President Ike Liked a Mike

But only now and then

In the transcript of a conversation in the Oval Office, Richard Nixon comes off as alternately aggressive and defensive, attacking the Democrats and then justifying his own campaign tactics. Just another snippet of dialogue from the White House tapes that unwound Nixon's presidency? No, the conversation was taped on June 29, 1954, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who told then Vice President Nixon that his ''castigation'' of the Democrats was damaging the Administration's efforts to achieve a bipartisan foreign policy.

According to a 45-page sheaf of transcripts uncovered last month at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kans., by Rice University Historian Francis Loew-enheim, Ike taped 27 conversations between 1953 and 1958. His conversational partners were legislators, journalists, aides, businessmen and heads of state, including Ethiopia's Haile Selassie and Greece's Queen Frederika. The recording machine itself, which resembled a supply cabinet, was installed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the nearby office of Eisenhower's personal secretary, Ann Whitman. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and some other officials knew of its existence, but most who were recorded apparently did not. Unlike Nixon's sophisticated system, the Eisenhower machine was not voice activated, but controlled by a switch at Ike's desk.

Though the transcripts usually offer summaries and not verbatim reports of Ike's conversations (the whereabouts of the actual tapes today are unknown), they do shed fascinating light on his opinions of Nixon and the game of politics. Eisenhower pointedly omitted Nixon's name when discussing those he considered good future Republican presidential material. And in a late 1954 conversation with U.P.I. White House Correspondent Merriman Smith, Ike complained that the worst part of his job was ''accommodating yourself to values and considerations that fundamentally you can't fully accept.''

Why Ike requested such a machine and then used it so sporadically is unclear. He did like to keep written synopses of most Oval Office meetings; but he almost always either had an assistant take notes or dictated his recollections afterward. Whitman, who transcribed many of the tapes, points to the machine's deficiencies. After typing the first summary in 1953, she typed at the bottom that ''large portions of the tape were completely garbled.'' Five years later, when Queen Frederika visited the Oval Office, the recorder was still not cooperating: the transcript simply notes that Her Highness's remarks were ''inaudible.''

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