That lumbering beast, the Washington scandal, is awake again and growling to be fed. Dinner--trembling and cowering and looking very tasty--is to be Charles Z. Wick, head of the United States Information Agency. Flogging the beast vigorously to keep it enraged and hungry is William Safire, conservative columnist for The New York Times.
Someone leaked Safire evidence that Wick had been tape-recording his phone calls. Confronted, Wick stupidly insisted that he had never recorded a conversation without telling the other pairty, then later admitted he sometimes had. Also stupidly, he said the taping had begun in 1983, though it went back to 1981. Newspapers have been ringing the changes on the "secret tapes" story for two weeks. A federal agency is investigating. Two Congressional committees plan hearings. One state is considering criminal charges. In a particularly ominous development, President Reagan has expressed his full support for Wick. All this is standard operating procedure. Meanwhile, Safire hints darkly of more revelations to come.
Wick was wrong to tape his phone calls, and wrong to lie. But the almighty fuss is way out of proportion, and its self-feeding momentum is downright frightening. Safire's motive in branding this vain and silly man as the Wicked Wick of the West is, at best, mysterious.
By all accounts, Wick is a jackass. One of Reagan's California socialite buddies, he's been a repeated embarrassment to his chum. He spent $32,000 on a security system for his rented house, believing himself Washington's second most likely target of a terrorist attack. In the so-called "kiddy- gate" episode, he gave jobs to children of Administration members and friends, including Alexander Haig, Caspar Weinberger, and William Clark. More recently, he blurted his view that British Prime Minister Thatcher only opposed the American invasion of Grenada because "she's a woman."
Employees and former employees describe Wick as a petty dictator in two senses: first, as a maniacal boss given to comic swaggering and lunatic rages; second, as a man with a dictaphone for a right arm, who likes to record his every passing thought and conversation and then have secretaries type up transcripts. His taping was not "secret" in the sense that he made any attempt to hide the practice. (It's wonderful how many people now recall having warned Wick that the taping was a bad idea.) There's no reason to doubt Wick's assertion that when he failed to alert people to the taping, it was an oversight.
There's a fundamental difference between taping your own conversation and bugging a conversation you're not a party to. The people talking to Wick knew he was listening and knew he could repeat what he heard. Nevertheless, surreptitious taping is a violation of confidence, though Safire's assertion that victims of secret tapes "are left with the feeling of the aborigine who fears that a picture taken of him steals his soul" is a bit theatrical. Richard Cohen of The Washington Post is closer to the mark when he argues that what taping steals from you is deniability. When it's on tape, "You can't lie."
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