The Nation: Why Those Tapes Were Made

Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee.

—Luke 19: 22

One of the continuing ironies of Watergate is that Richard Nixon has become increasingly entangled in the scandal largely through a needless and voluntary creation of his own: his secret system for recording nearly all of his official conversations. If his clandestine tape recorders had not been silently capturing his words and those of his most intimate aides, he probably would not now be in so imminent a danger of impeachment. If he is finally forced out of office, it may well be largely due to those telltale tapes. Nearly forgotten in the endless struggles over access to those recordings is the question: Why did he ever install such a potentially dangerous system in the first place?

Men close to Nixon are now in fairly full agreement on the basic reasons. Foremost, according to them, was Nixon’s awareness of history and his place in it. Nixon yearned to write one day a definitive work that would be the classic of presidential memoirs. With thousands of his conversations in the White House and the Executive Office Building available for precise—if selective —quotation, he could produce a detailed and colorful narrative far beyond the capability of any of his predecessors. “More than most Presidents,” recalls one of his former assistants, “Nixon spent a lot of time poring over what he said and did. It was vital to him to have an accurate record.” Adds another aide: “Nixon wants a record of everything.”

The wondrous gadgetry of the system, with its tiny hidden mikes, its voice-actuated mechanism that required only a few spoken words to set recorder reels twirling in obscure recesses of the E.O.B., fascinated the President, his aides say. Moreover, what assistant could be more efficient than this omniscient and faithful monitor? Some presidential conversations, especially those with world leaders, were too important to permit misunderstandings. In the first 2½ years of the Nixon presidency, such advisers as Henry Kissinger, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman laboriously took notes at important meetings. All three soon became much too busy for that; the recording system, installed in the late spring of 1971, was a welcome substitute.

But a common-sense question intrudes: Would Nixon speak in total candor, knowing that his words were being preserved on tape? There is every indication that he did. Some investigators who have heard many of the tapes have said that they were appalled by the degrading conversation—talk that they did not expect to hear at a presidential level. “I wish I had not heard it,” sighed one listener. Part of the offensiveness lies in Nixon’s well-known private penchant for locker room language. What is less well known and more bothersome are the bitter and sometimes savage epithets he aims at individuals who have in some way angered or crossed him, and these highly personal comments include flecks of antiSemitism.

Nixon’s willingness to permit the recording of such language or possibly incriminatory material can be explained only by the hubris of the presidency, his absolute confidence that the tapes belonged to him and could never be wrested from him. The existence of the recorders was originally known only to a few Secret Service technicians and three trusted aides: Haldeman, Lawrence Higby and Alexander Butterfield. It was Butterfield who startlingly revealed the system in response to a throwaway question from a Senate Watergate-committee staff counsel on July 13. Even then the President must undoubtedly have felt that he could still protect the tapes with his claims of Executive privilege. Indeed, there had been discussions among those privy to the system about dismantling the recorders as early as six months after the Watergate burglary, and again when the cover-up began to unravel. But nothing was done. “He never in the world thought he would have to give up any of those tapes to anybody,” insists one White House source.

Again common sense asks why, once the Watergate investigation began, Nixon did not destroy all of those tapes that even he concedes could be interpreted differently from the way he prefers? This could easily have been done before Butterfield revealed their existence—or even after, up until the time some were subpoenaed. Nixon was certainly under no legal obligation to keep them before they became sought-after evidence. It would have been embarrassing, of course—but not criminal—to have destroyed them in this interval.

Some former Nixon associates offer a plausible theory to explain why the tapes were kept available in the White House as the Watergate scandal unfolded and before the public was aware of the recording setup. If any member of the cover-up conspiracy were to make any false accusations about a talk with the President, Nixon could contend he had taped that conversation because he had felt it was especially important. Then he could produce the tape and destroy the credibility of the witness.

There is no clear indication yet of how damaging the tapes will prove to be for Nixon. Certainly his general reluctance to yield them to investigators has created widespread suspicion that they hurt rather than help his cause. So, too, has the report of a group of technical experts that part of one tape was deliberately erased. That conclusion is expected to be confirmed and strengthened when the panel presents its full scientific analysis, probably this week, to Federal Judge John Sirica in Washington. So far, two other tapes have been declared to be “nonexistent” by the White House. Never adequately explained has been the fact that Haldeman checked out 22 tapes on April 25, 1973, returned them the same day, then withdrew them again on April 26 and kept them until May 2. There is, indeed, still much to be explained about those fateful tapes that have contributed so much to Richard Nixon’s difficulties and could even end his political career.