F.D.R. on Tape

Black arts, and sex talk

Weakened and distorted by the warps of time, crackling with static interference, the famous voice from the past gloats over the possibilities: "Now you'd be amazed at how this story about the gal is spreading around the country . . . Awful nice gal, writes for the magazines and so forth and so on . . ."

At the height of the Watergate scandal, when Americans were appalled to learn that Richard Nixon had secretly taped conversations in the Oval Office, his defenders liked to argue that Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy had also taped at least a few White House talks. There were even old rumors that Franklin D. Roosevelt had occasionally asked a stenographer to eavesdrop on meetings.

Last week, almost on the eve of celebrations commemorating Roosevelt's 100th birthday, Professor R.J.C. Butow of the University of Washington published in the February/March issue of American Heritage a remarkable transcript of some long-forgotten recordings at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. After three years of technical doctoring and close study, Butow re-created a Roosevelt talking indiscreetly with his aides about Japanese military threats, the black arts of politics and the sex life of his 1940 Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie. Bu tow insists that Roosevelt had no "Machiavellian designs," and that the recorder "was never used to entrap anyone."

The 1940 experiment began because Roosevelt was angered at being embarrassingly misquoted after a private meeting with some Senators. White House Stenographer Henry Kannee suggested that such talks be recorded. The technology of bug ging was still in its infancy, but David Sarnoff, then president of RCA, donated to Roosevelt an experimental device similar to machines used in making sound films. The microphone was hidden in Roosevelt's desk lamp, and it could be switched on or off by a button in a drawer. Roosevelt used the machine between August and November mainly to record 14 press conferences, where no direct quotation was ever allowed. Butow speculates that on several occasions F.D.R. simply forgot to turn the machine off, and so it caught him in some revealing moments. Samples:

P: On a reported Japanese proposal that the U.S. demilitarize Pearl Harbor: "This country is. . .ready to pull the trigger if the Japs do anything . . . That's the first time that any damn Jap has told us to get out of Hawaii."

P: On the possibility of publicizing Willkie's "awful nice gal": "If they want to play dirty politics in the end, we've got our own people ... We can't have any of our principal speakers refer to it, but the people down the line can get it out."

P: On New York Mayor Jimmy Walker's private life: "Jimmy Walker, once upon a time, was living openly with this gal all over New York, including the house across the street from me ... She was an extremely attractive little tart . . . Jimmy and his wife had separated, [but during the investigation of Walker on corruption charges] Jimmy goes and hires his former wife, for ten thousand dollars . . . Mrs. Walker comes up to Albany, lives with him ostensibly in the same suite in the hotel, and on Sunday the two of them go to Mass at the Albany cathedral together. Price? Ten thousand dollars. "

The recordings mysteriously end in November of 1940, perhaps simply be cause Roosevelt had won reelection. Hardly the stuff of Watergate, but new evidence that no man is a hero to his own tape recorder.

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