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4.5
It's a little mindblowing to realize such a historical resource exists: Recordings of presidents in the Oval Office discussing matters of state, negotiating with world leaders, and offering often-candidly caustic opinions of their contemporaries.While William Doyle's "Inside The Oval Office" is subtitled "The White House Tapes From FDR To Clinton," this is a misnomer. As others here point out, there's really only a trio of presidents that taped themselves at work with any regularity, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and four more (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Ford) that did so even at all. Reagan and Clinton both had video crews film some of their formal meetings, but Bush 41 and Carter avoided anything more involved than private diary tapings in recording the doings of their administrations.Despite the uneven nature of this record, Doyle tries his best to analyze each president's administration from a purely executive-managerial level, sometimes using the tapes as a guide but just as often relying on contemporaneous accounts and even interviews with people who were in the room with the various chief executives. The result is some fascinating portraits in miniature of the vastly different leadership styles America have elected to its helm.Doyle manages effective profiles of each man, but delivers the goods best on the ones, not surprisingly, who did the most taping. LBJ verbally bludgeons cowering senators to pass aggressive civil rights legislation and tells a pants manufacturer to give him some slacks with more room for his testicles, employing some decidedly earthy terminology in both instances. Kennedy and his Best and Brightest advisor team listen in on reports from Ole Miss while James Meredith is enrolled as a student there and the campus erupts into a combat zone. Nixon makes bizarre and angry pronouncements, half-commands and half-rantings, urging aides to spy on Kissinger when he suspects his chief diplomat is talking to the press."Even with all their limitations, the Oval Office tapes do offer something no other source can: A real-time record of the presidents as executives in action as they manage the business of American history," Doyle writes.I heard my first Oval Office tape a couple of months ago at whitehousetapes.org, the first one ever made which features FDR holding a press conference in August 1940 and then, after the room is cleared, slyly slipping an aide some dirt on his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, apparently having forgotten he was wired for sound. That whole tape, just under an hour, is fascinating listening, even during that sometimes dry press conference where Roosevelt talks about American military preparedness and then apologizes to the lone female reporter before using the term "BVD," a brand of men's underwear the troops were being outfitted with.It would have been nice to read about filigree like that in this book, if it had been written as a tour guide of the mounds of tapes out there and all the strange secrets and bits of trivia they contain. You can't listen to all the tapes; Nixon alone made more than 3,000 hours of them. But something attempting to give shape to the vast treasure trove of Presidential tapings would have been more worthy of the title of this book.Please don't read that as a knock: Doyle does write a solid historical overview, complete with voluminous footnotes that should please the scholar as well as the casual reader. He manages the feat of presenting a very political setting in a way that is non-partisan yet zesty. He offers some interesting tidbits about each president you won't find in any other book, particularly Johnson, who agonized about Vietnam long before most anyone else did and was in many ways the Oval Office's most complicated man."He was King Lear, Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, Captain Ahab, Moses, and Grendel, all stuffed into a scratching, belching, blustering, six-foot two-inch 220-plus pound explosive package," as Doyle memorably puts it, yet Johnson was also a passionate humanitarian and patriot who, as caught on tape, once exclaimed the one thing he ever wanted in the world was "a little love."A good book, at times very very good, but one with a poorly-chosen subtitle.
