Look Ma, No Script: What That Says About Me (Re: President Bush's Open Mike)

It was just four minutes, after all, out of six years. Yes, the tape could conceivably fall into the bin of political history that includes the hours of recordings of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, which give deep looks into each man’s character and way of doing business. But it’s far more likely that it will fall into what can best be described as the blooper bin, which includes moments that draw a lot of attention in their day but give historians less to work with.

Nixon famously and reluctantly provided 3,700 hours of tape from his inner sanctum, along with tens of thousands of pages of transcripts of conversations, which combined to blow any vestige of a strait-laced facade off his White House — and hastened the march toward impeachment. After Nixon, though, presidents tended to keep the candor well guarded, and so to the blooper bin we go for insight.

Mr. Bush’s predecessor was ensnared a couple of times by open mikes he thought were closed. In his primary campaign, Bill Clinton sat in front of a live television camera he thought was dead and seethed over the erroneous news that Jesse Jackson had endorsed Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa instead of him. Through gritted teeth Mr. Clinton said, “It’s an outrage, it’s a dirty, double-crossing, back-stabbing thing to do.”

It was a flash of Mr. Clinton’s dark temper, but not seared into the collective memory the way, say, a blue dress was.

Perhaps the most famous clip in the blooper bin features Ronald Reagan, who during a microphone check before a radio address joked: “My fellow Americans. I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.’’ Europe was not amused; but the incident highlighted two things about Reagan at once: his distaste for the Soviets, and his brand of humor.

Yet how can any of these snippets compare with the hours of recordings of Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson?

Kennedy, in an unintended recording, is revealed to be disappointed with the recruits to the Foreign Service because they were softies ill-suited to face dictators; men who “don’t seem to have cojones,” unlike, he said, Defense Department officials. “That’s all they’ve got,” he said of the latter, and added, “They haven’t any brains.” It showed Mr. Kennedy to be less decorous or politic than had been assumed.

In the tapes from the Nixon administration, said the historian Robert Dallek, “What you see is how scathing and angry they are, how frustrated they are over their inability to dominate and control and make these other leaders or politicians or public officials bend to their will.” Nixon, Mr. Dallek added, “was paranoid as all get out; anti-Semitic — they would talk about African diplomats and call them cannibals.”