The Tapes as Literature
SCHORR, DANIEL
zThe Tapes as Literature Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives by President Richard Nixon Government Printing Office....
...potent figures nervously loosen their collars and start breathing hard...
...But there is a growing sense that neither power nor the separation of powers any longer confers invulnerability...
...The top man, whom we always thought of as confident and incisive, grows confused and indecisive...
...693 pp...
...Nothing is going to come crashing down to our surprise...
...It is the language of "bottom-lining," "stonewalling...
...The Presidential Transcripts Dell...
...Joyce gave us the Stream of Consciousness...
...But, no, for Greek tragedy told of large men destroyed by their flaws...
...Almost any document receiving similar mass exposure—excerpted and even dramatized on television, read in full on Public Radio?would, as one of its earliest effects, put an imprint on the national language...
...Both are selling like The Exorcist...
...Reviewed by Daniel Schorr CBS News, Washington So the good, gray Government Printing Office (GPO) finds itself with a hot property—considerably hotter than the Warren Report or the Pentagon Papers...
...The most troublesome post-thing" means the most troublesome problem connected with the period after the Watergate break-in...
...This is somewhat odd, because a lingo hitherto unfamiliar to most Americans does emerge from these 300,000 words, one that is frequently vivid despite mixed metaphors and muddled meanings...
...Old loyalties crumble, scapegoats are sought and principals become suspicious of one another...
...For Joyce, looseness of texture was a device to illumine inner thought...
...Head them off at the pass...
...But the Presidential patois is not being picked up in the way that the verbal inventions of the ghetto, hippies and football fans have been...
...One encounters weird combinations of the cosmic and the commonplace, such as, "We are going to make it the whole road and put this thing in the funny pages of history...
...896 pp...
...hard-lining," "caving," "toughing it out," and "letting it all hang out," with variations like, "Is it too late to go the hang-out road...
...Or maybe it mixes Sophocles with Dreiser—little men in lofty positions, doomed for all their con-trivings...
...it has an extra dimension...
...Hunt and his present finance" is the euphemism for the Howard Hunt hush-money...
...Dumbest paperpusher in the bowels of the White House...
...Individuals are revealed in ways that shatter years of public image-making...
...it is the sense of terror among the mighty that lurks behind it all...
...One reaches to literature, trying to find an appropriate parallel for this disintegration of character, this predestined disaster, this inevitability that mocks all the hopeless thrashing and conspiring...
...A noose is closing around the Oval Office, and every report from the Outside brings some new complication...
...Although theater scripts have been fashioned directly from documentary records —the Auschwitz trials, the Oppen-heimer and Rosenberg cases—I suspect transferring the Nixon tapes to the stage would be difficult because the dialogue is so often inside, vague and coded...
...There is still power—power to invoke Executive privilege and national security...
...for more, the commercial publishers swung into action on crash paperback editions...
...At last report, there were printings of 1.3 million by Bantam Books in conjunction with the New York Times, and of 1.7 million by Dell, with commentary by the staff of the Washington Post...
...Superficially it is reminiscent of James Joyce, but only superficially...
...Through the opaque ramblings of individuals shrinking from their own thoughts and their own actions comes a tragedy that is here and now, real and ours...
...After the first printing of 3,000 blue-covered typescript copies evaporated within an hour, and people started lining up outside the GPO building at 2 a.m...
...In literary as well as legal terms, there is a plot...
...The language, I must admit, fascinates me...
...And there is the shorthand that evolves in special situations...
...The ship is sinking, and the captain and his officers are gibbering on the bridge about plugging the leaks, capping the bottle, buttoning up...
...Interlarded throughout is the easy slang of common purpose and common targets: "Loose cannon...
...What makes the whole thing so scary is not the cynical preoccupation with scenarios...
...Under the strain, layers of civility peel off...
...Put a little heat on him...
...From more legitimate government concerns it borrows Johnson-like warnings about "a domino situation" and Kennan-like objectives of achieving "containment...
...The image of men willing to bring the temple crashing down with them suggests something Samsonian...
...2.45...
...It has provided material for New Yorker cartoons and Art Buchwald take-offs, and a thousand derisive gags have bloomed with the punch line, "It would be wrong, that's for sure...
...Not letting "this thing blow up in front of the election" expresses the consensus within the Nixon White House that preelection disclosure was out of the question...
...The line of authority subtly shifts until we see a prattling commander being brought up sharp by his lieutenants...
...We watch those who have mouthed law-and-order slogans turning lawless to save their own skins...
...If anyone is thinking of the interests of the nation, it is not readily apparent...
...White Housese is an amalgam of bureauc-ratese, legalese, advertising jargon, and sports terms...
...power to issue orders to the investigators who have started investigating them...
...Or simply weird combinations, such as, "You have got to maintain the President out of this...
...12.95...
...1,308 pp...
...out of the Oval Office comes the Stream of Unconsciousness...
...Still, for all the murkiness (and for all the "unin-telligibles" and "expletives," somehow much dirtier in their implications than the Hemingway "obscenities"), the transcripts possess the stuff of high drama...
...2.50...
...Yet apparently so deep is the alienation today between the nation and its elected head that the newly revealed White House mode of discourse has so far mainly entered the lexicon of satire and scorn...
...But this drama is not simply a cautionary tale of some writer's imagining...
...Little attention, however, has been given to the fact that the Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations is not only a climactic event in the political process, but a literary event of a profound, if strange, kind...
...Or perhaps these creatures unable to escape their preordained fates are closer to Greek tragedy...
...This story is more naturalistic: It is Dreiserian, an American tragedy of little, middle-class, men caught in their own web...
...Here, hunkering down in their palace, are men whose eyes were fixed on the election—convinced that whatever they did, they would be home free once Nixon/Agnew were returned to office—and who now watch as their landslide victory turns into dust...
...the White House ramblings merely blur and obfuscate...
...There is much to say—and much that is being said—about the transcripts' political impact...
...The White House Transcripts Bantam/New York "Times...
...But the copyright on Federal documents being what it is (namely, nonexistent), the selected and edited transcripts of President Nixon's conversations about Watergate between September 15, 1972, and April 27, 1973, have not remained solely in the GPO's hands...
...Even the President begins to wonder whether the office in which he has cloaked himself will become unwrapped...
Vol. 57 • May 1974 • No. 11
