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Season Five Research Files
Episode Three
9:00am - 10:00am
Ever since 1940, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American presidents have taped conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office. Microphones were drilled into White House walls, drawers, and light fixtures. Secret switches were rigged to tables, desks and lamps. These were connected to recording devices in secret chambers. Presidential phone lines were linked to Dictaphone machines stashed away in closets. Sometimes they even had stenographers and video cameras to openly record White House business.
The Oval Office was bugged by FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon. Johnson only tapped the phones. Reagan’s head-of-state phone calls were recorded through the basement Situation Room. Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson would signal their secretaries to begin recordings. Some also taped conversations in the Cabinet Room. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon installed bugs in the White House Mansion.
After President Kennedy was assassinated, one of the first things Lyndon Johnson did when he took over the Oval Office was to install a tape recording system. Kennedy had made secret tapes of his White House conversations, but Johnson took the practice to the extreme by taping hundreds of hours of inside his office as well as more than 9,000 phone calls.
In July, 1973, it was revealed that presidential conversations in the Nixon White House had been tape recorded since 1971. Those tapes consist of about 3,700 hours of recordings containing approximately 2,800 hours of recorded conversations between the President, his staff, and visitors at locations inside the official offices and Oval Office telephones.
Although most of these Presidents probably instilled taping devices to help them write their memoirs later in life, an experienced executive like Eisenhower probably recorded important meetings out of habit. For historians, these audio tracks have served as a tool for analyzing each President as a leader, politician and manager.
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