American Notes THE WHITE HOUSE

The tapes that prompted Richard Nixon's Watergate resignation in 1974 might never have existed had he not been such a klutz with gadgets. Nixon was reluctant to have his conversations recorded, writes former Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman in Prologue, a National Archives publication. But if there had to be a taping system, the President said, he wanted something simple -- like Lyndon Johnson's manually operated setup.

Haldeman was worried that his chief would forget to turn the gizmo on when he wanted it, or -- worse -- to turn it off when he didn't. Haldeman also fretted "that this President was far too inept with machinery ever to make a success of a switch system." The result: voice-activated tape recorders were installed in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, and at Camp David. Writes Haldeman: "I think Nixon lost his awareness of the system even more quickly than I did." The machines, of course, forgot nothing.