Tupac Shakur, murdered in Las Vegas in September of last year, stars in the hit movie ““Gang Related’’ and its soundtrack album. Transcripts from once secret tapes of Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are all now filling the bookstores. The Library of Congress this month released the diaries of the late Clare Boothe Luce, in which the matriarch of American conservatism describes her experiments with LSD. Richard Nixon, speaking in newly transcribed recordings, has never been more over the top (page 52). And TV executive Brandon Tartikoff settles some scores from beyond the grave in the November issue of Esquire. When the dying is this high profile, who needs living?
For journalists and historians, all this necrolatry raises prickly ethical questions. What courtesies and privacies do we owe the dead? Bob Woodward of The Washington Post (NEWSWEEK’S sister publication) vows to reveal the identity of Deep Throat as soon as the source dies; some protections do not extend into the next world. But for the dead themselves, the afterlife offers a nifty spotlight. They were once left to the catty or adulatory words of their survivors; now they have their own say. As Johnson tells his aides on the verge of deciding not to seek re-election in 1964, ““They think I want great power. And what I want is great solace–and a little love.''
The dead are often more interesting, less guarded, than they were when alive. Tartikoff, formidably clawed in private, usually pulled his punches for the record. In death, he can say of NBC head Warren Littlefield, ““He’s a cockroach’’–an uncharacteristic show of on-the-record frankness, but editor David Granger and writer Nikki Finke aver that the proof is all in her tapes and notes. Yet the real revelations are in the presidential books. Michael Beschloss’s ““Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964’’ (the first of three labor-intensive volumes) probably pays LBJ more mind than anyone did during his lifetime, and draws a fascinating portrait of a master politicker negotiating some of the major upheavals of our time. The tapes are addictively inside. ““The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis,’’ edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, walks readers minute by minute through intimate meetings that brought the nation close to nuclear war. ““These books come from a time that was richer and more consequential,’’ says Beschloss, to explain their appeal now. ““Johnson’s decisions really meant life or death for a lot of people: whether he got civil rights for people, whether he took us into the calamity of Vietnam. Compare that to the mid-1990s, when presidents work by focus groups wired to monitors.''
Both presidents used hidden microphones and taped in secret. Johnson stipulated that his tapes be suppressed until 50 years after his death, and some forever. ““There’s an ethical problem with making the recordings in the first place,’’ admits May. ““As a historian, you weigh that against the public’s need to know.’’ Beschloss argues that once the Johnson Library began releasing the recordings, his only duty was to tell the story. ““We historians all use FBI files that include transcripts of wiretaps. It’s a horrible thing that this material is derived that way, but it tells us a lot about history. So we use it with mixed emotions.''
After Nixon, presidents saw the wisdom in not bugging their own offices, and Congress changed the law so that any such tapes would belong to the government and not the president. We won’t likely have such naked views of later administrations. But the celebrity culture that has replaced our relationship with such momentous men exists primarily on film, disk or tape; flesh and blood, living or dead, is a secondary phenomenon. So these dead keep keeping on. You can pop a newly minted Jimi Hendrix CD in your dash, go see a dead actor’s best performance, catch a dead princess’s confessions on the news and nod off with the hallucinations of a dead right-wing acid dabbler. Soon there will be another new CD by the murdered rapper Notorious B.I.G.; videos too. Death: it’s the new lifestyle option. As the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote, ““I shall have more to say when I am dead.’’ We can only hope someone gets it on tape.
LBJ: “I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less.”
Brandon Tartikoff: “You have to understand something about (NBC head Warren Littlefield). He’s a cockroach. He’s going to survive nuclear war.”
John F. Kennedy: “Let’s say we go into Cuba and (Castro retaliates with nukes). . .What is it that we ought to do for the population in the affected areas, in case the bombs go off?”
