Although Richard Nixon is surely the most notorious president to install a secret taping system in the Oval Office, he was hardly the first: such tapings began with Franklin Roosevelt. The University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs has begun transcribing these recordings, allowing scholars like Rosenberg (author of the forthcoming "How Far the Promised Land?") and Karabell (The Last Campaign) to use the tapes to illuminate pivotal moments in American history. Here they examine a two-year period in the civil rights movement, from the 1962 violence surrounding James Meredith's attempt to enroll at the University of Mississippi through LBJ's success at pushing through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The authors have neatly organized the transcripts into discrete historical moments (bombing in Birmingham, the March on Washington and so on), and they provide commentary and historical context throughout, which is necessary since many of the conversations are difficult to follow, either because too many people are talking at once or because the transcriber could not decipher certain words or phrases. While there are conversations with Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, black leaders such as Roy Wilkins and many others, there are no revelations, and the tapes are limited in that they offer only the "top-down" perspective on any issue, a point the authors are careful to make in their last chapter. The presidential recordings project is a worthy enterprise, but these texts will likely be of interest primarily to scholars and students of American government and civil rights already familiar with the main events. (Sept.)
