Taping the President

Richard Nixon secretly taped his Oval Office conversations. Lyndon Johnson did it, too. The George W. Bush tapes, made when he was governor of Texas, were something else. He didn’t record them, he didn’t know he was being taped and rather than showing skulduggery or hubris, they suggested a president more aware politically than sometimes thought.

The taper was Doug Wead, a one-time liaison for the president’s father to Christian evangelical groups. A brief statement by a White House spokesman reflected Mr. Bush’s resentment at the intrusion: “The governor was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend.” Secret tape recording, even though legal in some states, is a nasty business. And one can doubt Mr. Wead’s assertion to The New York Times that he recorded his conversations with Mr. Bush for historical rather than profit-making reasons. Mr. Wead has a book coming out about U.S. presidents. His disclosure of the tapes led to a Page One story in The Times.

Still, the portions of the tapes that he played for the paper contain some interesting tidbits, such as remarks about some of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. He took offense at former Vice President Dan Quayle’s reported remark that he was proud of his own behavior as a young man and retorted, “As if I’m not!” He dismissed Steve Forbes as “too preppy” and threatened “consequences” if Mr. Forbes went after him the way he had campaigned against Bob Dole in the 1996 primary. He wrote off Sen. John McCain, saying he would “wear very thin.” But he praised then-Sen. John Ashcroft, whom Mr. Bush later named as U.S. attorney general, as a good choice for the Supreme Court and a good prospect for vice president.

More important, the tapes showed how Mr. Bush planned to cater to conservative Christian groups in his presidential campaign, while keeping those contacts mostly private to avoid offense to secular groups. But he kept saying he would resist any efforts by conservatives to persuade him to criticize gays. As he put it, “I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?” While saying that it was “bad for Republicans to be kicking gays,” he said even in 1998 that he opposed same-sex marriage. It did not become a national issue until five years later.

The Bush tapes thus provide some insights into the thinking of Mr. Bush as he served as governor of Texas and prepared for his first presidential campaign. He resents their disclosure, but on balance they probably do him little harm. As for the American public, even though secret taping is a despicable practice, there is some advantage in learning a president’s private thoughts.