INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

What an astonishing discovery! Rumors had long circulated about a recording device in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. But these rumors were denied for years by archivists who had custody of the Roosevelt papers. This denial was understandable. Shortly after Roosevelt’s death, his stenographer Jack Romagna confidentially informed National Archives officials of the existence of such recordings, and arrangements were made to send them to the FDR Library at Hyde Park. This was done in December, 1947. The overworked archivists at Hyde Park quickly established that the recordings were of certain press conferences in 1940, apparently made as an experiment but of such poor quality as to be practically indecipherable. But they contained other material that the archivists were never able to puzzle out. Regarding the matter as an experiment that had not worked, the library staff accessioned the recordings and duly opened them to researchers, but the recordings were little remarked among the mass of other audiovisual materials at Hyde Park until Professor R.J. C. Butow came on them in 1978.

Professor Butow is altogether too modest about the size of the task he set himself three years ago, as we here at AMERICAN HERITAGE learned when he allowed us to listen to his copies of the tapes. The recordings are difficult to understand at first: Roosevelt’s voice is usually fairly distinct but those of his visitors are murky at best; whole passages are indistinct or broken into fragments that are actually painful to the ear. To see if more might be retrieved from them, we turned to Professor Mark Weiss of Queens College, a pioneer in the technology of enhancing recorded speech who served on Judge John J. Sirica’s panel of technical experts during the Watergate grand jury investigation. With the kind help of Dr. William R. Emerson, the director of the FDR Library, and of Raymond Teichman, the curator of its audio-visual archive, Professor Weiss was permitted to re-record all of Roosevelt’s private conversations from the discs; he then processed them through a machine of his own devising to eliminate distracting sounds. The results were dramatic: gone is the incessant crackling; adjustments in the speed at which the re-recording was done have rendered Roosevelt’s words more distinct and made his voice seem much more familiar. Listening to them confirmed for us the almost uncanny accuracy of Professor Butow’s ear and also allowed us to decipher other conversations that time had not permitted him to attempt. On the following pages the transcripts for which Professor Butow was responsible bear his initials; those we made bear our own.

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