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Revealing the Existence of LBJ's White House Taping System

Black Telephoneby David Coleman

The notion that the President might be secretly recording his telephone calls and meetings did not become the topic of widespread public attention until Alexander Butterfield first revealed the existence of Richard Nixon∇'s recording system during the course of the Watergate investigations. When the Nixon White House claimed that previous administrations had also taped, Harry Middleton, the director of the LBJ Library, confirmed that Johnson had done so even as several former LBJ aides and the Secret Service professed ignorance.1 But there were at least some public mentions of LBJ's recording system almost a decade before the Watergate investigations.

In general, knowledge of the taping system was closely kept to only a few aides and some White House secretaries who were assigned the task of creating transcripts for Johnson's use. Nevertheless, some in Washington knew privately of LBJ's taping system. One source was President Kennedy's long-time personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. In his memoirs, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote of his learning of the system from Lincoln in March 1964.

Evelyn Lincoln told me at luncheon that all LBJ's phone talks are taken down on tape. They are immediately transcribed by the girls in her old office and then given to the President the first thing in the morning, so he can see what he said. What a treasure trove for the historian! and what a threat to the rational and uninhibited conduct of government!2

 

Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1964

At some point, Robert Kennedy∇ also learned of the recording system, perhaps from Schlesinger or Lincoln. That, in turn, was disclosed to journalist and historian Theodore White. In his 1965 book, The Making of the President, 1964, White described the July 1964 meeting in which Johnson told Kennedy that despite pressure on him to do so, he would not be naming Kennedy as his running mate in the upcoming election.

Thereafter, since the story [of LBJ's cutting RFK from the ticket] was out, friends of the Attorney General began to make available Robert F. Kennedy's version of the story.

He had indeed come at one o'clock to the Oval Office and the President had sat behind his desk. The business part of the conversation had taken only a few minutes of the forty-five minute session. The President had looked at the wall, then looked at the floor, then said that he'd been thinking about the Vice-presidency in terms of who'd be the biggest help to the country and the Party--and of help to him, personally. And that person wasn't Bobby.

The Attorney General had said fine, and offered to help and support him. The Attorney General had been restrained during the entire conversation--he knew that the President had taken to the habit of recording conversations in his office on tape, and he could see that the buttons were down and the tape recorder was on.3

 

Leak to the Washington Post's Chalmers Roberts

But there was an even earlier public disclosure that LBJ had a taping system connected to his telephone. Coming at the height of the 1964 election campaign, it was the product of a politically motivated leak.

A key part of the Johnson campaign's strategy was to paint the Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater∇ of Arizona, as trigger-happy and reckless, charges that found their ultimate expression in the famous "Daisy" TV advertisement, in which the Johnson campaign implied that Goldwater might lead the country into a nuclear war. But even before that commercial aired, the charge that Goldwater was reckless was starting to stick.

At a press conference on August 12 in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Goldwater lashed out in frustration. Asked by a reporter to answer the Johnson campaign's accusation that he was "impulsive and imprudent and trigger-happy," Goldwater accused Johnson of hypocrisy, claiming that just over a week earlier Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara∇ had themselves authorized the use of nuclear weapons in response to the Tonkin∇ Gulf attacks on August 3-4. Goldwater was apparently misinterpreting a statement McNamara had made at a press conference on the afternoon of August 5. McNamara had been asked what orders he had issued to the Seventh Fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin and he responded that the Fleet had been told to protect themselves with "whatever force is necessary." By focusing on that phrase, Goldwater overlooked public assurances given the previous night (August 4) by McNamara and the State Department that no nuclear weapons would be used. Nevertheless, as the story played out in the press in following days, Goldwater stuck to the accusation. On August 14, in direct response to Goldwater's charge, the Pentagon declassified and released a section of the original orders to the Seventh Fleet. Those orders specified that the military response was to utilize "conventional ordnance only."4

But as the campaign heated up, the issue of nuclear [im]prudence lingered and was thrust into the center of the campaign with the September 7 broadcast of the "Daisy" commercial. As Goldwater found himself on the defensive, he continued to charge that Johnson himself had already proved his own recklessness with the response to the Tonkin attacks in early August. Evidently, Johnson, or someone very close to him, decided to answer the accusation by leaking to Washington Post reporter Chalmers Roberts some information that that could only come from the inner sanctum of the White House. In an October 4 article on the election campaign, under the subheading "Orders Now Taped," Roberts wrote:

After Sen. Goldwater implied that Mr. Johnson had permitted the possible use of nuclear weapons in the Aug. 4 incidents, the Administration was able to say that orders for the use of "conventional ordnance only" had been issued. Now the President has taken the precaution of adding a recording device to his telephone so that his orders, and he has given some tactical orders to the Navy, are on tape for the record.5

The source of Roberts' information is unclear, but it is possibe--perhaps even likely--that it came from Johnson himself. It was not unusual for Johnson to call reporters to suggest material for columns; indeed, at least one such call with Roberts was recorded, an August 15 call in which Johnson had addressed directly and at length Goldwater's "nuclear" charge. No mention of the recording system is made in the open part of that conversation, but one minute of the recording, at a point in the conversation when Roberts asks about "the technical control situation," remains closed by the LBJ Library.6 The type of information in Roberts' October 4 article, characterized as "the word at the White House," was also consistent with the type of information he would have gleaned from talking personally with the President. The information does not seem to have appeared elsewhere, which would also seem to indicate a private conversation between Roberts and Johnson or someone close to him rather than a public press statement provided to multiple reporters.

Although the Roberts article implied that LBJ's telephone recording system was designed for specific and limited use, it nevertheless amounts to the first known public disclosure of the existence of White House tapes.

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Recommendations for further reading:

 

 

  1. 1. Jules Witcover, "LBJ Aides Disavow System," Washington Post, 17 July 1973, p.A1.
  2. 2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Diary entry for March 25, 1964.
  3. 3. Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1964 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p.278.
  4. 4. Tom Wicker, "Navy Order Cited in A-Bomb Dispute," New York Times, 15 August 1964, p.1; Chalmers M. Roberts and Murrey Marder, "'Conventional Ordnance' Specified in Viet Action," Washington Post, 15 August 1964, p.A1.
  5. 5. Chalmers M. Roberts, "Johnson Expects to Win With Rating Shift," Washington Post, 4 October 1964, pA2.
  6. 6. See Conversation WH6408-22-4962, 4963.