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White House Tapes - The President Calling

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/prestapes/index.html

Provider: American RadioWorks.org Minnesota Public Radio


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Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all bugged their White House offices and tapped their phones. Kennedy taped about 260 hours of conversation and recorded just 12 hours of telephone calls. The calls illustrate Kennedy’s personality. LBJ taped many calls. Johnson recorded more than 9,000 of his conversations. Nixon, too, secretly taped his conversations in order to document conversations. Nixon’s system for recording was voice-activated. So his recording system captured sound whenever he picked up a phone in the White House or walked into a room and spoke. Nixon’s taped conversations about the Watergate scandal led him to become the only U.S. president ever to resign from office. According to the site, LBJ “told a young historian she could learn more about how government really works by listening to his tapes than from reading a hundred political science textbooks.”