The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [84]
Two years after his 1968 election as president, Richard M. Nixon had a secret recording system installed in his office in the White House. Only a couple of his staff knew about it, and based on the recordings, he himself was rarely inhibited by the presence of the hidden microphones. After serving for four years, Nixon ran for reelection against a Democratic candidate who hopelessly trailed in the polls from the very beginning. Partly because of the paranoia that ran rampant in the Nixon administration, some of his high-level aides approved a number of illegal activities to help ensure Nixon’s reelection. One scheme was a late-night break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. The burglars, some of whom worked in the White House, installed listening devices on the phones of the election strategists. Because of the vigilance of a single night watchman, the burglars were caught by the local police as they left the building.
Because the burglary was so peculiar, very few people could imagine that it had been initiated by responsible people in the White House. In the first months after the break-in, few took it seriously and its occurrence had no discernible impact on the election four months later. However, two young reporters from the Washington Post newspaper, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly pursued the story until Nixon’s closest aides began to be implicated. The Watergate scandal made headlines from early 1973 until Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.
The turning point in the investigation occurred when it was revealed by a midlevel White House staffer, Alexander Butterfield, that the White House taping system always recorded conversations when Nixon was present. In the subsequent months as their legal problems mounted, the White House released several of the transcribed recordings to the public. When the final one (also known as the “smoking gun” tape) was made public in the summer of 1974, Nixon was forced to resign.
The most pertinent tapes involved Nixon’s conversations with his lawyer John Dean, his chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman, and his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. The recordings, which were published in the spring of 1974, have been a treasure trove for historians and for language analysis researchers like me. Of the initial transcripts, we were able to analyze fifteen conversations where Nixon had one-on-one conversations with Dean, Ehrlichman, or Haldeman. For each conversation, we compared Nixon’s words with those of his aides.
Consistent with the lab studies, the high-status Nixon used far fewer I-words than his aides. Overall, 3.9 percent of Nixon’s words were first-person singular pronouns, compared to his aides’ 5.4 percent. Nixon also used more we-words (1.4 percent versus 0.8 percent) and you-words (3.4 percent versus 1.8 percent) than his aides.
Closer inspection of the transcripts suggested that Nixon had very different relationships with the three men. In their conversations, Nixon’s use of the first-person singular was significantly lower when talking to Dean and Ehrlichman than in his interactions with Haldeman. These pronoun patterns suggested that Nixon distanced himself much more from Dean and Ehrlichman, but that Nixon and Haldeman spoke to each other as equals. This is a great hypothesis, but is it true?
Of the four men, only John Dean was still alive when we began analyzing the Watergate transcripts in the early 2000s. He consented to an e-mail interview with me about Nixon’s relationships with the three aides. Haldeman and Nixon had known each other since the early 1950s and, in Dean’s words, were peers in running the White House. “They were not friends however. [Haldeman] once said that [Nixon] had no idea how many