But the White House has a history of recording, dating back to 1940. Presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan had various types of audio recording devices installed to conduct secret tapings, and it was a White House practice that was relatively unknown until Watergate.
Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman inherited the machine and continued recording in the White House, though sparingly. The Miller Center found that Truman recorded about 10 hours of material, but only a few hours of the recordings are intelligible.
The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Nixon administration officials, Nixon family members, and White House staff, produced between 1971 and 1973.
According to the Miller Center, a policy and political history institute at the University of Virginia, the president had the recording device -- a RCA Continuous-film Recording machine -- installed in 1940, with the intent to capture press conferences.
In fact every President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon had some sort of recording system in the West Wing.
Eisenhower then moved to a Dictaphone Time Master's red vinyl Dictabelt, which would record up to 15 minutes on a vinyl plastic loop, according to the group's official publication, the Institute.
They fed into a Tandberg Radiofabrikk Model 5, a reel-to-reel device that recorded about 260 hours of meetings and phone calls, according to the Institute. Bouck disconnected the device as soon as it was confirmed Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, according to the Kennedy Library.
FDR recorded about eight hours of press conferences and phone calls during his re-election campaign in 1940, according to Selverstone.
Nixon silenced the recorder for good on July 18, 1973 — two days after a former White House aide said the President might have taped conversations about the Watergate break-in. "The taping as far as we all know ended with Nixon in 1973," Selverstone said. The President handed over 1,200 pages of transcripts to a House Committee in April 1974 — ...
LBJ's custom requests included longer pockets because "my money and my knife and everything fall out," as well as an inseam that was easier on his groin.
The 33rd President recorded about 10 hours over the two-year period and experts have said there wasn't a pattern to what he taped.
In a 2011 interview with the New York Post, Doyle said Reagan limited his recordings to official business with heads of state, chiefly in the interest of overcoming bad translators and dropped calls.
Nixon recorded conversations and meetings for nearly half of his presidency. The result: 3,700 hours of recordings, with one “smoking gun” that eventually led to Nixon’s downfall.
According to the Miller Center, a policy and political history institute at the University of Virginia, the president had the recording device -- a RCA Continuous-film Recording machine -- installed in 1940, with the intent to capture press conferences. But the machine picked up some private conversations and meetings immediately before and after the press briefings. FDR also kept a microphone hidden in a lamp on his Oval Office desk, Doyle writes.
Kennedy’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln and Secret Service agent Robert Bouck, who installed the taping devices, believed it was added to provide an accurate record for his memoirs or personal use after leaving office. Lincoln also recalled that Kennedy was irked after some of his advisers who supported the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion later claimed they opposed it during the fallout.
LBJ had wanted the tapes to remain sealed for 50 years following his death, but his presidential library began releasing them in 1993.
On July 16, 1973, Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield revealed the secret recordings existed during a hearing in front of the Senate Watergate Committee. On one of the many tapes, Nixon discussed with his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman how to thwart the FBI’s investigation into the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Convention headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington.
In one such call, Regan asked Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq not to give concessions to the hijackers of TWA Flight 847. “I think we would just see more hijackings then and more terrorism,” he said.
The Presidential Recordings are located in the President's Office Files which is part of the Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy. The recordings were donated to the Library in the 1976 addendum to the 1965 deed of gift from President Kennedy's estate. There are approximately 248 hours of meetings and 12 hours of telephone conversations. Background and technical information on the recordings and a preliminary list of the dates and subjects of the meetings and telephone conversations is given in the Register to the Presidential Recordings of White House Meetings and Telephone Conversations.
President Kennedy recorded many of his Oval Office and Cabinet Room meetings between July 30, 1962, and November 8, 1963. The system was designed and installed by Secret Service agent Robert Bouck who was responsible for protecting the White House from electronic eavesdropping. A single recording system was connected to both the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. This system was located underneath the Oval Office.
The quality of the sounds recorded on the tapes varies greatly from tape to tape as well as voice to voice. The placement of the microphones affected the intelligibility of the recorded voices. Voices too close to the microphones are distorted; voices too far away from the microphones are inaudible. Some participants mumbled, while others yelled. The microphones picked up many background noises such as helicopter rotor noise, air conditioning, clattering of cups, scribbling of pens, and rustling of papers, to name a few, that obscured the recordings of the conversations. The microphones in the kneewell of the President's desk in the Oval Office also recorded loud and clear the President's knees and legs knocking against the desk. [13]
Sometimes, a tape may contain a recording of only one meeting. On other occasions, a tape may contain recordings of two or more meetings. There are conversations and meetings recorded in each area (Cabinet Room and Oval Office) on one tape since the microphones from each location went to a single system. If the President forgot to turn his switch off, the tape recorded room noise and other unintended and miscellaneous conversations. Often, the President did not begin recording until the meeting was well underway. On at least two occasions, cleaning personnel accidentally activated the system. On many occasions, a meeting continued from one reel onto the next when the second recording machine activated. [12]
The West Wing machines were connected by wire to two microphones in the Cabinet Room and two in the Oval Office. Those in the Cabinet Room were on the outside wall, placed in two spots covered by drapes where once there had been wall fixtures. They were activated by a switch at the President’s place at the Cabinet table, easily mistaken for a buzzer press. Of the microphones in the Oval Office, one was in the kneehole of the President’s desk, the other concealed in a coffee table across the room. Each could be turned on or off with a single push on an inconspicuous button.
As received, two primary numbering systems were discovered applied to the tapes. A numerical series from #1 to #118, with frequent use of the letter "A" as a suffix (26, 26A, 27, 27A, etc.) and with several numbers omitted, appeared to be the principal system used. These numbers appeared on the boxes in which the reels of tape were stored. It is believed that these numbers were assigned by Evelyn Lincoln as she received the tapes.
Prior to the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (effective beginning January 20, 1981), each President was free to define the scope and content of his personal property to be removed from the White House when be left office. This authority extended to working files of the presidency and was grounded in a tradition dating back to the first President, George Washington. All Presidents prior to Ronald Reagan were under no constitutional or statutory obligation to preserve the records of their presidencies, much less to make them public or to donate them to the United States. A growing sense of the value of presidential records, beginning in the late 19th century, led to a tradition beginning with Theodore Roosevelt that the papers should be saved and preserved for posterity. This was given statutory encouragement in the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955. The latter does not require former Presidents to donate their papers to the United States. It merely enabled the U.S. Government to undertake the responsibility of accepting such gifts when offered, and under such terms and conditions acceptable to the U.S. Government as the donors might wish to impose.
On February 16, 1971, a taping system was installed in two rooms in the White House, namely, the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room.
History of the Nixon White House taping system. Richard Nixon 's Oval Office tape recorder. Just prior to assuming office in January 1969, President Nixon learned that his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had installed a system to record his meetings and telephone calls.
The recordings were produced on as many as nine Sony TC-800B machines using very thin 0.5 mil (12.7 µm) tape at the slow speed of 15/16 inches (23 mm) per second.
The tapes contain more than 3,000 hours of conversation. Hundreds of hours are of discussions on foreign policy, including planning for the 1972 Nixon visit to China and subsequent visit to the Soviet Union. Only 200 of the 3,500 hours contain references to Watergate and less than 5% of the recorded material has been transcribed or published.
On August 19, 2013, the Nixon Library and the National Archives and Records Administration released the final 340 hours of the tapes that cover the period from April 9 through July 12, 1973.
President Nixon initially refused to release the tapes, for two reasons: first, that the Constitutional principle of executive privilege extends to the tapes and citing the separation of powers and checks and balances within the Constitution , and second, claiming they were vital to national security. On October 19, 1973, he offered a compromise; Nixon proposed that U.S. Senator John C. Stennis review and summarize the tapes for accuracy and report his findings to the special prosecutor's office. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused the compromise and on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned instead, then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was asked to fire Cox but refused and was subsequently fired. Solicitor General and acting head of the Justice Department Robert Bork fired Cox. Nixon appointed Leon Jaworski special counsel on November 1, 1973.
The system was turned off on July 18, 1973, two days after it became public knowledge as a result of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings. Nixon was not the first president to record his White House conversations; President Franklin D. Roosevelt recorded Oval Office press conferences for a short period in 1940.