FDR Tapes — Studio C

FDR tapes, unpublished school paper, spring 2002

I.

Magnetic tape recording devices were not yet perfected when, in 1940, Franklin Roosevelt had an experimental sound recording machine installed in the White House. The machine, the “Kiel Sound Recorder and Reporter,” developed by and named after the inventor J. Ripley Kiel, used, according to historian William Doyle, “a recording needle to feed signals onto ribbons of [35 mm] motion-picture sound film.” Kiel had licensed the prototype to RCA.

When White House stenographer Henry Kannee approached the company in 1940 with a request for a recording device, RCA founder David Sarnoff donated the “three-and-a-half foot-high contraption” in June of that year. Kiel installed the recording device in the room directly below the Oval Office – “a padlocked chamber” in Doyle’s words – and ran a wire from the machine to a microphone planted in Roosevelt’s desk lamp and another into the Oval Office phone line.

Roosevelt was by no means the first president to make sound recordings. But not until 1940 was the Oval Office “wired for sound.” The intent, according to stenographer Henry Kannee, was to protect the president from misquotation by the press. After Roosevelt’s death, one reporter commented on having noticed “some kind of radio apparatus in Roosevelt’s desk drawer,” but it was not until 1978 that the recordings were uncovered, thereby corroborating the reporter’s cryptic reference. It was through University of Washington history professor Robert J.C. Butow’s work – and a subsequent cover story published four years later in American Heritage magazine – that these recordings came to be known to the public. And it was through his work that the magnitude of these tapes in illuminating critical historic episodes can be appreciated.

II.

In 1982, when Butow’s article was published, the discovery of these recordings was hailed as “an astonishing discovery.” There had only been rumors until then of the Oval Office recordings. “Regarding the matter as an experiment that had not worked,” writes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the American Heritage introduction to Professor Butow’s piece, “the library staff accessioned the recordings and duly opened them to researchers, but the recordings were little remarked among the mass of other audio visual materials at Hyde Park until Professor R.J.C. Butow came on them in 1978.”

With the newly installed Oval Office recording device, the president in August 1940 began to record not only routine public-record press conferences but also private meetings. Press conferences aside, the absorbing – and germane – aspect of the uncovered materials is in these private conversations. William Doyle notes that Kiel’s device had “a sound activation feature that enabled it to record or idle unattended,” which would seem consistent with Schlesinger’s contention that the conversations were recorded “by accident. Someone just forgot to turn the machine off.” But even as Henry Kannee denies ever having been instructed to record private conversations, Doyle’s description of the “concealed control panel right in FDR’s desk drawer, with buttons for RECORD, PAUSE, REWIND, IDLE and PLAYBACK,” is nevertheless provocative for those wishing to impute a certain duplicity in the recording of these White House conversations. But Schlesinger, having surveyed the recordings, offers perhaps the final word
on such speculation. “Since FDR himself consumes most of the tapes and since the private chat – with the exception of one meeting that included black leaders – is with intimates, one must agree with Professor Butow that the conversations were probably recorded inadvertently and plainly not for purposes of entrapment.”

Butow adds: “There is no evidence to suggest that FDR was pursuing malevolent or Machiavellian designs.”

Whether such motives were involved is ultimately of less consequence than the tapes themselves. Their discovery is of pivotal importance in considering – and reconsidering – Roosevelt the president. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. : “With all their technical problems, the tapes add a fascinating dimension to our sense of the Roosevelt Presidency. They offer the historian the excitement of immediacy: FDR in casual, unbuttoned exchanges.”

These “unbuttoned exchanges” documented by the experimental “Continuous-film Recording Machine,” offer the listener unprecedented contact with Roosevelt during a critical juncture of our nation’s history. Little more than a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, “Roosevelt summarizes the latest news from Japan,” Butow writes. “There will be no war with the United States … on one condition, and one condition only … The United States [must] demilitarize all of its naval and air and army bases in Wake, Midway, and Pearl Harbor.’ FDR pauses, then reacts: ‘God! That’s the first time that any damn Jap has told us to get out of Hawaii!’

Eavesdropping on history, nearly 40 years after J. Ripley Kiel’s elaborate recording device captured Roosevelt’s piercing words on disc, and being one of the first people to ever hear them, Butow was astonished. “The President would never have said this in public,” he writes. “No one today can bear witness to the occasion; nor can FDR’s remarks be found in some lost memo of the conversation that only now has come to light.”

Butow, determined to discover “how and why these recordings had been made in the first place,” learned that the recordings were “confidential” and had not been intended, as Oval Office recordings made by subsequent presidents would be, to serve as historical record or documentation for scholarly or even popular consumption. This would appear consistent with Roosevelt’s policies regarding public disclosure. Writing 12 years after Roosevelt’s death, historian Rexford Tugwell laments: “He left nothing to help us see how magnificent his achievement was. On the contrary, he put every possible obstacle in the way so that a biographer often finds himself baffled.” Tugwell goes on to note the dearth of “dependable” records of Roosevelt’s conversations, Cabinet meetings, or “high-level” press conferences.

This seems so incredible that stories have been invented to explain the lack of materials. There was a persistent one, met with often at the Hyde Park library, that there was a secret recording booth in the White House basement below the presidential office and that conversations were taken down and put away for future reference. Alas, it is not so. There were never any recordings.

Fortunately, Tugwell was mistaken. But what do these recordings, of which there exists a scant eight hours (some of which “simply defy transcription” ), offer and how have they helped historians reconstruct and reconsider Roosevelt’s presidency?

William Doyle provides some insight: “The FDR recordings reveal an intimate inside view of his patrician, gossipy, and supremely confident executive style, as he uses charm, vagueness, gossip, and occasional deviousness as tools for managing his presidency.” Many of these traits are evidenced by an exchange that was first documented by Butow and elaborated upon by Doyle. It is a White House meeting recorded after a morning press conference on September 27. Present at the late-morning meeting are A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; T. Arnold Hill, acting secretary of the Urban League; and Walter White, secretary of the NAACP. Because the question being discussed is whether to integrate the U.S. military forces, Roosevelt’s secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and the assistant secretary of war, Robert Patterson, both of whom oppose integration, are also present. Says Doyle: “Roosevelt decided to skate down the middle path of charming, almost condescending ambiguity, leading both sides to feel he agreed with them.”

Immediately, Roosevelt takes command of the conversation, (at one point “interrupting and talking over Randolph” ), seizing every opportunity to placate the civil rights leaders.

The main point to get across, [Roosevelt says,] in building up this draft army, the selective draft, is that we are not as we did before so much in the World War, confining the Negro to the noncombat services. We’re putting them right in, proportionately, into the combat services … which is, something. It’s a step ahead.”

In reviewing the September 27 exchange in sum, Doyle comments: “Here was the president of the United States … referring to ‘colored’ men as ‘boys,’ suggesting that mess attendant was a good career track, and that there ought to be more colored bands, ‘because they’re darned good at it.’”

The text of the conversation seems in some ways to vindicate the civil rights leaders’ indignation when on October 9 White House press secretary Stephen Early read a statement that read: The policy of the war department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has proven satisfactory over a long period of years and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for public defense.”

“Far from diminishing jimcrowism,” Walter White wrote in his 1948 autobiography, “the new plan actually extended it.” Making matters worse, White, Hill and Randolph “were condemned across the country as a bunch of ‘sell-outs’,” writes Jervis Anderson. “The statement fell like a bomb on public opinion,” White adds. A “vigorous denial” followed two days later in an NAACP press release that distanced the civil rights leadership from Early’s facile intimation that the three men were in accord with the Roosevelt policy. “Inexpressibly shocked” were the words used to convey their discontentment with the president, whom they accused of surrendering “to [the] enemies of democracy who would destroy national unity by advocating segregation.”

Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published news of the White House meeting of September 27, nor of the NAACP retaliatory press release. The black press, however, took notice. The Washington African American offered for its readers reports of both the White House meeting, and of the NAACP’s angry response. The African American also reported on the decision by the Roosevelt administration to deny black officers from commanding black draftees.

The recording of the hour-long conversation of September 27 confirms the African American’s allusion to Colonel Knox, who “allegedly stated that while he was sympathetic, he felt that the problem was almost insoluble since men have to live together on ships, and that ‘Southern’ and ‘Northern’ ships are impossible.” The sound recording offers more coherence and context to the last reference – and a different source of the quotation.

Knox: And you can’t have separate ships with a Negro crew, because everything in the Navy now has to be interchangeable.

FDR: If you could have a Northern ship and a Southern ship it’d be different! (Laughs.) But you can’t do that.

As the president’s comment suggests, he was in high spirits; throughout the meeting he shares with the civil rights delegation a kind of congenial banter that threatens to undermine the gravity of his guests’ concerns. Furthermore, a reasonably earnest, typically amenable Roosevelt statement should not be confused for presidential resolve. In response to White’s endorsement of four-year apprentice programs for Negro ground crews, the president says: “I think we can work on that. Get something done on that.” But the exchange that follows more accurately suggests the course that the Roosevelt administration would pursue with regard to moving on White’s suggestions.

FDR: Of course, on the development of this work, you’ve got to have somebody – for instance, in the Navy, you’ve got to have somebody [black] in the office who will look after it.

[The President then digresses a bit, recalling his “colored messenger in the Navy Department,” a man named Pryor about whom he asks his guests, “Do you know Pryor?” Finally, White returns to the president’s earlier suggestion.]

White: An assistant, responsible to the secretary. [To Knox] I want to see you about that.

FDR: [To White, after Knox apparently gives him a stone faced non-reply] He’s giving you what you call the silent treatment! Ha, ha, ha!

While White tries again to put Roosevelt on a substantive track, handing to the president “petitions from eighty-five American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts from California to Maine protesting against discrimination,” Roosevelt replies, “Yup, yup, yup,” and the meeting formally concludes. In a side conversation with White, the president reverts to his earlier idea, an anemic, almost absurd compromise that places at the vanguard of his integrationist policy “the possibility of a Negro band, to increase the opportunity [for blacks enlisted in the armed forces]. The more of those we can get, a little opportunity here, a little opportunity there.”

The president’s ultimate policy of inaction, conveyed through the press release of October 9, was, predictably, a source of profound antagonism in the African-American community. The effort to end discrimination and segregation in the armed forces and secure “the right to fight” had galvanized black Americans in the fall of 1940. Roosevelt had suddenly become the symbol of the status quo.

Responding to “this Rotten Deal,” the Washington African American wrote in an October 12 editorial: “If [the President] wants the colored vote, he has a queer way of showing it.” In the October 19 edition, the AFRO ran a full-page feature by Jehu Jasper entitled “Jim Crow in the U.S. Navy,” and on its editorial page gave “Its Reasons Why … It Supports a Republican Candidate for the Presidency,” a policy that dated back 16 years to Bob La Follette’s 1924 campaign for president. The Republican candidate, Wendell Wilkie, even made a well-attended campaign stop in Harlem during the month.

If the mainstream press was reluctant to cover this string of events, Roosevelt’s early biographers likewise showed reluctance – or indifference – in recounting the events. A cursory inquiry into a half dozen Roosevelt biographies published during the ‘50s and '60s produced no mention of desegregation of the armed forces, nor any mention of Randolph or White at all. In his book Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People 1939-1945, published in 1973, Geoffrey Perret devotes two chapters to race issues. Perret makes reference to Randolph (though not to either Hill or White), but is not concerned with the September 27 meeting and its immediate aftermath.

Several contemporary accounts offer little or a total lack of attention to these events, preferring instead to consider Randolph and White’s more famous meeting with the president the following summer when Roosevelt struck a compromise to avert a march of 100,000 African- Americans on the nation’s capital. Recently, however, Doris Kearns Goodwin has recreated the events of late September and October of 1940 in some detail (she even offers a different time for the September 27 meeting–12:30 p.m. instead of 11:30 a.m.). She notes the president’s conciliatory pose and “open-mindedness about the Army.” She also considers the potent resistance to desegregation that Roosevelt faced from his advisers – Col. Knox, Gen. George Marshall, and Secretary of War Harry Stimson prominent among them. Stimson wrote at the time that when “colored officers [were appointed] to several of the Divisions that went over to France … the poor fellows made perfect fools of themselves.” He adds: “Leadership is not embedded in the Negro race.”

Following the War Department’s policy statement, Goodwin describes the “fury” the civil rights leadership felt when “the false impression [was given] that the three Negro leaders had agreed with the wording and countenanced the policy of segregation.”

A biography of A. Philip Randolph by Jervis Anderson published in 1972 mentions the September 27 meeting, having no record, of course, of the conversation. Anderson notes that “despite White’s feeling that progress had been made,” the prospect for any progress on the matter was “hopelessly mangled in the intransigency and clumsiness of the administration’s policy and public-relations machinery.”

III.

Uncovered and made public by Butow in 1982, the Roosevelt recordings became the first documented White House “tapes” to be made widely available. A technological breakthrough in 1940, Kiel’s recording apparatus was eventually replaced by magnetic tape recorders and improved upon many times in the 60 years that followed. Roosevelt was not the only president to be recorded on the Kiel/RCA machine, however. In May, 1945, shortly after taking office, President Truman was briefed on the machine and elected to secretly record a press conference. He was dubious of such furtive practices and rarely used the machine thereafter. There is a record of less than three hours of Truman recordings, all of them made during the first two years of his presidency. President Eisenhower later installed hidden Dictaphones in the Oval Office. The recording room was dismantled during Eisenhower’s first term and the Kiel machine was removed from the White House, never to be recovered.

Selected Bibliography:

- Anderson, Jervis. A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

This book was first published in 1972. It traces Randolph’s family life, his experience in Harlem, his work in the labor movement in the porters’ union and his political activities, and his involvement in the Civil Rights movement, the 1940 March on Washington that never happened and the 1963 March on Washington that did happen. The author is a native of Jamaica, who, coming to the United States in 1958, “had no idea who A. Philip Randolph was.” Mr. Anderson stresses that his book is not an exhaustive biography but a biographical portrait which “bears the marks of my own selective interest and curiosity.”

- Doyle, William. Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton. New York: Kodansha International, 1999.

This is the major source, and the impetus for me writing this paper. Doyle has done what no other book has done, and in working on the project has pieced together important pieces of the historical puzzle. He was perhaps the first to listen to Truman recordings. Truman made few recordings but the portions of the tapes on which he appears revealed to Doyle “a truly vulnerable man, a voice that almost disappears in the cavern of the Oval Office. Doyle tracks through every president since FDR, finding Kennedy dealing with a Civil Rights crisis and a Cuban missile crisis, Johnson and his advisers grappling with U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Nixon covering up Watergate, Reagan dealing with the Soviet Union, and “the bomb named Monica Lewinsky [that] landed on Bill Clinton’s head.”

- Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, New York, 1994.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of previous books on LBJ and JFK, takes on FDR and ER in this 1994 book. She looks at the developments “which led, almost inevitably, to America’s involvement in history’s greatest armed conflict.” More importantly, she examines American home front and how it “affected the course of the war, and how the war, in turn, altered the face of American life.” Goodwin endeavors to give readers a better understanding of how during the five-and-a-half-year period that begins in May 1940 when Hitler escalated the war by invading Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France, Roosevelt led and united the American people. She explores the role Mrs. Roosevelt played in that struggle as well.

- Jasper, Jehu. “Jim Crow in the Navy.” Washington African American, 19 October, 1940, p. , 10

Jehu’s feature begins: “It is quite obvious that passage of the conscription bill means nothing to the United States Navy.” Over the course of two pages, he forcefully argues the case. Jehu relates a story of discrimination that he witnessed involving Osborne Poitier, a young resident of Washington, D.C. who had planned to enlist in the navy. Poitier encounters the segregation that he thought the conscription bill had changed.

- Morgan, Ted. FDR: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Morgan offers a comprehensive biography of 800-page biography of the four-term president, looking at Roosevelt’s privileged upbringing, his schooling at Groton and Harvard, his courtship of Eleanor, and his years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, as governor of New York, and as president during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Morgan focuses a great deal on Roosevelt’s struggle with polio and his personal relationships. Morgan’s book was of only limited use for my project, but he does use the Butow transcripts in his investigation into the Roosevelt presidency.

- Perret, Geoffrey. Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People 1939-1945. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan Inc., 1973.

Perret’s book has a somewhat similar mission to that of Goodwin’s. He is interested in the home front during roughly the same period of time, surveying American life before, during and after the war. His chapters on race relations were especially useful. He relates the political and social struggles of African-Americans from the turn of the century, through the Great War, into the New Deal and the Second World War. He offers a detailed account of the Roosevelt administration’s handling of the issues of race and equality.

- Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

This is a more recent biography of the civil rights leader . Like Mr. Anderson, the author recalls a time when she hadn’t heard of Randolph. And like Mr. Anderson, the author makes no claim to biographical exhaustiveness, calling the undertaking “an analysis of Randolph’s civil rights leadership.” She is interested in exploring in a comprehensive way, “Randolph’s activity on behalf of black equality.” She emphasizes “the origins of his ideologies and civil rights tactics ” and the conflict that arose from Randolph’s involvement in the labor movement and the movement for black equality. Like other sources, this book offers only a limited account of the events revealed by the Roosevelt recordings.

- “Roosevelt or Wilkie?” Washington African American. 19 October, 1940, p. 4.

The African American was involved in the 1940 presidential campaign in an unexpected way. Coming out in favor of the Republican candidate, Wendell Wilkie, the AFRO, as it was often called, was making a much stronger case against Roosevelt than for Wilkie. In fact, in this October 19 editorial, the paper doesn’t get around to mentioning Wilkie in a substantial way until the 14th paragraph, more than halfway down the column. Roosevelt is assailed for his “silence on the anti-lynching bill,” “his permitting the navy to exclude us and the army to close every unit but seven,” (and several other military matters including falling behind Hitler and Mussolini in national defense), his failure in reviving economy and reversing ten-year trends in unemployment, and his “sincerity” in “his desire to help us solve our problems.”

- “Roosevelt versus Wilkie.” Washington African American, 12 October, 1940, p. 4.

This editorial, published only a week earlier, has a much different tone and is more accurately considered an acerbic examination of the Roosevelt administration policy and two of its engineers, the Army’s Harry Stimson (Stimmy) and the Navy’s C.W. Nimitz (Nimmy).

“Contrary to general belief,” the AFRO writes, “the race discrimination which has always existed in the army and the navy … is not of the sneaking, apologetic, undercover variety. It is rather bold, brazen, and blatant.” The editorial takes Nimitz to task for a statement made to the NAACP characterizing it as “rank discrimination on account of race, the like of which we have never had so boldly expressed before.” The paper finds the differences between Stimson’s “plans” and Nimitz’s “policy,” “but a matter of degree.” Perhaps most important is the AFRO’s implication of Roosevelt on the issue. “President Roosevelt knows all about this sordid business,” says the editorial.

- “The FDR Tapes: Secret Recordings Made in the Oval Office of the President in the autumn of 1940.” American Heritage,Feb.-March 1982, p.8-24.

This cover story was the product of four years of work by Professor Robert J.C. Butow. While working on “an entirely different project,” involving “the origins of FDR’s interest in the Far East,” Professor Butow made an accidental discovery of the tapes. His work has provided scholars with rich, if limited, source material for investigation into Roosevelt’s dealings on foreign policy and the polls, the uses of political scandal, civil rights, and the 1940 presidential campaign. Roosevelt is also heard defending his son, Elliot Roosevelt, on his rank as captain in the Air Corps, a matter of alleged favoritism that had become a campaign issue in 1940. The articles featured in AH, including one by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and one by Professor Butow, proved to be one of my primary sources.

- Tugwell, Rexford G. The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1957.

Tugwell was an economist at Columbia University who was asked in 1931 to be an adviser to Roosevelt while he was still governor of New York. He became part of the so-called Brain Trust in the New Deal. Tugwell was also known as “Rex the Red” for his outspoken antibusiness leanings. He wrote several books on economics and industry, as well as volumes on Soviet Russia and education. This, his first book on Roosevelt, was published in 1957, while a subsequent 1968 book, The Brains Trust, looked at “how [FDR] got himself nominated and elected president,” a “firsthand narrative by Roosevelt’s closest confidant and only no-man.” The Democratic Roosevelt proved useful only for the quote I have used that appears in the book’s introduction. I became aware of the book and the quote itself in reading Prof. Butow’s piece, “The Story of the Tapes” which appears as part of “The FDR Tapes” in American Heritage magazine.

- “White Officers Only for Draft.” Washington African American, 12 October, 1940, p. 1, 20.

This is a front page story that reports on the White House conference of September 27. It makes reference to specifications that had been drawn up by White, Hill, and Randolph before the meeting and presented as a memorandum to Roosevelt later that morning. The African American says: “In response to inquiries about the training of colored men as commissioned officers, the use of colored professionals such as doctors, dentists, pharmacists and nurses, and the use of colored men in the air corps, the president is quoted as saying that plans for the use of colored persons in these capacities had not yet been developed.” The story goes on to speak about Colonel Knox’s resistance and the NAACP response to the administration’s decision to preserve the status quo.

- White, Walter. A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White. New York: Viking Press, 1948.

White’s autobiography details his upbringing in Atlanta and his formative encounters with lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and the lily-white vote, and relates his many important efforts in politics and as secretary of the NAACP, notable among them the struggle for the “right to fight” waged by African-Americans in the early 40s. For White, who was 1/64th black, the title of the book is a play on words. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond,” he writes in the opening paragraph of the book. But “I am not white,” he asserts. “I am a Negro.”