Word: phoning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...satiric essay called "Igor Stravinsky: The Selected Phone Calls," the humorist Ian Frazier pretends to rummage through old telephone bills for clues to the composer's life. For serious historians, the situation seems less funny. "I know more about the Kennedy assassination than anyone," says William Manchester, author of The Death of a President, "but I know more about the Dardanelles in 1915 than I do about the assassination. In 1915, people put everything on paper. Now, it's all done over the telephone." Notes Historian Barbara Tuchman: "Phone bills won't tell you much, and as a result, contemporary...
...patron Alvin Wirtz and others, you could trace the most intricate deals and such matters as his stormy relationship with Sam Rayburn," says Caro. "Then, at a crucial moment, just when you want to know what someone is thinking, you'll run into a telegram or note saying 'Phone me tonight.' That's when you feel the impact of the telephone right in your gut." In researching L.B.J.'s role in the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill, Caro says he has been reduced to deciphering scrawls at the bottom of telephone-message slips...
Back when the telephone was a relatively new contraption, people often regarded it as too ephemeral for important communications. Averell Harriman and Robert Lovett, two great statesmen who had been Wall Street partners, talked on the phone regularly when they were apart and then would exchange letters the same afternoon, putting to paper what they had said. "As I told you over the telephone this morning . . . " they would typically begin. Back then, of course, the post was more efficient: the letter would usually arrive before the next morning's phone conversation...
...result, taping phone conversations came to be regarded as terribly sleazy. At least a dozen states have laws against such secret self-taps, as U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick was reminded when he tried to resurrect the practice...
...solution would be to make it once again respectable -- perhaps even mandatory -- to tape important discussions and phone conversations for the historical record. The tapes would become the property of the National Archives and could be tightly sealed from all scrutiny for at least two decades, the way that sensitive diplomatic cables were generally treated before the Freedom of Information Act came along. But aside from the legal and practical questions involved, such an idea would face philosophic objections: it could be seen as both an unwarranted invasion of privacy and a dangerous attempt to preserve the privacy of important...