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would have been?

No. I did talk to the telephone company about it. They did some -- I don't know what the technical term is for it, sweeps or something -- to see if there was any evidence of it. On a couple of occasions they thought there was, and then on a couple of occasions they thought it was clean. But, it's a way of life you get used to very quickly, and it didn't bother me any. As I say, it bothered my wife, who thought that what she said to me on the phone ought to be just between the two of us, and the fact that somebody else might be listening annoyed her. That's all. It was just an invasion of privacy more than anything else.

I did tell people who called me from time to time, who got into areas I thought might be sensitive, to bear in mind that it was possible one or the other of us was being monitored. But, no big deal. I can't point to anything that came to anyone's attention. I did ask, on one occasion, to get my FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, to find out what they had. It was pretty pale stuff, but they did have a lot of calls that I had made to and from people. Not any evidence of what they had heard.

Dating back to the forties and fifties?

No, dating back pretty much to the Eisenhower period. A possible reason for that was I was in the stand-by cabinet in case of war. I had a portfolio of things I had to do, and I had a place down in West Virginia, underground. Occasionally, we would have staff meetings down there, and that was classified information in those days. So, it's possible that there was justification for watching, to see what I was up to. Whether or not that was done by the White House -- I don't know who caused it to be done, but Ike had a group of us he met