The Nixon Tapes

Beginning on February 16, 1971, most White House conversations involving President Richard Nixon were recorded. Nixon through his chief of staff Bob Haldeman ordered the Secret Service to set up a tap­ing system. Seven microphones were installed in the Oval Office—five on the president’s desk and one on each side of the office fireplace. Two microphones were located in the Cabinet Room. In April 1971 Nixon’s hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House was also wired for recording. Telephones in the Oval Office, the hideaway office, and the Lincoln Sitting Room in the

White House family residence, where Nixon often spent his evenings working, were also tapped. Other than the Cabinet Room, where a switch had to be thrown to turn the tape recorders on and off, the recording systems were sound activated and linked to a locator device worn by the president, and thus only operated when the president was in the room. Only the president, Haldeman, a few of Nixon’s close personal assistants (but not Ehrlichman, Kissinger, and Shultz of his inner circle), and the Secret Service knew about the recording system.

Nixon had been advised by former president Lyndon Johnson to reinstall a recording system; Johnson had used one during much of his presidency. There were two main reasons for having a taped record of presidential conversations. One was protecting against others misrep­resenting what was said in meetings with the president; the other was as a source for the eventual memoir that Nixon, like all former presi­dents, would write after leaving office.

The Nixon tape recordings are difficult to understand. The tapes used and the slow speed at which they were recorded were not appro­priate for voice recording. Various sounds, ranging from ringing tele­phones to the sound of coffee cups being set down, obscure parts of many conversations. Those conversations and meetings were often rambling, filled with incomplete sentences, and unstructured, making them difficult to follow. Participants interrupted each other and fin­ished each other’s sentences. (More information regarding the Nixon tapes can be found at www. millercenter. org/presidentialtapes.)5

The author, assisted by George Washington University student Luis Suter, made a “best effort” attempt to transcribe conversations relevant to the space program on the Nixon tapes. Any errors of transcription are the author’s responsibility.

In contrast to Frank Jameson, who in his White House interviews appar­ently argued for bold new initiatives in space, Fletcher was known from his years on PSAC to be somewhat skeptical of the value of human space flight. Fletcher was aware of the proposal to develop a space shuttle; as a member of the PSAC, he had been exposed to the thinking of the committee’s panel on space science and technology about the need for low-cost space trans­portation and was aware of the content of the Space Task Group report. During PSAC deliberations, Fletcher had asked “why is it necessary to have a manned system to get [a payload] to and from space?” Before Fletcher was nominated, several members of Congress supportive of human space flight sent a telegram to the White House opposing Fletcher’s selection as NASA head, saying he was “a negative person on [manned] space,” but their objec­tions did not prevail.6

After his nomination was announced, Fletcher was quickly invited to attend, two days later on March 1, a large White House dinner in honor of the Apollo 14 astronaut crew—Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, and Stuart Roosa—whose mission had taken place from January 31 to February 9. NASA’s Willis Shapley remembered that as he went through the receiving line before the dinner, he noticed a person “sitting by himself with his little pad of pink papers.” Someone told Shapley that the person was Fletcher, his new boss. Shapley went to say hello, and later commented “that was Fletcher to a tee. He was always trying to find out who the key people were, keep his notes as to who was worthy of note. . . He was using his chance at this White House thing just to get a look at the people that were going to be significant to him in the future.”7

The next day, Fletcher and Low spent several hours together discussing the state of NASA. Low’s “first impression” was that Fletcher was “excel­lent” and “that he will be very good for NASA.” In several subsequent meet­ings during March and April, Low and Fletcher discussed the major issues facing NASA and plotted the approach they would take to managing the agency. They “spent considerable time discussing the space shuttle.” Fletcher indicated that he understood “that the space shuttle decisions this summer will be some of the most important decisions that he will make early in his career at NASA.” According to Low, Fletcher came into NASA “negative on manned space flight. He was selected. . . by the people close to Nixon for being the kind of person who would support an unmanned space pro­gram. . . He came in probably not to support” the space shuttle, but he “very quickly turned himself around.” Fletcher admitted that he “changed from the time I was on PSAC to the time I came to NASA,” recognizing that “neither the president nor I wanted to go ahead with a program that didn’t really have a manned element to it.” Before he decided to support the shuttle, Fletcher pushed hard on Low, Dale Myers, and Myers’s deputy Charles Donlan, who was overseeing shuttle studies, to convince himself that a shuttle, rather than some other human space flight system like a recoverable capsule, was the best option for NASA to advocate.8

Low early on also shared with Fletcher his growing concern that NASA should not take on the task of developing a two-stage fully reusable shuttle “without having clear-cut support for a space agency budget in excess of $4 billion.” The two discussed “the possibilities of other shuttle concepts and of phasing the orbiter and booster separately.” They also discussed whether there really was a need for more Apollo flights; they agreed both to examine this question after the Apollo 15 flight, scheduled for July. Given the sensi­tivity within NASA of possibly not going forward with the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, they agreed to not to raise the question with anyone else in NASA.9

The Senate confirmed Fletcher as NASA administrator on March 11, but Fletcher did not plan to arrive at NASA until around May 1. Flanigan recommended that President Nixon personally swear in Fletcher, noting that there had been a “long hiatus” since Tom Paine had left the agency

and that “interest in NASA and Congressional support has been declin­ing.” This suggestion was accepted, and Fletcher came to the Oval Office on April 27, 1971, to be sworn in as NASA’s fourth administrator as his family looked on.10

Fletcher reported for duty at NASA on May 3. He made his first speech as NASA administrator on May 20; his venue was the annual meeting of the Aerospace Industries Association. The speech was attended by senior people from all parts of the space industry, anxious to hear what the new head of NASA had in mind. Fletcher noted that it was “not the time for me to attempt to make definitive policy statements.” He observed that NASA was “in a period of uncertainty” since its major programs for the 1970s were “still in the study stage.” Fletcher claimed that he had “been backing the shuttle concept for a number of years” and that he was prepared “to advocate it vigorously.” He added “if we are going to put most of our eggs in the shut­tle basket, it had better be the best basket the American. . . aerospace indus­try can devise.” Fletcher said “we will take as much time as we need right now to be sure we make the right decisions” regarding which shuttle design to develop, on what schedule; he added “let’s not go off half-cocked on the shuttle.” In a statement that likely was troubling to the companies working on shuttle study contracts, Fletcher indicated that “we are not committed at this time to a two-stage fully reusable concept for the shuttle.” Rather, NASA would “continue to consider the various possibilities as cold-blooded engineers.” He argued that “we are not trying to justify the shuttle as a money-making project, but as a new capability of great promise.”11

Fletcher’s speech was a mixture of the preexisting NASA arguments for the shuttle and his own ideas. In particular, the emphasis on the shuttle as offering important new capabilities, not primarily as a means of reducing the cost of space activities, was his. He had not been previously involved in the shuttle program, and thus was free to indicate that he was not committed to the shuttle design that had been central to NASA’s thinking in preced­ing months. Within the first few weeks of his time at NASA, Fletcher had become convinced that the shuttle was NASA’s most important program for the 1970s. Now it would be up to Fletcher and Low to convince the White House that the space shuttle deserved presidential support.