10 minutes. Prof. Dean discovering the taping system is it lucky or inevitable . That is the discussion of these lectures. The whole story of the nixon tapes has been only partially told. It has taken me years to gather and find out what happened. Its one of the most important factors in the watergate story. I think its important to get that history straight. We will try and do that in a very summary fashion today. Before i start, id like to remind you that other president s did tape, starting with roosevelt. When they first went to talkie movies and they had a soundtrack, they had a system put in the oval office that recorded. I am going to try a very quick sample. Oops, let me go back. A quick sample of roosevelt taping. [indiscernible] prof. Dean you get a sample there. That is amazing when you think of somebody today, that we have cell phones, just talking about the breakthrough in that presidency of a walkietalkie that was so heavy they had to carry it on their back. Anyway, nixon got the idea of taping from Lyndon Johnson during the transition between the two presidencies. He said, i have several of the offices wired for recording, including several telephones. He said, i strongly recommend you do the same. Nixon had exactly the opposite reaction and had them all taken out. But this is the first time he had heard of president s recording. So what were the reasons that he does install . Back in the nixon white house, as we have discussed in prior lectures, there was a pretty efficient Management System, except in the instances like watergate where the Management System did not come into play. But the Management System on a daily basis was there. When somebody had a meeting with the president , and they brought a guest in, they prepared a talking paper that went into the president , was approved fir st. Then after the meeting, they prepared a summary of the meeting. I will give you an example, in this particular memo, Elvis Presley shows up at the northwest gate. I happen to know this because bud called me and said, elvis is at the gate, and he wants to present the president with a gun. Its a silver gun with ivory handles, but he also wants to talk about Law Enforcement. What should i do . I said have the secret Service Handle it, which they did. That talking memo went into the president mentioned why elvis was there and laid it out in detail. I kind of like this letter. If you read it, elvis starts dear mr. President , i would like to introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley as if anybody in that era would have any trouble knowing who this was. I admire you and respect the office. I talked to Vice President agnew in palm springs three weeks ago and expressed concern for the country. So this is why elvis is coming in. What he really wants to do is be deputized as a Law Enforcement officer to deal with the drug p roblem. There is the letter. Bud takes him into the oval office. Elvis starts showing him pictures. Much of the meeting was recorded. This is one of the most requested pictures of the nixon administration. You will notice his belt, which was solid gold. Bud was not the normal notetaker of meetings and prepared a fairly detailed account of what had happened. This actually runs several pages. I took just one paragraph here that notes that presley indicated that he thought the beatles had been a real source for antiamerican spirit. This sounds a little bit like competition. He said that the beatles came to the country, made their money, and returned to england, where they promoted and antiamerican theme. The president nodded in agreement and expressed some surprise. This is a good host meeting memo. This became the exception to the rule. No greater offender than henry kissinger, who fell way behind on his meetings and recording it. This was noticed and something had to be done about it. He decided, we are not keeping a good record of this presidency. What nixon wanted was two things. One, he wanted the historical record of what had happened during his presidency to have a real sense of history. Secondly, he wanted to know if he had said something or given some indication to a guest, like nodding at the beatles doing something. He wanted a record of that. So somebody couldnt leave the office and say that he had said something that he in fact had not said. He did not fully agree with elvis in this, you just nodded and showed surprise. He could not go out and say the president hates the beatles, because that was an untrue statement. He wanted protect himself. To deal with this problem and the breakdown of this recording system, nixon discussed putting in the same system that Lyndon Johnson had, keeping an audio record of it. He calls an aide you can trust, because this would become one of most guarded secrets of the presidency. He calls alex butterfield, the Deputy Assistant to the president , the person dealing with the president more than anybody else. He had more face time because he is the person that takes documents in and out. Butterfield in turn calls the secret service the Technical Services division. There are the people that made sure that nobody outside the white house was bugging the white house. So they had the capability and understanding. Butterfield told me over the years that when he went to the head of the Technical Service division, wong said, oh, here we go again. That he had been there and this happened in prior presidencies. He knew exactly what it was. What was different is that they put in a voice activated system. Isnt that an annoying video . [laughter] what does it mean to have a voice activated system . Anytime nixon spoke, it triggered the recording. And the way it worked was nixon carried a small device on his belt or in his pocket that indicated his location. It was a locator so the secret service knew if he was in the barbershop or in the oval office, or if hed gone to the residence. They keyed the taping system to the locator so that when he was in the room where the taping system was employed, it would trigger the taping system. In other words, installing it in the oval office. Say the cleaning crew is there at midnight, it wont activate. And its very clear that nixon forgets about the recording system. Other times they clearly remember the recording system. As somebody that has gone through as many as i have, you can hear him when he is trying to make a record. Even with outsiders, as opposed to insiders. They start in the oval office. Here are the locations of the microphones in the oval office. This is actually down by the president s feet. Youve seen a couple pictures where the president has his feet up on the desk. The fact that he would often be talking through his legs distorted the sound. I sat in this seat here. My voice must have been right beside the microphone because its very clearly picked up. M4, ehrlichman tended to take that seat. M3 for kissinger. Its bizarre how people would go back to the same places in repeated fashion. That is where the mics were located. To my knowledge, i cannot hear anything from those near the lamps. They tended to make the room sound rather hollow when they get picked up. The next place they put them were in the eob office. Same thing in the desk. The problem that i alluded to earlier, nobody sat by the desk. A seating arrangement on the far corner. These are some of the most difficult to understand. Some of the best recordings are those on the telephone. Every telephone the president used, except some in the residence, they all were wired through the switchboard. They were very good. This is the one recording device in the residence in the sitting room. This princess phone up here is wired because it goes through the central switch. He had actually 3 tapes in camp david. 2 different telephones. One via his deck. The room was recorded. They were put in in stages, not all at once. The final place that was wired, and some of the most difficult sound, because the wiring did not work in the cabinet room. This was controlled outside the cabinet room by alex butterfield, whose telephone had a button that would result in his turning on. As alex left, it went over to steve. If alex knew he would be in the meeting himself, he would have one of the secretaries turn it on. The system starts in february 16, 1971. The date, is not easily remembered by most people that write about this. That is when it happened. The first conversation, other than a general one, is somebody that walked into the office before alex did. The first 4501 is the First Oval Office test. Yes . [indiscernible] prof. Dean they had no control over them. They are all voice activated. He had no control over them. Sometimes he knows they are being recorded, other times he has clearly forgotten. He tells the operation and purpose of it, the fact that the cabinet room is controlled by butterfield. The fact that it is being monitored. And who knows the president and secret service . The recordings were being made on a sony recording system. That is what the system looks like. At one point they had up to nine of these machines gathering information. They were gathered on very thin tape, a half millimeter. Is played at the slowest speed possible, 16 inch per second on a six inch reel. This translated into about six hours per reel. One of the reasons the sound quality is so bad because it was played so slowly