of self-incrimination.

This was a covert, furtive arrangement. “Nixon said I was to tell nobody about the existence of the tapes,” Haldeman recalled. “I say things in this office that I don't even want Rose to hear,” Nixon told him. Woods was not informed, nor were Pat and the girls. Pat was said to have been “appalled” when news broke of the recordings' existence. She would insist they were “like private love letters, for one person only,” meaning of course her husband.

But were the tapes really heard by one person only? Haldeman noted in an early diary entry that his boss feared that the “White House [switch]board may be tapped, or operators listen in.” Nixon had not forgotten Hoover's warning that the phone system, run by the White House Communications Agency, a military unit, might not be secure. When the taping system was put in place, orders went out to “Have anyone but WHCA do the project.” The installation of the devices, their day-to-day maintenance, and the changing and storage of the tapes, was handled instead by the Technical Services Division of the Secret Service.

As reported elsewhere information exists suggesting that the tapes were not secure even in Secret Service custody. Some even suspected that Butterfield, the former air force colonel who oversaw the taping system, was a CIA stool pigeon.
⁷

Only four aides are supposed to have had any knowledge of the tapes: Haldeman, his assistants Higby and Butterfield, and Butterfield's successor, Stephen Bull. Ehrlichman, who covertly recorded some of his own conversations, was not made aware of the taping until shortly before his resignation. Kissinger was also excluded from the secret—by his account, until the spring of 1973.
⁸
Even though he had been a party to the wiretapping of the journalists, and had his staff make notes of many of his own phone conversations, he was taken aback when he learned of the Nixon procedures.

“We are going to look perfect fools when all of the tapes are released,” Kissinger was to warn Ehrlichman. “Nixon will be heard delivering one of his tirades, saying all sorts of outrageous things, and we will be sitting there quietly, not protesting or disagreeing. You and I know that's how we had to do business with him, but we will be judged harshly. . . .”

Some Oval Office visitors guessed their conversations were being recorded, among them Sir Alec Douglas-Home, then Britain's foreign secretary. When he noticed at a meeting that no one was taking notes, Douglas-Home recalled, he “immediately drew the obvious conclusion, that every single word was being taped. . . .” Sir Alec had figured out what Kissinger missed when, about the time the taping commenced, he received a memorandum informing staff that they need no longer “pay too much attention to substantive details in our records of presidential conversations.”

House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill caught on when, during a discussion of Vietnam with the president and Kissinger, he asked if a certain development was Kissinger's doing. Nixon cut in with “I'll answer that one, Henry.” Then, O'Neill recalled, he “did something very strange: he paused, raised his voice, and looked up at the ceiling. I looked up too, to see who he was talking to, but the only thing up there was the chandelier. ‘I want you all to know,' he announced, ‘that as President of the United States, this was
my
decision. . . .' ” From the bizarre declaiming and from the way Nixon craned his head, O'Neill guessed there were hidden microphones.

Conversations that had made no sense at the time fell into place, Kissinger was to say, once he learned of the taping. “I could see occasions,” he said, “when I was set up to prevent my dissociating myself from some course, or to get me on record supporting some complicated design.”

Nixon claimed he soon became oblivious to his own recording devices, and happily for posterity, he clearly often was. It is equally clear that the claim was at least partly disingenuous, for he undoubtedly also used the system to ensure he got something on the record. Yet sometimes, leery of his own microphones, he tried to hide from them.

With Watergate in full flood, but the tape system still undiscovered, Republican Senator Howard Baker asked Nixon if Mitchell was vulnerable. “Nixon suddenly lowered his voice and sort of turned away,” Baker recalled, then whispered that Mitchell might indeed have “a problem of some proportions.” Baker suddenly suspected that the meeting was being taped, and ended the conversation as swiftly as possible.

The president's lapses into whispering occurred often enough to be noticed by all manner of people. Even the White House dog keeper, Traphes Bryant, guessed at bugging. Charles Colson, the ultimate Nixon loyalist, would remember “moments when I should have been suspicious: the time at Camp David when he walked from his office to the corridor to whisper to me sensitive information about another staff member. Then once, during a telephone conversation, there had been a clicking sound. . . .”

White House counsel John Dean was to notice Nixon “posturing” during a key Watergate conversation, “always placing his own role in an innocuous perspective. . . .” “I wondered if the meeting was a setup,” Dean wrote later. “Was he recording me?” His suspicion deepened when Nixon got up and walked away a few steps before saying something compromising to himself in “an almost inaudible tone.”

When some of the tapes were finally surrendered to Congress, they not only bolstered Dean's credibility but suggested he had been right about the president's odd Oval Office performance. “You never heard a more programmed conversation in your life,” Judiciary Committee member Jerome Waldie noted in his diary after hearing one of the Nixon-Dean recordings.

Nixon claimed in his memoirs that he was “not comfortable with the idea of taping people without their knowledge. . . .” Yet one taped transcript, of a 1971 meeting with dairy industry chiefs, demonstrates strikingly that this was not true. With the hidden tapes rolling, Nixon made the remark “. . . this room is not tapped. Forgot to do that. . . .” The milk industry men guffawed at the apparent joke, yet Nixon had to know he was lying. The meeting occurred just a month after the first installation of the microphones, at a time when he could not possibly have forgotten their existence. It took place, moreover, in the Cabinet Room, where the microphones had to be manually switched on.

Every head of state, every senator or representative, and every colleague
who believed he was having a private conversation with the president, on the phone or in person, was wrong.
⁹

_____

From the day of his downfall until his death Nixon would struggle to prevent public access to the four thousand hours of tape recordings, and the forty-two million pages of documents, generated during his time in office. Immediately after the resignation he would try to have the tapes shipped to his home in California. A truck and a plane were standing by when, at the last moment, the transfer was halted. Recognizing that letting Nixon have the tapes would be seen as “the final act of cover-up,” President Ford blocked shipments to San Clemente of anything except Nixon's clothing and that of his family.

After the twenty years of legal wrangling that followed, and further delays caused by Nixon's heirs since his death, comes a fact of which many remain unaware. As of the year 2000, the public has access to only about 864 hours of Nixon recordings.

Only 60 hours were provided to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, after a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Of those 60 hours, only 12
¹
⁄
₂
were made accessible to the public—and that only in edited transcript form—until six years after Watergate. After stiff resistance a further 851 hours of recordings were released during the nineties, some of them under a congressional mandate requiring release to the public of the “full truth” on matters defined by the archivist of the United States as “abuse of governmental power.” Under the current agreement, some 2,765 hours of tape are scheduled to be released in the next five years or so.

In his memoirs Nixon quoted a passage taken, he said, from his daughter Tricia's diary. “Daddy,” the cited entry read, “has cautioned us that there is nothing damaging on the tapes. . . .”

“Imagine your own feeling,” Haldeman was to write, “if you were to open your Monday morning paper and find that someone had taped all the conversations in your home over the weekend—then selected the very worst segments and printed them in the paper. That's just about what happened to us.”

As late as 1997 Nixon Library archivist Susan Naulty condemned those who, she claimed, had tried to perpetuate the “false caricature” of Nixon as “villainy incarnate.” Accusations that the available tapes reveal “felony wrongdoing” or serious character defects, Naulty argued, are unfair.

It is true that those of the tapes that have been made available are merely a small portion of the total, and that their audio quality is sometimes poor. Yet they remain riveting historical documents, not least because of the style and tenor of the material. “Here's this voice you've heard all your life,” Congressman Waldie noted, “and it starts in stammering and stuttering. . . . Rarely is a thought expressed coherently, and a lot of it is covered up with obscenities . . . [or] some unintelligible grunt from the President.”