Kennedy on Tape

Extract

Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, six presidents secretly taped White House meetings. John F. Kennedy was one of three who did so extensively. That began in July 1962 and continued until Kennedy’s death. Unlike Nixon, who used a voice-activated system, Kennedy flipped a concealed switch in the Oval Office and the cabinet room. He also recorded telephone conversations in the Oval Office and possibly in his bedroom. Only a few White House personnel knew this, including Evelyn Lincoln, his personal secretary, and probably his brother Robert Kennedy and close aides Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers. Why Kennedy decided to tape select meetings and conversations remains somewhat of a puzzle to the general editors of the presidential recordings project. The most likely explanation, they surmise, is that Kennedy could employ that invaluable source in his memoirs. A keen student of history, Kennedy kept Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., around partly to assist in that endeavor. Timothy Naftali, the editor of the first volume, adds that Kennedy’s sense of history caused him to believe that in the summer of 1962, Berlin was pushing the United States and the Soviet Union closer to a war neither country really wanted. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which revealed how Europe had stumbled into the abyss in 1914, had a profound impact on Kennedy. This gave him an even greater urgency to chronicle the events of his time.