![]() "And obviously tapings were a very controversial subject ever since the Nixon days. "Reagan was presented with the option of continuing or not continuing the phone tapings in the Oval Office for national security purposes," Politifact quotes Doyle referencing Michael Deaver, Reagan's chief of staff. There is no law preventing secret White House recordings, and some kept it up - most notably Reagan. And there is evidence to support that presidents continued to roll the tape - albeit in a more limited way. "Prudentially why would anyone do this?" Perry noted.īut that hasn't stopped the imaginations of authors and conspiracy theorists. "People knew the smoking gun could be found."Īfter Nixon's resignation, most thought that was that. "It was an amazing annoucement," Perry said. That system was dismantled voluntarily after it became public when White House aide Alexander Butterfield revealed the tapes' existence in the Watergate congressional hearings. The recording ability was all over the White House - from the Oval Office and Cabinet room to Nixon's private office and Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He added more technology the technology got better and he wanted to record as many meetings and phone calls as possible. Johnson ratcheted up the use of secret tapes and made it a staple of his White House. Kennedy also wanted to keep the tapes to help with his memoirs once he was out of office. That has made for some rather notable recordings. ![]() ![]() Kennedy kept his recordings secret, appearing not to want even advisers or those on the phone to know. Kennedy was savvy about what was available to him and "so careful about how his image was portrayed," Perry said. He began recordings in earnest after he felt he received bad advice in the run up to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Magoun, a historian at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, who dug into the technology used by presidents in secret recordings.īut Truman and Eisenhower were from a different generation as Kennedy. The technology wasn't great, but Eisenhower did have a system installed in which "a button in the president's desk turned on a microphone hidden inside a fake telephone on the desk," according to Alexander B. There are very few recordings from the Truman era, and only about 75 from Eisenhower. Roosevelt abandoned the use of the recording after his reelection. These things have been manufactured by deliberate misrepresentation of facts, existing facts."įDR's recordings weren't discovered until 1978, four years after Nixon resigned because of his tapes, by a historian who visited the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. "There isn't one story or one headline in all of those papers that does not give, to put it politely, an erroneous impression-not one. "I have in front of me, oh, about eight or 10 different newspapers," FDR said in that February 1939 press conference. Roosevelt, like Trump (and almost every previous president), was also highly critical of the news media. His radio "fireside chats" were, in a way, a precursor Trump's tweeting - an effort to communicate directly with the American people past the critical filter of the news media. ![]() ![]() Roosevelt pioneered attempts to get around the press using mass broadcast media. Roosevelt is also recorded talking about the possibility of spreading a rumor that his Republican opponent Wendell Willkie is having an extra-marital affair, compares Willkie to Hitler (yes, that bad comparison was even happening then) and referred to a Japanese official he disagreed with as a "damn Jap." "The FDR recordings reveal an intimate inside view of his patrician, gossipy, and supremely confident executive style, as he uses charm, vagueness, gossip, and occasional deviousness as tools for managing his presidency," author William Doyle wrote in his 1999 book, Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton. ![]()
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