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During one brief and bizarre episode, the ever-optimistic Ervin thought that his hopes had been realized beyond expectation. He announced at a session of the televised hearings that he had just received a telephone call from Treasury Secretary Shultz, whose Secret Service is custodian of the tapes Shultz, the chairman reported, had concealed that the President had decided to make all relevant tapes available to the committee and would meet with Ervin to arrange the transfer. The chairman praised the President for his "very wise decision." Vice Chairman Baker joined in the salutations, declaring: "It would appear that the White House has shown its spirit of cooperation."
Within a half hour, his face now ruddier than usual, Erviri returned to his Senate Caucus Room microphone to announce that he had been the victim of a hoax. Ervin had just talked to a man "who really assured me he was the real Secretary Shultz, and he informed me that he had had no conversation with me today." Protested the embarrassed Ervin: "It is just an awful thing for a very trusting soul like me to find that there are human beings—if you can call them such—who would perpetrate a hoax like this."
He had believed the first caller, Ervin said, since turning over the tapes was "what I've been praying the White House would do—because it is so rational." Far from amused, both the Ervin staff and the FBI, at White House direction, promptly announced investigations to find who had posed as Shultz.
Beyond its potentially decisive impact on how Americans may judge Nixon's role in Watergate, the revelation of the President's bugging and wiretapping raised other problems for him. It reinforced to a dismaying degree the portrait of a suspicious, self-protective, secretive White House staff.
Even the Butterfield explanation of the rationale for the President's clandestine taping—that it was purely for a historical record—was questioned by a former presidential aide, who had not been aware of the bugging. This aide insisted that it was Nixon's "paranoia about the press" that motivated his taping. Explained this official: "The President has had a bad press for a long time. He ordered the taps and bugs to keep his own record of what happened in his offices, to tell what he considered to be the true story." Yet it is not at all clear how Nixon could use such recordings to refute press accounts.
If the goal was solely to preserve a record for historians, the practice becomes more tolerable. Certainly, a recorder is a more efficient device than a staff member or stenographer taking notes. But taping seems fair only when all parties to a conversation are aware that their words are being recorded. This may hinder candor somewhat, but so does the presence of a notetaker. When only the President is aware of the listening devices, he is in a position to manipulate and distort the historical record with self-serving or misleading statements.
Other Buggings. The reaction to the revelation among U.S.