Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has had his first phone call with US President Donald Trump since Trump returned to office in January. Perhaps trying to avoid the drip feed of details that surrounded his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull’s famously rough chat back in February 2017, Albanese called the call “great” in a press conference this morning. He further claimed that an exemption from Trump’s threatened tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium is now “under consideration”.
One day we will likely know for sure just how “great” the chat was. Going back to Franklin Roosevelt, nearly every US president has secretly recorded great swathes of their daily conversations. Here are some of the gems that process unearthed.
Lyndon Johnson
LBJ was many things — a crucial figure in America’s civil rights struggle of the 1960s, responsible for setting the stage for the horrors perpetrated by the US in Vietnam, a man of quite profound personal corruption, and, of course, an object of noteworthy fawning by Australian leadership. Most importantly for our purposes though, he was the most naturally comic figure of any modern president pre-Trump. And we have hundreds of hours of secretly recorded phone calls to prove it.
In late 1964, Johnson called Dallas clothing company Haggar to order six “real lightweight” slacks for summer wear. First noting that he needs pockets an inch longer, because when he sits in his current pair, “my money and knife and everything fall out”, he soon got to the real, uh, crux of the matter — that the last pair did not accommodate his (apparently substantial) wang:
“Yeah. Now, another thing: the crotch, down where your nuts hang, is always a little too tight. So when you make them up, give me a[n] inch that I can let out there, because they cut me. They’re just like riding a wire fence.”
Adding to the John Belushi vibe, the transcript captures Johnson’s uninhibited bodily functions during the conversation.
“You never do have much margin there, but see if you can’t leave me about an inch from where the zipper
[belches] ends around under my — back to my bunghole.”
Another highlight — very soon after taking office, Johnson was recorded trying to coerce a hairdresser into a discounted haircut (“I want you to see what you can do for your country”) claiming that he was a “poor man”. ” He insisted “don’t believe what you read in the newspapers that I get a lot of money”.
Richard Nixon
Under the famously paranoid Nixon, White House surveillance went right up a notch. Nixon put in place a voice-activated recording system, planting the seeds whose flowering would be his downfall. Sadly, there are far fewer yuks available from the Nixon tapes — just antisemitic theorising about his enemies in the “Jewish dominated” press and directions to raid think tanks.
Ronald Reagan
Reagan, like Carter before him, apparently did not record much of his time in office (as Gore Vidal put it, the former movie star would never sully his record by appearing in a radio play). So most of the revelations of his time in office — say, ongoing concerns about his possibly diminished capacity — played out relatively publicly at the time.
So wouldn’t you know it, Reagan’s most damaging revelation comes from Nixon’s time in office. In 1971, Reagan, then California governor, called Nixon to talk about a recent vote that the US had lost at the United Nations regarding recognition of the People’s Republic of China, partly thanks to the votes of various African delegations:
REAGAN: Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did…
NIXON: Yeah.
REAGAN: … To see those monkeys from those African countries. Damn them. They’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes.
Nixon laughs.
Donald Trump
After the Bush and Obama administrations focused more on recording other people’s phone calls than their own, Trump’s first period in office offered a smorgasbord of leaked phone calls. There was, notoriously, the phone call with our then PM Turnbull, which featured the sickening observation (offered approvingly) that Australia was “worse than I am” when it comes to the treatment of asylum seekers.
Then there was what we thought would be the smoking gun of Trump’s time in office, when he spoke to Ukrainian leader Voldomyr Zelenskyy and pressured him to investigate his political opponent Joe Biden’s son in exchange for US aid. Trump was impeached (for the first time), cleared by the Senate when no Republican senators voted to remove him, and the episode probably only just scrapes into the top five scandals from his first term.
Actually, our favourite Trump phone call moment wasn’t made public by a leak, but was part of an openly shared attempt at humanising the president. During the cutesy annual North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tracks Santa tradition (which dates from a 1955 call an anxious child made to NORAD command trying to get in contact with Santa), Trump spoke to a 7-year-old from South Carolina, and asked: “Are you still a believer in Santa?”
He listened for a beat before adding, with comic timing that cannot be taught, “Because at seven, it’s marginal, right?”
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
