ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Saturday, March 15, 1997               TAG: 9703170062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL   PAGE: A-2  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST

IKE SECRETLY RECORDED MEETINGSOLD AND CREASED, PRESIDENT EISENHOWER'S DICTABELTS OF MEETINGS WENT UNNOTICED FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS.

President Dwight Eisenhower used a secretly installed dictabelt machine to record his Oval Office conversations and, on one recording made public Friday, described one of his predecessors as somewhat of an ``egomaniac.''

The discussion, held Jan. 7, 1955, with then-Sen. Walter George, D-Ga., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was arranged by Eisenhower to talk about congressional efforts to curb his treaty-making powers with a cumbersome constitutional amendment.

Evidently recorded without George's knowledge, the conversation is sometimes difficult to make out, but Eisenhower can be heard clearly in tracing the sour mood about presidential authority to Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Eisenhower described as ``almost an egomaniac in his beliefs.''

Old and creased, the dictabelts of that and a few other meetings of his presidency went unnoticed at the Eisenhower library in Abilene, Kan., for more than 40 years, flattened out and stuffed into letter-sized envelopes with dates and other notations scribbled by Eisenhower or his secretary, the late Ann Whitman.

Archivists assumed the belts contained dictations by Eisenhower. ``We thought they were damaged and unplayable,'' library director Dan Holt said. But last summer, a New York researcher, William S. Doyle, asked to listen to them.

Friday, with the help of the Dictaphone Corp. and other experts, the first conversation to be recovered, the meeting between Eisenhower and George, was released here and in Abilene. National Archives officials said the recordings of four other meetings of that era, all that have been found, will be made public shortly on modern-day cassettes.

It isn't clear why Eisenhower recorded the people he did. George was an ally in Eisenhower's resistance to the so-called Bricker amendment, sponsored by Sen. John Bricker, R-Ohio, to preclude treaties from overturning domestic laws. Eisenhower blamed much of the furor on the agreements Roosevelt made in 1945 at Yalta, where he was accused of ``selling out'' Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.

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