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Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 19:39:38 -0700
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From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: Safire: The White House Tapes (fwd)
<snip>
>
>http://www.nytimes.com
>
>The New York Times
>October 12, 1997
>
>ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE
>
>White House Tapes
>
>WASHINGTON -- After the nation had become disgusted at President Nixon
>for secretly taping confidential discussions in the White House, I got a
>call from Cartha (Deke) DeLoach, a longtime top official at the F.B.I.
>
>"He wasn't the first President to have a secret taping system," insisted
>the veteran J. Edgar Hoover aide. "The Senate Watergate Committee has a
>report from us on how Johnson and Kennedy taped everything."
>
>As a former Nixon speechwriter who had just become a New York Times
>columnist, I had been using that "everybody did it" defense on
>everything from fishy fund-raising to campaign dirty tricks.
>
>But the committee refused to release the F.B.I. documents on previous
>Presidential taping, lest precedents of invasion of privacy be used to
>excuse Nixon's predations. And the media were not looking for evidence
>that might diffuse the focus on wrongdoing by the sitting President.
>
>Now, a generation later, selections from the tapes of the inventors of
>White House eavesdropping are being published. Historians are ecstatic.
>
>"A historical triumph!" blurbs Arthur Schlesinger Jr. about "The Kennedy
>Tapes," by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, ". . . powerful proof of the
>cool and careful leadership of John F. Kennedy." Similarly, reviewing
>"Taking Charge," based on Johnson's secret taping during his first year
>in office, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times hails the historian
>Michael Beschloss for his "masterful [sic] job of putting together a
>book that gives us a remarkably intimate portrait of a working
>President. . . ."
>
>Nobody stops to ask: What kind of chief executive secretly records the
>intimate advice of his visitors, with no concern for their privacy or
>reputations? I think the secret taper has a serious character flaw.
>Moreover, the tapes inherently lie. There pose the Kennedy brothers,
>knowing they are being recorded, taking care to speak for history --
>while their unsuspecting colleagues think aloud and contradict
>themselves the way honest people do in a crisis.
>
>Tapes do not present pure, raw history. On the contrary, when the
>central character is the only one to know the tape is rolling, he can
>turn the meetings into a charade of entrapment -- half
>history-in-the-making, half image-in-the-manipulating.
>
>And you can be sure of some outright deception. Not only the editing of
>tapes by Kennedy acolytes -- with uncool, uncareful comments snipped out
>-- but the turning-off of the machine at key moments. Only Nixon was
>stupid enough to speak freely and never turn the recorder off, on the
>arrogant assumption that he would always have control of "his" tapes.
>
>Outrage at such breach of trust is no longer fashionable. "Everybody did
>it," right? (No; Truman did not do it and Eisenhower did not do it,
>though the technology was available to both. Those two evidently had
>consciences.) The man who brought secret taping to high office was John
>F. Kennedy; his sneaky habit was emulated by Lyndon Johnson, and finally
>entwined Richard Nixon in its coils.
>
>So far, we've seen transcripts of Kennedy at his best, Nixon at his
>worst and Johnson at his most manipulative. Nixonites long for the day
>when his "good" tapes show the statesman, as Kennedy's Cuban-crisis
>tapes purport to do; I say there are no "good" secret tapes. All are
>tainted by the trick of the central actor's unfair awareness of the open
>mike.
>
>One might think, after tapes brought Nixon down, that the practice would
>be ended. Yet now we see "the Clinton videotapes" -- not secretly shot,
>because the participants could see the cameras, but treated secretly
>inside the White House, as valuable fund-raising souvenirs that turned
>into embarrassments to be hidden from subpoena. (Can East Wing
>audiotapes be far behind?)
>
>The ironies are in the fire. Today, Fred Thompson is forcing Clinton's
>videotapes out into the open; only a generation ago, Thompson was the
>Watergate committee counsel who refused to release the Kennedy and
>Johnson taping precedents because it might lessen the fury at Nixon.
>
>And those leaders of the 60's who betrayed the trust of their colleagues
>to make themselves look good in the eyes of history? In their despicable
>secret taping, they demeaned themselves, despoiled the Oval Office and
>diminished the privacy of us all.
>
>Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
>
<snip>
===========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell, Sui Juris : Counselor at Law, federal witness 01
B.A.: Political Science, UCLA; M.S.: Public Administration, U.C.Irvine 02
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_____________________________________: Law is authority in written words 09
As agents of the Most High, we came here to establish justice. We shall 10
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