Presidents That Used Recorders in the White House (1940 thru 1974)

White House Voice Recording Systems
Type of Activity	Tape Recording Conversations
Location
Location	Washington DC and Others
Date of Activity	1940 through 1974 and maybe more
Coordinates	38°53'51.2"N 77°02'20.9"W

Did You Know:  U.S. Presidents Have Secretly Recorded  Conversations Since 1940

Forty-four years ago, Richard M. Nixon became the first (and only) U.S. president to resign his office. A prime reason for his unprecedented decision was the revelation of his White House recording system—which showed his effort to conceal a major abuse of executive power.

In an era of diminished expectations of privacy, Nixon and several of his predecessors, who wanted to preserve important facts that might come up during a meeting or during a telephone call, recorded nearly 5,000 hours of presidential conversations beginning in 1940.

PROTECTING REPUTATIONS

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was outraged with The New York Times in 1939 for publishing what he called “a deliberate lie.” Someone who attended a meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Military Affairs in the White House quoted Roosevelt as saying that the country’s frontier lay on the Rhine River in Europe.


After that incident, the president’s stenographer suggested that he start recording his meetings. Roosevelt experimented with the standard dictation device of the time, a hard-wax cylinder recorder designed by Dictaphone, but the test proved to be unsuccessful. It had less than 10 minutes of recording capacity, and its microphone was often ineffective.

 
David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America, offered Roosevelt an alternative recording device that the company had licensed from inventor John Ripley Kiel, who recorded sound by indenting patterns on a disc or ribbon instead of on a cylinder. It was, in the inventor’s words, the only “device that could record for as long as 24 hours unattended” and “immediately have the recording played back.” It was installed in the White House basement directly under Roosevelt’s desk in the Oval Office. A microphone was hidden in the president’s desk lamp, offered 180-degree sound pickup. Roosevelt pressed a button to activate the system, which then recorded only in response to sounds.

Roosevelt recorded 14 press conferences in 1940 during his toughest reelection campaign. The eight hours of recordings. After he won reelection, he never used the sound recorder again. It remained in the White House until 1947, when the National Archives took possession of it and transferred the recordings to acetate discs.

EISENHOWER’S SYSTEM

President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower began recorded meetings upon taking office in 1953. The White House Signal Detachment (WHSD) installed a Soundscriber Tycoon dictation system in the Oval Office early that year.

A button in the president’s desk turned on a microphone hidden inside a fake telephone on the desk; the rest of the system’s components were housed in the adjacent office of his secretary, Ann C. Whitman. However, Eisenhower often would forget to turn the machine on at the start of a meeting, and many of the conversations he did record turned out to be indecipherable.

By 1955 the White House had switched to another dated but durable format, the Dictaphone Time Master’s red vinyl Dictabelt. Eisenhower recorded about 75 meetings.

By 1955 the White House switched to the Dictaphone Time Master’s 

red vinyl Dictabelt

JFK INCREASES USE

President John F. Kennedy significantly increased the amount of recording in the White House. Like Roosevelt, Kennedy wanted to ensure that the people he spoke to in private said the same things in public.

His system, installed in 1962 by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), used a Model 5 reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder made by Tandberg Radiofabrikk, a Norwegian company. Obtained from the U.S. Army Signal Corps, it could record up to two hours on a reel with greater frequency response than the earlier indenting recorders, and with minimal distortion. Microphones were hidden behind the drapes in the Cabinet Room, under Kennedy’s desk, beneath a coffee table in the Oval Office, and in the White House study. Kennedy also had a Dictaphone machine connected to his telephone.

In 1962 and 1963, the White House recorded 265 hours of meetings and 12 hours of phone calls. The microphones still picked up background noise, however, including the air conditioning hum, paper shuffling, and the tapping of Kennedy’s legs against his desk. JFK’s vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson also recorded telephone conversations with a Dictaphone, an Edison Voicewriter, and IBM’s transistorized Executary.

A Model 5 reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder made by Tandberg Radiofabrikk 

was installed in 1962 during John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

LBJ MOVES INTO THE WHITE HOUSE

Apparently, when he moved into the Oval Office four days later November 26, 1963, he initially used Kennedy's Dictaphone system. Gradually, President Johnson expanded his use of the Dictaphone system. He began recording his telephone conversations in the Oval Office and from other locations.

President Johnson looks at the news feed and watches his Three Eyed Monster

 in the oval Office

WHCA was responsible to install the recorders on the Telephones that the president approved. WHCA was also responsible for maintaining the White House switchboard, the telephone systems, the "triple" television sets and news wire machines throughout the White House, and the pager buzzers to aides and secretaries.

The President’s desk in the Oval Office

Call Director on the President’s desk

The coffee table with Phone

When he moved into the Oval Office on November 26, 1963, Johnson had the WHCA technicians install new machines on each of his secretaries' desks. The machines were physically located inside the knee wells of each secretary's typing desk. From their office next to the Oval Office, the President's secretaries could record the President's conversations on the telephone lines that went into the Oval Office and the Little Lounge next to the Oval Office.

Gradually, Johnson had WHCA install Dictaphones in several locations because he desired “complete coverage.” Dictaphone recorders were installed in his master bedroom where the President himself controlled the switch that turned the machines on and off. The recording system was placed under his bed and controlled by a switch on the telephone that was next to his bed in the residence section of the White House, also at Camp David, and in two locations in Texas: in his office and bedroom on his ranch in Stonewall.

LBJ held many meetings in the Master Bedroom

Both the Cabinet Room and lounge recording systems were installed over the weekend of January 19, 1968, by Sergeant First Class Joseph B. Wilson and Navy Yeoman Gordon Olson under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel James Adams. Adams was responsible for the white House Residence Branch of WHCA.

Beginning in early 1968, Johnson had the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) install a conventional reel-to-reel analog recording system in the Cabinet Room and in his small private office next to the Oval Office. A WHCA carpenter drilled eight holes in the underside of the Cabinet table to feed microphone outputs to a mixer in the basement. Voices were still hard to hear among other noises in the room.

WHCA also installed Dictabelt machines in the White House Situation Room and on the desk of the Duty Officer in the Communications Center. President Johnson also wanted a portable system that he could use when he traveled outside of Washington, D .C. Although this machine was not used regularly, there are some recordings of the President speaking on the telephone while he traveled.

Jack Albright the WHCA Commander and other members of the White House staff suggested that Johnson, in constant fear of leaks during his second term, was afraid that the existence of the Dictaphone system would become known. Therefore, he used the system infrequently and carefully.

President Johnson ordered all traces of the Dictaphone systems removed in mid-December 1968, so the President elect, and his staff would not know that recording telephone conversations ever took place. WHCA removed the machines in the White House and at Camp David over the weekend of December 28, 1968. However, they left the machines at the President's ranch in place.

LBJ in the cabinet meeting room

As president, Johnson relied on Dictaphones rather than tape recorders to save more than 800 hours covering 9,000 telephone conversations on five phone lines, including two at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. Johnson was the first president to use his recordings; his secretaries transcribed them for his review each evening.

NIXON, HIS RECORDINGS AND THE WATERGATE SCANDAL

Johnson encouraged Nixon to use his system just before Nixon took office. He declined at first but also wanted to ensure the accuracy of statements by people who met with him and keep a record for his memoirs. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, considered Nixon to be “far too inept with machinery” to operate a recording system so the installation used modified, voice-activated Sony TC-800B reel-to-reel tape recorders.

Nixon learned that Lyndon Johnson had in the White House's West Wing a taping system that permitted him to record both meetings and telephone conversations. When Nixon came to the White House on Inauguration Day, 1969, he found what he believed to be Johnson's taping equipment in what was, the small room just to the west of the Oval Office. It was hidden in the upper part of a closet just next to the fireplace.

Shortly after Richard Nixon took office on January 20, 1969, he ordered the removal of an extensive secret taping system his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, had installed in the White House. Johnson, selectively recorded conversations on telephones in the Oval Office, his bedroom, and on several other phones he used regularly. He also installed a taping system in the Cabinet Room.

Nixon abhorred the idea of taping the president's meetings and telephone conversations. He ordered the equipment removed immediately when he came to the White House, as he did Johnson's triple television monitor system and his ticker-tape machine. The new president shared none of LBJ’s love of gadgetry. All of Johnson's machines were quickly removed. Nixon's White House, as these actions taken immediately after his arrival seemed to assure, was to be free of garish electronics, and there was to be no surreptitious recording of meetings and conversations.

The problem was that people who met with the president did not always report accurately or completely what was said and decided privately. Sometimes the error was honest; Nixon often knew much more about a subject than the person he was meeting with and misunderstanding sometimes resulted from this. More often, though, the inaccurate reports had more self-serving motives. Contact with the president presents many temptations to people and brings out many things in their personalities that might never have appeared had they not been flattered with Oval Office meetings. Johnson had warned Nixon about what would happen. "Everybody in this town," he said, "will call somebody else and say, 'the President wants this, and the President wants that. And the people who claimed to know what the president wanted were often believed—because they had just this morning, or just yesterday, stepped out of a meeting in the Oval Office. Sometimes the misreporting of fact had a bad intent, sometimes it represented a willful manufacture of false knowledge to gain some end.

In an attempt to ensure accurate records of presidential meetings—and to trace sources of public leaks emanating from the White House – beginning in February 1971, and at Nixon’s direction, recording equipment was installed in the Oval Office, the President’s office in the Old Executive Office Building, the Cabinet Room, and at the presidential cabin at Camp David. Unlike Johnson’s system, which was manually activated to record conversations Johnson wanted to tape, Nixon’s system was voice-activated and recorded everything.

Nixon’s decision to place recording devices in his offices and elsewhere was not unique. Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt had secretly recorded conversations with aides and others with whom they met or spoke on the telephone.

Until Alexander Butterfield, a former White House aide. revealed the existence of the taping system to the Senate Watergate Committee in July 1973, the existence of the taping system had remained unknown except to a select few at the White House. When its existence became known, differing advice was offered to President Nixon as to what to do with them, as they were considered his personal private property. He chose not to destroy them. 

Only about 5 percent of the nearly 3,600 hours of Nixon White House tape recordings contain references to Watergate. Two tapes proved to be particularly damaging
Nixon wanted an accurate record of his presidency was for his eventual use in preparing his memoirs and other writing projects that he might undertake after his term of office was over.

Something had to be done, Nixon agreed, to ensure that we possessed an accurate record of what was said in meetings. WHCA tried a series of experiments during 1969 and 1970.

Of course, Nixon's presidency was ultimately brought down in large measure by tape recordings of his meetings and telephone conversations. He changed his mind about tape recordings, but he did so hesitantly, over a considerable period, and because of a sequence of failed attempts to solve a problem that seemed to leave no alternative to recommencing taping in the White House.

Two years into his presidency, Nixon had still not found a satisfactory way of getting a full account of what was said and decided in his meetings. Many experiments had been tried, and just as many had been discarded. It was Lyndon Johnson who finally solved his problem, not with a new idea, by any means, but with a decisive nudge toward an old idea. As a former president, Johnson could offer Nixon advice on some subjects with an authority no one else could match. Somehow, probably through some friend of Nixon's who had been conversing with Johnson on how best to set up a Nixon Library, word got back to Nixon, probably in late 1970 or early 1971, that Johnson's view was that he was foolish not to be keeping a record of what was going on, and that a good record was essential to the preparation of a former president's memoirs.

Initially only the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room were included in the system. The Cabinet Room was the only location ever to be included in the taping system that was not sound activated; a control mechanism in Butterfield's office had to be switched on to activate the machinery. The Oval Office machinery—and this was true of all the other White House taping locations—was activated by the Executive Protective Service's First Family Locator system; whenever an officer notified the system that the president was now in the Oval Office, the appropriate light came on in boxes scattered around the West Wing, and the taping machinery switched on. It was poised and ready to begin taping whenever any sounds occurred.

The White House Communications Agency eventually installed seven of the recorders in the White House and set up others in the Executive Office Building; Camp David, and on four presidential telephone lines. They were connected also to the president’s electronic location system, a radio-frequency device Nixon carried that activated receivers in certain rooms he entered.

President Richard M. Nixon used voice-activated Sony TC-800B 

reel-to-reel tape recorders.

The taping system began operating in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room on February 16, 1971. On April 6, the president's office in the Old Executive Office Building and his telephones in both this office and the Oval Office, and the telephone in the Lincoln Sitting Room in the Residence, were added to the system. Over a year later, on May 18, 1972, the president's office and two telephones in Aspen Lodge at Camp David were also added to the system, The Camp David installation completed the system.

The map below of the Oval Office shows the positions of seven microphones. Five (M-1 through M-5) were at the President s desk, and two were in the wall lamps on each side of the fireplace.

Microphone locations in the Oval Office Enlarge

What makes the Cabinet Room recordings unique is that the room itself could accommodate more participants than the average meeting recorded on a White House Telephone, in the Lincoln Sitting Room, or in the president's Executive Office Building retreat. Thus, these recordings often captured larger meetings with Congressional leaders, various domestic councils, presidential commissions, task forces, meetings of the National Security Council, an occasional Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, top secret briefings by Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, an international summit meeting--such as the U.S.-Soviet meetings during June 1973, and, of course, Cabinet meetings, along with many other types of gatherings.

The Cabinet Meeting Room

The Aspen Lodge office was taken off the system in March 1973. On April 9, 1973, Nixon told Halderman to remove the rest of the taping system, but later that same day he changed his mind—he wanted to retain the system, but he wanted it converted to a switch basis. Nixon's order was not carried out. The sound-activated system remained in place in the president's offices until it was finally shut down on July 18,1973, two days after Alexander Butterfield told the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities—the so-called Ervin Committee—of its existence.

Nixon never used the White House tapes for any of the purposes he had had in mind when he ordered the system installed until he ordered Halderman in mid-April 1973 to listen to the recording of his March 21, 1973, conversation with John Dean during which Dean had described at length the problems that Watergate had created for the presidency. He wanted to know precisely what he had said during that troubling conversation.

Also, while taping at other White House locations was ended earlier in 1973 by Watergate-era Chief of Staff Al Haig, the Cabinet Room recordings continued until July 1973, even after the revelation of the taping system before the Watergate investigating committee by presidential aide Alexander Butterfield.

The prosecution was interested in tapes of a discussion between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, that were captured by the president's secret White House recording system in the days immediately following the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.

But those tapes contain a mysterious 18.5-minute gap -- a patch of buzzes and clicks of missing audio -- in the middle of a recording made June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in.

Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s loyal private secretary, was tasked with transcribing the tapes before they were turned over to prosecutors. Woods testified in front of a federal grand jury in 1974 that she was using a Dictaphone, which had a pedal that would pause the recording when she lifted her foot off it, and she claimed she had erased part of the tape by mistake.

Rose Mary Woods, President Richard Nixon's secretary transcribing recorded tapes

Her explanation was that she was listening to the tape and … the telephone rang. So, she kept her foot on a pedal, pushed the wrong button. She pushed record instead of off and reached for the phone.” Woods testified that when she accidentally pushed record on the Dictaphone, it recorded over part of the original conversation. There’s a famous photo of Woods re-creating the moment, in which Woods attempted to keep her foot on the Dictaphone pedal and reach for the phone on the other side of her desk at the same time. Some have jokingly referred to it as the “Rose Mary Stretch.” The audio couldn’t be recovered during the trials. It is widely believed that the President had tried to alter the tapes but erased the missing 18 min. himself!

Oval office meeting note the Dictaphone machine next to the President’s desk

After Nixon's resignation, most thought that was the end of recordings but was it? There is evidence to support that presidents continued to roll the tape — albeit in a more limited way. There is no law preventing secret White House recordings, and some kept it up — most notably Reagan.

Reagan was presented with the option of continuing or not continuing the phone tapings in the Oval Office for national security purposes, obviously tapings were a very controversial subject ever since the Nixon days. But Reagan could see the value of it, not so much for history but for accuracy ... and readily agreed to continue the tapings."

Ford, Carter and George H.W. Bush reportedly had no-recording rules, and there's no evidence that Bill Clinton taped anything secretly in the White House.

There's some evidence that George W. Bush recorded at least some video conferences. As for Obama, There is only speculation that recordings were made, but we know that the NSA can collect anyone’s telephone conversations.

But an Obama official told NPR that while it was true the Obama White House recorded interviews with the media — a common practice among campaigns, too — it was out in the open. And that they didn't record private meetings.

The Presidents’ recording efforts in the White House have had many consequences, most notably Nixon’s resignation. It is hard to imagine that any President has tried to record conversations since it was disclosed over forty years ago when it was common practice, but it appears that with today's advanced technology don't Assume it isn't happening today and in the future!