ROLL TAPE . . .

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE WITH JFK, LBJ -- AND OVERHEARING EVERYONE ELSE

Author: By Zachary Karabell

Date: SUNDAY, October 19, 1997

Page: P1

Section: Books

If Johnson had lived until 1974, he would have realized that saying too much to reporters wasn't nearly as lethal as recording conversations in the White House. Yet until those famous tapes helped sink Richard Nixon, he and the two previous presidents eagerly recorded meetings, phone calls, and assorted discussions. For John F. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in particular, taping conversations was a way to control how the history of their administrations would be written. The taping systems were a closely guarded secret, with microphones stashed in kneeholes of desks, on night stands, and in light fixtures.

Both the Johnson and Kennedy presidential libraries had planned to keep their tapes sealed for many more years. But the Kennedy Library had been criticized for its tight control of information, while the Johnson trustees felt that the public's need to know outweighed the library's obligation to honor Johnson's timetable for making the material public. Three esteemed scholars of foreign affairs -- Ernest May and Philip Zelikow in the case of the Kennedy Cuban Missile Crisis tapes, and Michael Beschloss with Johnson -- then undertook the painstaking task of listening to and overseeing transcription of the scratchy recordings.

With the publication of these two volumes, the public can now sample the fruits of these taping systems. ``Taking Charge'' offers a glimpse into the first year of Johnson's presidency, from the tense days after Kennedy's assassination through the acrimonious contest over seating the Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. The Johnson that emerges from these transcripts is an earthy president more comfortable with the horse trading of legislation than with the ambiguities of foreign policy. Throughout much of 1964, Johnson shepherded his civil rights bill through Congress, to the dismay of Southern Democrats. The tapes show him massaging some legislators and steamrollering others, all the while keeping a close eye on his approval ratings.

In those months, Johnson spent hours on the phone with Senator Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia. Russell opposed the civil rights legislation, but Johnson valued the veteran senator's counsel, particularly about Vietnam. ``Frankly, Mr. President,'' Russell told him in May 1964, ``it's the damn worst mess I ever saw. . . . It's a tragic situation. It's just one of those places where you can't win. Anything you do is wrong.'' Johnson agreed that the war looked hopeless, but he couldn't shake the fear of what would happen if he allowed South Vietnam to ``fall to communism.'' He was convinced that the Republicans would have a field day. ``They'd impeach a president though that would run out, wouldn't they?'' Russell replied, ``It's one of those things where heads I win, tails you lose.''

More and more of Johnson's time was consumed by Vietnam in 1964. Reading the transcripts of these discussions is something akin to watching a train wreck in slow motion. You know what's coming; the people on board don't.

The transcripts from the Kennedy White House during the Cuban missile standoff of October 1962 have the opposite effect. Early in the two-week crisis, Kennedy and his ExComm (short for the Executive Committee convened when the crisis began) discussed air strikes against the missile sites in Cuba. What would have happened if American planes had bombed Cuba and killed Soviet troops we will never know, but we do know -- as Kennedy did not -- that Soviet protocols for launching the missiles were dangerously unclear. In the end, Kennedy instituted a blockade, and Nikita Khrushchev blinked. The transcripts remind us how close Kennedy came to air strikes and an invasion, and how close the world came to nuclear war. They also show a president firmly in control of the deliberations.

The publisher of the Johnson volume touts the tapes as ``an indispensable window on one of the most legendary figures in American politics.'' The jacket copy for the Kennedy tapes calls them ``a unique window on a drama rarely if ever witnessed by those outside the halls of power.''

Maybe. There's certainly an illicit thrill, a childlike awe at being a fly on the wall of the Oval Office, listening to Johnson cajole a hair stylist to give his wife and daughters cheap haircuts for the sake of the nation, hearing what Kennedy and the ExComm actually said as they tried to navigate around the tripwires of Armageddon.

But the window is a bit more opaque than the packaging of these tapes suggests. Without question, Beschloss, May, and Zelikow have provided historians with a vital resource and the general public with a fascinating aural portrait of two presidencies. May and Zelikow also offer substantial background information and analysis. That said, the transcripts themselves don't alter much of what we already knew about Johnson's character or the missile crisis. They do offer confirmation of many details that have been described elsewhere. That is valuable, but not revolutionary.

The tapes seduce with the promise of full knowledge, but it's a false promise. The published transcripts have no tone. On the page, it's impossible to distinguish sarcasm from praise, genuine feeling from posturing. If Johnson says ``great,'' does that mean wonderful or awful?

The editors of these volumes provide detailed annotations, but no matter how well done these are (and they are well done), annotations are interpretive, bringing us back to the subjectivity of history and away from the ``objectivity'' of the tapes. Even the seeming neutrality of the tape recorder is suspect. Kennedy and Johnson knew they were recording the conversations; their interlocutors did not. That means that we can never determine how much either man tailored what he said in order to control the historical record.

These transcripts do provide a window into the presidency, but the window isn't wide open, and one can only glimpse scattered images. The tapes are a magnificent source. But with them alone, we see through a glass, darkly.