Taping Time Bombs

By Hugh Sidey

An image emerges from shrouded memories of 20 years ago: Bobby Kennedy, hunched in a big chair in the Attorney General's office hi September 1962. His arms are wrapped around his legs, his sleeves are rolled up, his eyes are weary. He is engaged in another battle, which has mostly been the story of his young life. He is the field marshal, acting for his brother the President. They have been on the phone with Democratic Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi, as the Federal Government presses its demand that James Meredith, a black student, be admitted to the all white University of Mississippi at Oxford.

The Kennedys' fragile plan is coming apart, as black rage at injustice simmers across the South. Three times Meredith had tried to register and three times he had been refused. Tension has been building that would lead to riots and death. The National Guard and federal troops have been summoned. Meredith is not on campus yet. But there is no doubt in Bobby's mind about what ultimately must be done. Barnett on the phone tells him and the President one thing, Bobby mutters, but then says another thing publicly. How do you deal with a man like that, he asks, not expecting an answer. Secret agreements are made, and they

vanish as soon as Barnett goes out to meet the press, says Bobby. Then he adds: But we've got it down. We know what he said.

Taped. There it was. The real truth in the midst of veiled and chaotic maneuvering. Why not tape those conversations with the Governor? What did it matter when one was battling for a just cause against an unscrupulous adversary? In Bobby's view of political combat, enemies often must be fought on their terms. The good of the nation and a higher morality demanded it. History would understand.

If the brothers learned anything in their first two years of power, it was, to use John Kennedy's borrowed phrase, that "victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." Often he had pondered his humiliation at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Some day, he used to muse, he would write the story of the last White House meeting before that debacle, when Kennedy had gone around the table and extracted an opinion from each of his advisers. None foresaw disaster, he said.

None. But later some of them had much different memories of their positions. So in October 1962, when he needed counsel on the Cuban missile crisis, he taped again.

As we have since learned, Kennedy did more taping. So did Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, in various amounts, for what their chroniclers now suggest were various reasons. All were strong Presidents in different ways, yet all felt it necessary for protection to make secret records of what was said in the Oval Office.

Secret taping by Presidents has been generally condemned, but there may be another message in those reels and discs. There is no such thing as a casual conversation with a President, either by friend or foe. Every presidential word is a potential time bomb for good or bad, when it is carried out of the Oval Office to be used. Presidents know that. And visitors understand that what they say to a President can be just as explosive. It will always be so, and should be, as long as the office has the power it does.

Maybe we have been going at the problem the wrong way. Right now, because of the new revelations, there is naturally a terrible uncertainty about whether the White House is or is not wired. Why not clear up the doubts once and for all? Why shouldn't the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room be wired and the fact announced that all conversations will be recorded? (Ultra secrets could be whispered in a bug-free cubicle in some other White House corner.) Then set up another rule: that no tape will be released for 50 years or while any participant is alive. Two immediate advantages leap to mind. Presidents might clean up their language. Visitors would not feel betrayed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.