The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

by Chris Whipple

Haldeman suggested installing a manual recorder, which the president could turn on and off, recording selectively. But Nixon was utterly incapable of operating even the simplest mechanical device. “He just lacked natural grace,” recalls Higby, laughing at the memory of “this tremendously clumsy guy. We tried over and over again. He would erase half the memo that he just dictated and then get all frustrated. So we finally had IBM make a special machine that only had ‘on’ and ‘off.’ And that was an utter failure once again. He’d forget to turn it on. He wouldn’t turn it on right.” As Higby recalls: “So eventually Haldeman said, ‘Well, the only other thing you can do is do a voice-activated system.’ And that is when we put in the system that later became the tapes.” The decision to automatically record every word spoken in the Oval Office meant that, when scandal struck, nothing would be off-limits to congressional investigators. As one Nixon staffer would later note ruefully, “For want of a toggle switch, the presidency was lost.”