More Tapes
Holland and Stern further posit that perhaps the Miller Center might want to produce multiple volumes of each transcript--one that fulfills their criteria, another that employs a more subjective middle ground to transcribing. Left unspoken is why the Miller Center or anyone else would devote the time or resources to producing duplicate volumes; or who would publish a volume most of whose words would be written in phonetic rather than standard English and whose audience would consist of a handful of English, Speech, or perhaps Sociology professors.
What disturbed me the most, however, about the Stern/Holland article was its tone. It insinuates that gross unreliability exists in the Miller Center volumes by comparing them with volumes prepared in haste by single historians (Beschloss, Kutler) who used very different procedures. The article never produces the goods to substantiate such an insinuation, however; it simply leaves the charge hanging for intelligent readers to draw on their own.
The Stern/Holland responses to me continue this pattern:"Let’s suppose," Holland muses,"Richard Nixon answered John Dean by saying 'no' seven times . . . No one would argue though, that if the author/editor rendered a 'yes' in place of seven 'nos,' or had John Dean saying 'no' instead of Nixon, that this was an acceptable transcript. And that was our point."
An ill-informed reader might suppose the Miller Center had committed such a mistake, perhaps by producing a volume in which President Kennedy, having responded by saying"no" seven times to Curtis LeMay as to whether the United States should attack Cuba, is transcribed as actually having said"yes." Instead, in another response to me, the duo provides an example of they consider a 'gotcha' mistake, which Stern terms a"butchered transcription":
Miller Center/Norton edition, Vol. 3, p. 252:I haven't listened to this particular Kennedy tape, so I don't know whether the Stern or Miller Center version is correct. But I'd hazard a guess that few historians would consider a transcript stating"[unclear mentions of 'nitric acid']" rather than"fuming nitric acid" is in any way comparable to a transcript that lists a President saying"yes" even though he actually had seven times said no.Unidentified: Have you ever seen missile fuel?
McNamara: No. [unclear mentions of 'nitric acid']
Stern's version:
George Ball: Kerosene missile fuel?
McNamara: No, fuming nitric acid.
It's clear that Holland and Stern feel a strong personal distaste toward the Miller Center, perhaps explaining their tendency to engage in hyperbolic examples. (As Cliopatria readers know, I've been accused of this problem once or twice . . . ) I doubt that there is anything that the Miller Center, or anyone else, could do to remove Stern and Holland from the ranks of the Center's (to borrow another of my favorite LBJ phrases)" carping critics."