Where Kennedy never forgot that he was being recorded, Nixon seems never to have remembered. He is being immortalized. Despite intermittent political skills, Nixon seems, on the evidence of the tapes, to have had no conscious mind. He is all flowing unconscious. Remembered slights, grudges, conspiracies. "We are surrounded by enemies," he declared after his re-election by one of the greatest majorities in history. Two years into his first term Nixon joined the taping club. Along with the normal presidential desire to get something on others before they get it on him, Nixon had Kissinger. Nixon knew, everyone knew, that Kissinger would say one thing to the President and then just the opposite to journalists in order to build himself up in the eyes of the public. All in all, it would have been cheaper--and less bloody--for Nixon to have got a new foreign policy adviser, but, as Dick liked to say, jowls aquiver, that would be the easy way. Along with tracking enemies, Nixon used the tapes simply to rant against the Ivy League, Georgetown set as well as Jews, the Pentagon, the CIA. Regularly, he ordered crimes to be committed that his staff promptly forgot about. Doyle quotes Bob Haldeman as observing, "Nixon was the weirdest man ever to live in the White House." The great Gen. Alexander Haig said, "My God, if I had done everything Richard Nixon told me to do, I'd probably be in Leavenworth today!" In any case, at the end, Nixon's own talk did him in. He obstructed justice, suborned witnesses and, most horrifying, talked dirty and even blasphemed in the Oval Office, the pure heart of our empire. So--California, here I come.

Doyle accepts the generous view that Nixon was a master of foreign affairs who brought to an end the Vietnam War. That is one way of looking at it. But the war that he pretended to have a plan to end in 1968 kept right on going through 1972 and almost up to his own political end. The trip to China was made because no other President could ever have done so--thanks to Nixon, who would have been busy intoning, "I am not saying that President Johnson is a Communist. No. But I am questioning his judgment on Communism." He played that broken record for an entire career and did more damage to the country than a single photo-op with Mao could ever undo. Nixon's appointed Vice President, Gerald Ford, vowed that he would not record. Doyle has found an authorized telephone tape between Ford and Kissinger. They appear to think the world of each other. Doyle also pads things out with the minutes of the tense national security meetings over the seizure of an American merchant ship by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Communists. Thus Gerald Ford underwent his baptism of fire as, yet again, the resolve and will and credibility of the United States, the earth's only good nation, was being tested by crafty Asian Communists. One senses the tension in those meetings. Also the playacting. Even Doyle recognizes that the "participants seem to be as concerned with bellicose posturing and inflicting punitive damage on Cambodia as much as with the actual rescue. Kissinger advised: 'Let's look ferocious.'" The United States has now entered its Cowardly Lion phase. The appointed Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, has a presentiment of what is to come when he warns: "Many are watching us, in Korea and elsewhere. The big question is whether or not we look silly."

Carter did not record. He was also ill suited for the presidency because his virtues--an engineer's convergent mind--were of no use in a job that requires almost surreal divergency. Engineers want to connect everything up and make sense. Politicians--and artists--realize that nothing really makes sense and nothing ever hooks up. As Carter's Vice President, Walter Mondale, sadly noted, "Carter thought politics was sinful." Happily, he was born to be a former President, a phantom office that he has since enhanced. Two years after Ronald Reagan replaced Carter, he too was faced with a crisis. The free world was at risk, yet again, thanks to ruthless Commies at work on the small island of Grenada, where 1,000 Americans, many of them medical students, might possibly be at risk from a Mr. Bishop, the local point man for the evil men in the Kremlin. Well, Ron stood tall; he hit his mark. An actor's got to do what an actor's got to do--so we invaded, 'cause if we hadn't we'd reveal to the world "that when the chips were down, we backed away." This is a great scenario only slightly spoiled by mean old General Haig, who observed that "the Provincetown police force could have conquered Grenada."

I feel that Doyle is somewhat dazzled by the Great Communicator, who slept more on the job than any other President since his idol Calvin Coolidge, who wisely stayed in bed every chance he got. Reagan did attend to his occasional acting chores but, as in his movie career, he almost never had a good script. Sample: Reagan is being videotaped as he tries to sell some senators on his pro-contra line: "I think what is at issue today is whether we're voting for or against a plan, we're really voting are we going to have another Cuba, a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian country as we have now in Nicaragua, on the mainland of the Americas, or are we going to hold out for people who want democracy." Well, it probably played better than it reads. It was Reagan's astonishing luck to have, in Gorbachev, a Soviet leader who was willing to switch off the cold war (and the Soviet Union in the process, presumably by accident), and a wife, Nancy, who finally took US policy in hand and made peace with the Russians while not missing a single lunch with Betsy Bloomingdale. Tapes of their telephone conversations would indeed be the stuff of history.

On to Bush. We are faced by even more Enemy of the Month Club choices now that the Soviet Union is flying apart. Qaddafi, Noriega (invasion of Panama, hooray!), Saddam Hussein (light show over Baghdad!). Next--Clinton. Bit soon for a useful summing up. Doyle does think that the White House should be wired for the record, but with the tapes sealed for twenty years unless otherwise needed. He seems aware of the dangers of absolute surveillance over everyone, today's trend. He quotes Frank Church's warning of a quarter-century ago. The Senator realized how, with modern technology, we now have the capacity "to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we can never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Doyle seems to think that there is nothing wrong with the American political system that a few honest guys and gals in high office couldn't cure. But to obtain high office those guys and gals have to raise millions and millions of dollars first and this can only be done dishonestly, even by our Rube Goldberg rules, the ever-shifting campaign financing laws. As for intellectual honesty, the consumer society in which we glory is based on advertising which is at best hype and at worst plain lying. Thus even the most virtuous candidate is sold, with a merry spin. It has been a long time since any public figure has openly said anything useful, much less true, even in the relative privacy of the Oval Office. Up to a point, this is the nature of our society and kind of fun. When the wise Frank Church heard the virtuous Jimmy Carter promise the American people that he would never lie to them if elected President, Church said, with morose delight, "He would deny the very nature of politics." But when, as must happen, all sense of social reality is lost, the rulers and the ruled then plunge into the churchly abyss where nothing at all is ever real again and even the ghost of the Republic is gone while the first, and probably last, global nuclear empire reels from crisis to crisis, involving ever weaker enemies, led by ever more off-the-wall rulers.

The overall impression that Inside the Oval Office gives is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is now in serious play: Everything is running down. From our Augustus, FDR, who never worried about his place in history because he knew that he was supremely history, to the present day one notes the increasing second-rateness of our Oval Ones. I suggest that this has nothing to do so much with the caliber of the individuals as it does with an overextended military industrial political complex that wrings tax money from Congress to fight drugs, terrorism and bad guys who use eyeliner like Qaddafi. Money for "defense" (sic) should be spent repairing our rotted home base. But it won't be. Meanwhile, the Ovoids do their best to please the corporations that house them so nicely. They also talk, as politicians always have, in code. FDR was accused of making different agreements with different people. Wearily, Eleanor Roosevelt, if she remembered, would warn those about to approach FDR in his office: "Remember that when Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn't agreeing with you. He's just listening to you." So when polls show that the American people over a weekend rate highly this or that President, they are really only saying yes, yes, yes because there's not much point in saying no, no, no until we can find a new way of selecting what, after all, are essentially powerless figureheads--except in wartime, which is why... You complete the sentence. I feel their pain.

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