THE WHITE HOUSE: The Battle for Nixon's Tapes

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politicians and officials ranged from outrage to "So what?" AFL-CIO President George Meany called it "so fantastic as to be almost beyond belief. God bless the blunderers at Watergate. If they hadn't been so clumsy, America would never have known about things like this." Declared former HEW Secretary Robert H. Finch, a longtime Nixon associate: "I'm literally astonished." Ousted Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel observed wryly that his problem was not being overheard at the White House but being heard at all. Nevertheless, he thought anybody talking to a President should be aware of any taping "as a matter of self-protection." Republican House Leader Gerald Ford said that he saw "nothing wrong with the practice." Quipped former Republican National Committee Chairman Robert Dole: "I'm glad I always nodded when talking to the President." A Nixon loyalist, former Presidential Aide William Safire, writing in the New York Times, said the President was setting "a terrible example" of eavesdropping by his "Monster With Total Recall."

Democrats, predictably, were more critical. Senator George McGovern called the taping "a violation of privacy." House Speaker Carl Albert termed the practice "an outrage." Senate Dem ocratic Leader Mike Mansfield said:

"I'm not surprised, but I don't like it. I wouldn't mind if they had told me."

Buzhardt's claim that the Johnson Administration had engaged in a similar practice was met with heated denials by some former L.B.J. aides, but it nevertheless seemed generally accurate. Some 500 transcripts of telephone conversations that Lyndon Johnson had selectively and apparently secretly re corded are in the archives of the John son Library in Austin, Texas. He was able to push buttons to activate Dictaphones wired to his telephones in both the Oval Office and his White House sleeping quarters. Installed by Army communications experts rather than the Secret Service, the recording equipment was also available in the Cabinet Room.

He could reach under the table and throw a switch (among buttons labeled COFFEE, TEA and FRESCA).

Documents in storage for the still-to-be-built Kennedy Library include 68 recordings of John Kennedy's telephone conversations and 125 tapes of presidential meetings. In some cases, said the library's director, Dan H. Fenn Jr., the participants were clearly aware that the recording was being made. He said that most of the topics under discussion seemed to be "highly sensitive foreign policy and national defense matters."

Yet the full extent and manner of the Kennedy taping is not clear. The fact that other Presidents also made secret recordings does not make the practice any more attractive. There is a spying, snooping quality in it that seems beneath the nation's highest office.

Self-taping and self-bugging is not a crime, although recording a telephone conversation without using a beeper to warn the unsuspecting party at the other end is a violation of Federal Communications Commission tariff regulations. The penalty normally is a warning from the telephone company to stop any secret taping or risk the loss of its telephone service. The FCC ordered AT&T to check into the Nixon telephone-taping practice. An official of the A T