John Powers spends his days with Richard Nixon, straining to hear the man’s voice so that we may ultimately understand his actions. Given Nixon’s muddled legacy, perhaps it’s fitting to learn the identity of Powers’ previous job.
“I was selling Hondas,” he informs.
Powers, 31, is an archivist at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and for the past week a witness in a momentously tedious, but at times engrossing, trial in federal court.
There, the Nixon estate seeks more than $200 million from the government as the value of the late president’s famous tape recordings and papers. They’ve been at it for nearly 60 trial days and, once in a while, one side plays snippets from previously unheard Nixon tapes.
Last week, those tapes confirmed that Nixon offered Vice President Spiro Agnew’s job to Treasury Secretary John Connolly in March 1971. There was more evidence of Nixon’s bigoted streak as he bad-mouthed women, blacks, Mexicans and Italians, as well as proof of a tenuous respect for civil liberties as he and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell rationalized wiretapping.
Powers is an unlikely expert-of-experts on the Nixon tapes, a treasure trove barely inspected so far. Imagine: 3,700 hours of secret recordings made between Feb. 16, 1971, and July 12, 1973, in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, Nixon’s office in the Old Executive Office Building, and in the personal residence and Aspen Lodge at the weekend retreat in Camp David, Md.–and most have not been heard by the world.
There are more than 60 hours of already released Watergate-related tapes, which we tend to think of as the “Nixon tapes.” The vast majority are still to be disclosed, a process slowed in no small measure by litigation from the Nixon estate.
The taping system was mostly voice-activated (top Nixon aides felt he’d be too ham-handed with a manual system) and meant to provide an accurate historical record of his tenure, capturing room and phone conversations.
Each recording station had two Sony 800B recorders, using tapes that recorded at the slow speed of 15/16ths of an inch per second, allowing each reel of tape to hold up to 6 1/2 hours of recording time.
Powers is now somewhere in October 1971, as he sits at a cubicle with a digital audio tape player and headphones, surrounded by a wealth of books on Nixon.
Powers knows better than anyone that the tapes are tough to understand at times, largely due to mechanical problems with the recorders, microphones and wiring. The tapes themselves weren’t very good. Volume fluctuated. Because there were five microphones on Nixon’s Oval Office desk, they picked up virtually any sound: somebody writing on the desk, putting down a glass or cup, Nixon’s chair moving about, his feet hitting the desk when he put them up, and his knees knocking up against the desk’s kneewell.
Frequently, he must hit rewind and try again as he and colleagues assemble logs detailing what each conversation is roughly about, being sensitive to potential issues of national security, invasions of privacy and violations of treaties, agency policies or federal statutes.
He will slow the speed at times to better understand the words. But for poor telephone and Old Executive Office Building tapes, especially, he can spend an entire day listening to a 20-minute conversation.
“It’s very difficult to listen to them,” he said last week. “It’s why you have to go back at times to the textual materials. The president may say, `Henry (Kissinger), did you take care of that plan for me?’ and you have to go to books to figure out what they are talking about. Then, it may turn out that the plan is classified.”
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How Powers wound up being a Nixon aural analyst par excellence is a story onto itself, as is the evolution of his views toward Nixon as he listens to hour after hour of tape.
He grew up in nearby Alexandria, Va., the son of a Defense Department computer expert and a housewife mom. He attended the College of William and Mary, majored in European Economics and fully expected to serve in the Army because he’d been in ROTC.
He was sent to Ft. Bragg, but his physical revealed bad eyesight, and he was stunned to be discharged for medical reasons within 24 hours. “I was thrown for a loop,” he said.
He joined a college roommate who was selling Hondas in Alexandria. He was there for a year and a half but got antsy as increasing competition meant he was making less money.
An old family friend who worked at the Archives contacted him about buying a car. During the test drive, Powers disclosed his desire for another line of work. The friend didn’t buy the car but got him a low-level technical job, involving Nixon materials, at a facility in Alexandria.
He did menial work for a year and then got a chance to start reviewing tapes, initially inside a poorly lighted vault. In time, the Nixon tapes were moved to College Park, Md., and Powers headed to Austin, Texas, to work at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library for 18 months.
He returned with a better job and began reviewing the Nixon tapes five days a week, with two Saturdays a month thrown in. He has listened to as much as 1,000 hours of tapes and seen his perceptions “change dramatically about Nixon and the presidency.”
“I remember thinking, out of college, how I had high ideals of what the political system was supposed to be about. The tapes make clear that there is an inherent, political nature in every single thing a political leader does.
“What is especially interesting to me is how I went to the LBJ Library with a (poor) opinion of Johnson, but now have come away with tremendous respect after listening to his (Oval Office phone) tapes. On issues like civil rights, he comes off as very presidential.
“You don’t see a lot of that on the Nixon tapes. He comes off as a political animal, a politician who wasn’t going to do anything unless he could see political benefit.”
Then, of course, there is the raw language, belittling women and minority groups.
“All of us are human,” Powers said. “But I look at this in terms of the difference between you or I complaining about women or blacks as opposed to the president telling his principal personnel adviser those same things. His saying them has much greater impact and thus is that much more disappointing.”
Banquet of the bizarre
The annual dinner of the Radio & Television Correspondents’ Association last week was like some weird, collective wink between President Clinton and the news media that cover him.
There were 2,000 people in a ballroom for the formal affair. They drank, ate and watched the big journalism award go to ABC’s Jackie Judd for disclosures of Clinton sliminess during Monicagate, including the existence of the semen-stained dress. Judd’s producer, standing perhaps 5 feet away from a poker-faced president, thanked the late Clinton partner-turned-nemesis James McDougal for all his help.
And there was Clinton shaking Judd’s hand. There was the audience applauding Judd, then Clinton for a mediocre speech in which he joked about Monicagate, avoiding tough press questions and even alleged Chinese espionage, suggesting a potential Oscar winner, “Leaving Los Alamos.”
His derision toward the press was undisguised, though he finished with a banal homage to a free media. His presentation included a White House-produced video starring, of all people, Clinton critic Robert Novak, hosting a post-Monicagate show called “Pundittubbies.”
And there was Clinton secretary Betty Currie, who may have lied to protect Clinton, sitting with the gang from CBS’ “60 Minutes.” A slew of senators and congressmen were scattered about with venomous Clinton critic Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) inches away from Clinton lawyer Cheryl Mills, the whole crowd mingling with conviviality.
Following the Clinton deceits and yearlong mess of impeachment, it all felt wrong and as witheringly small-town as Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.