Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee.
—Luke 19: 22
One of the continuing ironies of Watergate is that Richard Nixon has become increasingly entangled in the scandal largely through a needless and voluntary creation of his own: his secret system for recording nearly all of his official conversations. If his clandestine tape recorders had not been silently capturing his words and those of his most intimate aides, he probably would not now be in so imminent a danger of impeachment. If he is finally forced out of office, it may well be largely due to those telltale tapes. Nearly forgotten in the endless struggles over access to those recordings is the question: Why did he ever install such a potentially dangerous system in the first place?
Men close to Nixon are now in fairly full agreement on the basic reasons. Foremost, according to them, was Nixon's awareness of history and his place in it. Nixon yearned to write one day a definitive work that would be the classic of presidential memoirs. With thousands of his conversations in the White House and the Executive Office Building available for precise—if selective —quotation, he could produce a detailed and colorful narrative far beyond the capability of any of his predecessors. "More than most Presidents," recalls one of his former assistants, "Nixon spent a lot of time poring over what he said and did. It was vital to him to have an accurate record." Adds another aide: "Nixon wants a record of everything."
The wondrous gadgetry of the system, with its tiny hidden mikes, its voice-actuated mechanism that required only a few spoken words to set recorder reels twirling in obscure recesses of the E.O.B., fascinated the President, his aides say. Moreover, what assistant could be more efficient than this omniscient and faithful monitor? Some presidential conversations, especially those with world leaders, were too important to permit misunderstandings. In the first 2½ years of the Nixon presidency, such advisers as Henry Kissinger, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman laboriously took notes at important meetings. All three soon became much too busy for that; the recording system, installed in the late spring of 1971, was a welcome substitute.
But a common-sense question intrudes: Would Nixon speak in total candor, knowing that his words were being preserved on tape? There is every indication that he did. Some investigators who have heard many of the tapes have said that they were appalled by the degrading conversation—talk that they did not expect to hear at a presidential level. "I wish I had not heard it," sighed one listener. Part of the offensiveness lies in Nixon's well-known private penchant for locker room language. What is less well known and more bothersome are the bitter and sometimes savage epithets he aims at individuals who have in some way angered or crossed him, and these highly personal comments include flecks of antiSemitism.