OHN F KENNEDY - Chicago Tribune...JOHN F. KENNEDY THE GREAT CRISES, VOLUME ONE JULY 30–AUGUST 1962 Timothy Naftali Editor, Volume One George Eliades Francis Gavin Erin Mahan Jonathan

The

PRESIDENTIALRECORDINGS

JOHN F. KENNEDY�� THE GREAT CRISES, VOLUME ONE ��

JULY 30–AUGUST 1962

Timothy NaftaliEditor, Volume One

George Eliades

Francis Gavin

Erin Mahan

Jonathan Rosenberg

David Shreve

Associate Editors, Volume One

Patricia Dunn

Assistant Editor

Philip Zelikow and Ernest May

General Editors

B

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY • NEW YORK • LONDON

Copyright © 2001 by The Miller Center of Public Affairs

Portions of this three-volume set were previously published by Harvard University Press in TheKennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisisby Philip D. Zelikow and Ernest R. May.Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of AmericaFirst Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

The text of this book is composed in Bell, with the display set in Bell and Bell Semi-BoldComposition by Tom ErnstManufacturing by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing GroupBook design by Dana SloanProduction manager: Andrew Marasia

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

John F. Kennedy : the great crises.p. cm. (The presidential recordings)

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.Contents: v. 1. July 30–August 1962 / Timothy Naftali, editor—v. 2. September 4–October 20,1962 / Timothy Naftali and Philip Zelikow, editors—v. 3. October 22–28, 1962 / Philip Zelikowand Ernest May, editors.ISBN 0-393-04954-X

1. United States—Politics and government—1961–1963—Sources. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1961–1963—Sources. 3. Crisis management—United States—History—20th century—Sources. 4. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Archives. I. Naftali,Timothy J. II. Zelikow, Philip, 1954– III. May, Ernest R. IV. Series.

E841.J58 2001973.922—dc21 2001030053

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110www.wwnorton.com

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

MILLER CENTER OF PUBLIC AFFAIRSUNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

The Presidential Recordings Project

Philip ZelikowDirector of the Center

Timothy NaftaliDirector of the Project

Editorial Advisory BoardMichael Beschloss

Taylor BranchRobert Dallek

Walter IsaacsonAllen Matusow

Richard NeustadtArthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Robert Schulzinger

Contents

The Presidential Recordings ProjectPhilip Zelikow and Ernest May xi

Preface to John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises, Volumes 1–3Philip Zelikow and Ernest May xvii

Editors’ Acknowledgments xxv

Areas of Specialization for Research Scholars xxvii

A Note on Sources xxix

Meeting Participants and Other Frequently Mentioned Persons xxxi

Introduction: Five Hundred DaysTimothy Naftali xli

WEEKEND OF JULY 28–29, 1962 3

Prologue: Taping System Installed 3

MONDAY, JULY 30, 1962 4

11:52 A.M.–12:20 P.M. Meeting on Brazil 512:25–12:57 P.M. Meeting on Peruvian Recognition 2612:58–1:10 P.M. Meeting on Europe and General

Diplomatic Matters 434:00–4:55 P.M. Meeting on the Economy and the Budget 525:00–6:48 P.M. Meeting on Nuclear Test Ban 80

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1962 130

11:30 A.M.–12:43 P.M. Meeting on Nuclear Test Ban 1324:45–5:32 P.M. Meeting on Nuclear Test Ban 1675:35–6:25 P.M. Meeting with the President’s Foreign

Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) 186

C O N T E N T Sviii

FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 1962 202

10:33–11:12 A.M. Meeting on Berlin 20311:14 –11:20 A.M. Meeting with Lyman Lemnitzer 227

MONDAY, AUGUST 6, 1962 233

6:00–6:42 P.M. Meeting with Wilbur Mills on the Tax Cut Proposal 234


10:36–11:12 A.M. Meeting with Llewellyn Thompson on Khrushchev 261

5:30–6:12 P.M. Meeting on China and the Congo 272

THURSDAY, AUGUST 9, 1962 287

10:00–10:55 A.M. Meeting on Peru and Haiti 28710:55 A.M.–12:15 P.M. Meeting on Berlin 3114:30–5:47 P.M. Meeting with Business Leaders

on the Tax Cut Proposal 335

FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 1962 361

10:10–11:10 A.M. Meeting on the Tax Cut Proposal 36211:20 A.M.–12:30 P.M. Meeting on the Gold

and Dollar Crisis 385


4:10–4:45 P.M. Meeting on Laos 4196:35–6:53 P.M. Meeting with John McCone 439


10:50–11:46 A.M. Meeting with Douglas MacArthur 4455:50–6:32 P.M. Meeting on the Gold and Dollar Crisis 462


11:48 A.M.–12:06 P.M. Meeting on Intelligence Matters 4824:00–5:30 P.M. Meeting on the Gold and Dollar Crisis 489

TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1962 526

9:30 A.M. Conversation with Orville Freeman 52710:00 A.M. Conversation with Dean Rusk 534

10:14 A.M. Conversation with Robert McNamara 53610:20 A.M. Conversation with Eugene Zuckert 54010:25 A.M. Conversation with Lyndon B. Johnson 54110:30 A.M. Conversation with James Eastland 5455:05–5:15 P.M. Meeting on U.N. Strategy 5465:15–5:55 P.M. Meeting with Adlai Stevenson 5526:00–7:05 P.M. Meeting on Trade and Textile Policy 566


6:10–6:37 P.M. Meeting on Intelligence Matters 593


9:36 A.M. Conversation with Philip Hart 604


TIME UNKNOWN. Dictated Memo to Eugene Zuckert 6085:00–6:06 P.M. Meeting on Arab-Israeli Questions 610


11:06 A.M. Conversation with David McDonald 6245:46–6:35 P.M. Meeting on Berlin 6276:35–6:46 P.M. Meeting on the Congo 641


9:30 A.M. Conversation with Walter Reuther 65111:26 A.M. Conversation with Willard Wirtz 65411:30 A.M. Conversation with a White House Operator 65511:33 A.M. Conversation with George Harrison 65611:35 A.M. Conversation with Walter Reuther 657

Index 659

C O N T E N T S ix

xi

The Presidential Recordings Project

BY PHILIP ZELIKOW AND ERNEST MAY

Between 1940 and 1973, presidents of the United States secretlyrecorded hundreds of their meetings and conversations in theWhite House. Though some recorded a lot and others just a little,they created a unique and irreplaceable source for understanding notonly their presidencies and times but the presidency as an institutionand, indeed, the essential process of high-level decision making.

These recordings of course do not displace more traditional sourcessuch as official documents, private diaries and letters, memoirs, and con-temporaneous journalism. They augment these sources much as photo-graphs, films, and recordings augment printed records of presidents’public appearances. But they do much more than that.

Because the recordings capture an entire meeting or conversation,not just highlights caught by a minute-taker or recalled afterward in amemorandum or memoir, they have or can have two distinctive qualities.In the first place, they can catch the whole complex of considerationsthat weigh on a president’s action choice. Most of those present at ameeting with a president know chiefly the subject of that meeting. Evenkey staff advisers have compartmented responsibilities. Tapes or tran-scripts of successive meetings or conversations can reveal interlockedconcerns of which only the president was aware. They can provide hardevidence, not just bases for inference, about presidential motivations.

Desk diaries, public and private papers of presidents, and memoirsand oral histories by aides, family, and friends all show how varied anddifficult were the presidents’ responsibilities and how little time they hadfor meeting those responsibilities. But only the tapes provide a clear pic-ture of how these responsibilities constantly converged—how a presi-dent could be simultaneously, not consecutively, a commander in chiefworrying about war, a policymaker conscious that his missteps in eco-nomic policy could bring on a market collapse, a chief mediator amonginterest groups, a chief administrator for a myriad of public programs, aspokesperson for the interests and aspirations of the nation, a head of asprawling political party, and more.

The tapes reveal not only what presidents said but what they heard.For everyone, there is some difference between learning by ear and by

eye. Action-focused individuals ordinarily take in more of what is said tothem than of what they read, especially when they can directly questiona speaker. A document read aloud to a president had a much betterchance of registering than the same document simply placed in the in-box. Though hearing and reading can both be selective, tapes probablyshow, better than any other records, the information and advice guidingpresidential choices.

Perhaps most usefully, the secret tapes record, as do no other sources,the processes that produce decisions. Presidential advisers can be hearddebating with one another. They adapt to the arguments of the others.They sometimes change their minds. The common positions at the endof a meeting are not necessarily those taken by any person at the outset.The president’s own views have often been reshaped. Sometimes therehas been a basic shift in definition of an issue or of the stakes involved.Hardly anyone ever has a clear memory of such changes. Yet, with thetape, a listener now can hear those changes taking place—can follow, asnowhere else, the logic of high-stakes decision making.

Casting about for analogies, we have thought often of Pompeii. As theruins uncovered there have given students of Greco-Roman civilizationknowledge not to be found anywhere else, in any form, so the presidentialrecordings give students of the presidency, of U.S. and world history, andof decision making knowledge simply without parallel or counterpart.They are a kind of time machine, allowing us to go back and be in theroom as history was being made. And, unlike even the finest archaeologi-cal site, what we uncover are the words and deliberations of the peoplethemselves in the moment of action, not just the accounts, summarynotes, or after-the-fact reconstructions they left behind.

Of the six presidents who used secret recording devices, three did soextensively. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhowerrecorded to a limited extent. John Kennedy, however, after installing anelaborate taping system in July 1962, used it frequently during the 16months before his murder in November 1963. Using a different system,Lyndon Johnson made recordings throughout his presidency, especially in1968, his last, tumultuous year in office. Richard Nixon, after two yearswithout using any recording devices, installed a system which, becausevoice activated, captured every conversation in a room with a microphone.

The existence of Nixon’s system came to light in July 1973 duringcongressional hearings on administration involvement in the 1972Watergate burglary. Segments of tape obtained by Congress provided amajor basis for the impeachment proceedings that led to Nixon’s laterresignation.

T H E P R E S I D E N T I A L R E C O R D I N G S P RO J E C Txii

The Watergate hearings brought an end to secret taping. Afterward,it became unlawful to record conversations without knowledge and con-sent. As the ruins of Pompeii reveal details of Greco-Roman life only upto August of 79 A.D., when lava from Vesuvius buried the city, so secretrecordings reveal the inner workings of the U.S. presidency only from1940—and especially 1962—down to mid-1973.

On the premise that these recordings will remain important histori-cal sources for centuries to come, the University of Virginia’s MillerCenter of Public Affairs plans to produce transcripts and aids for usingall accessible recordings for all six presidencies. We started with themethods and style we used in 1996–97 to produce a then-unprecedentedvolume of its kind, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during theCuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).Though that volume improved on the then-available transcripts of a fewKennedy administration meetings, we kept trying to find ways to makethe transcripts still better. This was a process of trial and error.

Our initial hope was that professional transcribers, like court reporters,could do much of the primary transcription. That did not work outwell. For those untrained in the history of the period, transcribingpresidential tapes can be a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle withoutbeing able to see the picture on the puzzle box, and this is especiallytrue when the audio quality is bad. Tapes of telephone conversationstend to be much easier, both because the speakers are using a machinethat was linked to the original recording system (usually a Dictaphonein this case) and because there are generally only two participants inthe telephone conversation. Recordings of meetings are much harder totranscribe. Most Kennedy recordings are of meetings; most Johnsonrecordings (and all those publicly released so far) are of telephone con-versations.

Originally short of funds and audio expertise, we initially workedalmost entirely with ordinary cassette copies of the tapes. We later beganrelying on more expensive Digital Audio Tape (DAT) technology. We triedout other technical fixes, starting in 1996 with a standard noise reductiontechnique (called NONOISE in the trade). The results were disappointing.We have since tried out other, much more sophisticated techniques sug-gested by some sound studios. Though we have learned these techniquescan sometimes be vital for especially murky material suffering from unusualinterference, there is an offsetting risk of additional distortion and loss ofdata, including the subtle changes in tone that can affect accurate speakeridentification. Two of our scholars, Timothy Naftali and George Eliades,were especially critical experimenters in this learning process.

T H E P R E S I D E N T I A L R E C O R D I N G S P RO J E C T xiii

The same two scholars helped the growing team stumble on a moreuseful bit of hardware. Looking for a way for two scholars to listensimultaneously to the same DAT copies, Eliades suggested use of a mul-tiple outlet headphone amplifier (Rane’s Mojo amplifier). Eliades andNaftali also discovered that this hardware dramatically improved ourability to boost the audio signal from the tapes. We are continuing to tin-ker with the hardware, including more use of CD-ROM technology. Wewelcome suggestions for further improvement.

The most fundamental improvements in transcription so far, though,have not come from machines. They came from people. Introduction of ateam method for reviewing transcripts, an innovation developed andmanaged mainly by Naftali, has helped reduce the most intractable sourceof error—the cognitive expectations and limitations of an individual lis-tener. For instance, when you expect to hear a word in an ambiguous bitof sound, you often hear it. Even without particular expectations, differ-ent listeners hear different things. So we have utilized a special kind of“peer review” in this new realm of basic historical research.

The talents required from our scholars are demanding. They must beexcellent historians, knowledgeable about the events and people of theperiod. They must also have a particular temperament. Anthropologistsand archaeologists used to taking infinite pains at a dig, teaspoon ortoothbrush in hand, might call this a talent for “field work.” So we areespecially grateful to the historians, listed on the title page of the vol-umes, who have displayed the knowledge, the patience, and the disciplinethis work requires, rewarded by a constant sense of discovery.

In consultation with our editorial advisory board and our scholars, wedeveloped a number of methodological principles for the Miller Center’swork. Among the most important are:

First, the work is done by trained professional historians who havedone deep research on the period covered by the tapes and on some ofthe central themes of the meetings and conversations. They are listed onthe title page as associate and volume editors. The historians not onlydelve into documentary sources but sometimes interview living partici-pants who can help us comprehend the taped discussions. Our voiceidentifications are based on sample clips we have compiled and on ourresearch. On occasion our list of participants in a meeting differs fromthe log of President Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. We list onlythe names of participants whose voices we can identify. Our research hasalso turned up a few minor cataloguing errors made at the time or later.

Second, each volume uses the team method. Since few people alwaysspeak in complete grammatical sentences, the transcriber has to infer

T H E P R E S I D E N T I A L R E C O R D I N G S P RO J E C Txiv

and create paragraphs, commas, semicolons, periods, and such. Usuallyone or two scholars painstakingly produce a primary draft, including theintroductory scene setters and explanatory annotations. Two or morescholars then carefully go over that transcript, individually or sometimestwo listening at the same time, with their suggestions usually goingback to the primary transcriber. In the case of often-difficult meetingtapes, like the Kennedy recordings, every transcript has benefited from atleast four listeners. The volume editors remain accountable for checkingthe quality and accuracy of all the work in their volume, knittingtogether the whole. All of this work is then reviewed by the general edi-tors, with the regular advice of members of the project’s editorial advi-sory board.

Third, we use the best technology that the project can afford. As of2001, we work from DAT copies of the recordings (not the less expensiveanalog cassettes ordinarily sold to the public by presidential libraries).Our transcribers are now moving toward transferring this digital dataonto CD-ROMs. Each transcriber at least uses a professional qualityDAT machine and AKG K240 headphones with the signal boosted by aheadphone amplifier. Each listens to a DAT copy of the library master,checking with a DAT from which sound engineers have attempted toremove extraneous background noise.

Fourth, we aim at completeness. Over time, others using the tran-scripts and listening to the tapes may be able to fill in passages marked[unclear]. Although the Miller Center volumes are intended to be author-itative reference works, they will always be subject to minor amendments.Editors of these volumes will endeavor to issue periodic updates. We useellipses in our transcripts in order to indicate that the speaker paused ortrailed off, not to indicate that material has been omitted.

Fifth, we strive to make the transcripts accessible to and readable byanyone interested in history, including students. As the U.S. govern-ment’s National Archives has pointed out, the actual records are thetapes themselves and all transcripts are subjective interpretations. Forinstance, our team omits verbal debris such as the “uh”s that dot almostanyone’s speech. Listeners unconsciously filter out such debris as theyunderstand what someone is saying. Judgments must be made. Someonesays, for example, “sixteen . . . uh, sixty. . . . ” The transcriber has todecide whether the slip was significant or not. But the judgment calls areusually no more difficult than those involved in deciding where to insertpunctuation or paragraphing. In the effort to be exhaustive, sometimesthere is a temptation to overtranscribe, catching every fragmentaryutterance, however unclear or peripheral. But the result on the page can

T H E P R E S I D E N T I A L R E C O R D I N G S P RO J E C T xv

add too much intrusive static, making the substance less understandablenow than it was to listeners at the time. Obviously, what to include andomit, balancing coherence and comprehension against the completenessof the record, also requires subjective judgment. The object is to give thereader or user the truest possible sense of the actual dialogue as the par-ticipants themselves could have understood it (had they been payingattention).

Sixth, we go one step further by including in each volume explana-tions and annotations intended to enable readers or users to understandthe background and circumstances of a particular conversation or meet-ing. With rare exceptions, we do not add information that participantswould not have known. Nor do we comment often on the significance ofitems of information, except as it might have been recognized by the par-ticipants. As with other great historical sources, interpretations willhave to accumulate over future decades and centuries.

T H E P R E S I D E N T I A L R E C O R D I N G S P RO J E C Txvi

Preface to John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises, Volumes 1–3

BY PHILIP ZELIKOW AND ERNEST MAY

These three volumes in the Miller Center Presidential Recordingsseries cover the three months after Kennedy first began to tape-record meetings.Before and after becoming president, Kennedy had made use of a

recording device called a Dictaphone, mostly for dictating letters ornotes. In the summer of 1962 he asked Secret Service Agent RobertBouck to conceal recording devices in the Cabinet Room, the Oval Office,and a study/library in the Mansion. Without explaining why, Bouckobtained Tandberg reel-to-reel tape recorders, high-quality machines forthe period, from the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He placed two of thesemachines in the basement of the West Wing of the White House in aroom reserved for storing private presidential files. He placed another inthe basement of the Executive Mansion.

The West Wing machines were connected by wire to two micro-phones in the Cabinet Room and two in the Oval Office. Those in theCabinet Room were on the outside wall, placed in two spots covered bydrapes where once there had been wall fixtures. They were activated bya switch at the President’s place at the Cabinet table, easily mistaken fora buzzer press. Of the microphones in the Oval Office, one was in thekneehole of the President’s desk, the other concealed in a coffee tableacross the room. Each could be turned on or off with a single push on aninconspicuous button.

We do not know where the microphone in the study of the Mansionwas located. In any case, Bouck, who had chief responsibility for the sys-tem, said in 1976, in an oral history interview, that President Kennedy“did almost no recording in the Mansion.” Of the machine in the base-ment of the Mansion, he said: “Except for one or two short recordings, Idon’t think it was ever used.” So far, except possibly for one shortrecording included in these volumes, no tape from the Mansion machinehas turned up.

President Kennedy also had a Dictaphone hooked up to a telephonein the Oval Office and possibly also to a telephone in his bedroom. He

xvii

could activate it, and so could his private secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, whoknew of the secret microphones, often made sure that they were turnedoff if the President had forgotten to do so, and took charge of finishedreels of tape when they were brought to her by Bouck or Bouck’s assis-tant, Agent Chester Miller.

Though Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, andRobert Kennedy’s secretary, Angie Novello, certainly knew of the tapes anddictabelts by some point in 1963, it is not clear that they had this knowl-edge earlier. Anecdotes suggest that the President’s close aide and sched-uler, Kenneth O’Donnell, might have known about the system and mighthave told another aide, Dave Powers, but the anecdotes are unsupported.Most White House insiders, including counsel Theodore Sorensen, whohad been Kennedy’s closest aide in the Senate, were astonished when theylearned later that their words had been secretly captured on tape.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Evelyn Lincoln was quickly displacedby President Johnson’s secretaries. She arranged, however, for the SecretService agents to pull out all the microphones, wires, and recorders andtook the tapes and dictabelts to her newly assigned offices in theExecutive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. Though RobertKennedy had charge of these and all other records from the KennedyWhite House, Lincoln retained physical custody.

During Kennedy’s presidency, only a small number of conversationswere transcribed. Though Lincoln attempted to make some other tran-scripts, she never had much time for doing so. George Dalton, a formerNavy Petty Officer and general chore man for the Kennedy family, tookon the job. “Dalton transcripts” have not been released, but everyonewho has seen them uses terms like fragmentary, terrible to unreliable, awful,or garbage.

The tapes and dictabelts migrated with President Kennedy’s papers.First they moved to the main National Archives building in downtownWashington, D.C. Herman Kahn (an archivist, not the strategic analyst)was responsible for them within the National Archives system; RobertKennedy was the custodian for materials belonging to the family, includ-ing all the tapes. Robert Kennedy disclosed the existence of the tapes in1965 to Burke Marshall, a legal scholar and former Justice Departmentcolleague. Lincoln and Dalton were looking after the materials, andDalton was attempting some transcripts. The papers and the tapes thenwere moved to a federal records depository in Waltham, Massachusetts.In the summer and fall of 1967, when Robert Kennedy drafted hisfamous memoir of the Cuban missile crisis, Thirteen Days, he used what-

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ever transcripts existed and almost certainly listened to tapes. Passagesin the book which refer to “diaries” seem nearly all to be based on thesecret recordings.1

After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, custody of PresidentKennedy’s private papers became the primary responsibility of SenatorEdward Kennedy (Burke Marshall represented Jacqueline Kennedy’sinterests). Dalton was employed by Senator Kennedy, and either sometapes or some of Dalton’s transcripts or both may have been moved intoSenator Kennedy’s own files. Despite occasional rumors, none of the cus-todians publicly acknowledged that the tapes existed.

When Nixon’s taping system was revealed in 1973 and Congress wasseeking access to those tapes, Senator Kennedy was a member of theinquiring Judiciary Committee. With rumors by then rife, he and the fam-ily quickly confirmed that President Kennedy had, indeed, also secretlytaped meetings and conversations in the White House. They publiclypromised to turn the tapes over to the National Archives. During the nexttwo years they negotiated a deed of gift that put in the hands of archivistsat the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts, alltapes except those dealing with private family affairs.

According to Richard Burke, a longtime member of Senator Kennedy’sstaff, Dalton was instructed by the late Steven Smith, Senator Ken-nedy’s brother-in-law, to remove sensitive documents from the Kennedypapers and to cull the tapes in order to protect the family’s reputation.Burke also claims that he read transcripts by Dalton from Oval Officedictabelts of conversations with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner andthat Dalton had erased potentially embarrassing passages.2 But Burke isan undependable source. A book he wrote about his years with the sena-tor is full not only of errors but of outright inventions. Yet there areothers, including at least one Kennedy Library archivist who receivedthe tapes, who suspected that between 1973 and 1975, Dalton—possi-bly assisted by Kennedy aide Dave Powers and retired archivist andKennedy family employee Frank Harrington—looked at the tapes to seewhat should be removed without leaving any record or documentation

P R E FAC E xix

1. See Timothy Naftali, “The Origins of ‘Thirteen Days,’”Miller Center Report 15, no. 2(Summer 1999): 23–24.2. Philip Bennett, “Mystery Surrounds Role of JFK Tapes Transcriber,” Boston Globe, 31March 1993, p. 1; Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997),pp. 454–55.

of their work. Dalton has refused to discuss what he did. SenatorKennedy’s then–chief of staff, when interviewed in 1993 by the BostonGlobe reporter Philip Bennett, denied that Dalton had worked on thetapes at the direction of Senator Kennedy, but Burke Marshall toldPhilip Zelikow in February 2000 that he thought Dalton had beenworking on the tapes for the Senator, at least in general.

In 1975, tapes recording about 248 hours of meetings and 12 hoursof telephone conversations became part of the President’s Office Files atthe library. While a treasure trove for history, this handover did notinclude all the recordings that President Kennedy had made, nor were allthe recordings complete.

Fortunately perhaps, the Secret Service agents had originally num-bered and catalogued the reels of meeting tapes in a simple way, soremovals and anomalies are easily noticed. There are a few. Three tapeswere received by the library with reels containing “separate tape seg-ments.” It is possible that they had been cut and spliced, for two of thesetapes, including the one made on August 22, 1962, concerned intelli-gence issues and may have involved discussion of covert efforts to assas-sinate Castro. The Kennedy Library archivist Alan Goodrich says,however, that the “separate tape segments” may exist simply because theSecret Service agents were winding some partial reels of tape togetherto fill out the reels of blank tape being fed into the machine.

Another tape from August 1962 is simply blank. Several more num-bered tape boxes, for tapes made in June 1963, had no tapes inside,though the library has “Dalton transcripts” for at least four of thesemissing tapes. The fact that still other tapes received by the library hadbeen miswound suggests at least that they had been clumsily handled.Since the library has not yet issued its own forensic reports about the“separate tape fragments” or blank tape or made the original tape reelsavailable for outside examination or released the existing “Dalton tran-scripts” for missing tapes, we cannot draw conclusive judgments aboutjust what happened.

The dictabelt recordings never had any order. Lincoln seems to havefiled them randomly. Some seem to have been partially overwritten. TheKennedy Library’s numbers merely distinguish one item from another.They provide no guidance to chronological sequence or content. As withthe meeting tapes, the Kennedy Library has attempted to date and iden-tify the tapes, and the editors of these volumes have confirmed and, invarious cases, amended this information as a result of further research. Anumber of dictabelts were taken by Lincoln without authorization for aprivate collection of Kennedy memorabilia. Some of these went to the

P R E FAC Exx

Kennedy Library after her death in 1995; others turned up in the handsof a collector who had befriended her. In 1998 the Kennedy Library wasable to recover these dictabelts too, but there is no way of knowingwhether there were others and, if so, what their fate was.

Once in the jurisdiction of the Archivist of the United States, therecordings were handled with thoroughgoing professionalism. The libraryremastered the tapes on a Magnecord 1022 for preservation. The dicta-belts were copied onto new masters. All copies of the tapes, includingthose used for these books, derive from these new preservation masters.

Some minor anomalies were introduced as a result of the remastering.Listeners will occasionally hear a tape stop and the recording start up,replaying a sentence or two. That is an artifact of the remastering process,not the original White House taping. The original tapes were also recordedat relatively high density (1 inches per second). The remastered tapesnecessarily have different running speeds that produce subtle audio distor-tion. The new masters, for example, seem to have people talking slightlyfaster than they did at the time.

The library was initially at a loss as to how to make tapes available tothe public. Many contain material still covered by security classification.Because of the poor sound quality of most of the tapes, it was not easy toidentify sensitive passages. The library initially attempted to prepare itsown transcripts and submit these for classification review. But the taskwas hard, the library staff was small, and funds were meager. Moreover,some archivists believed as a matter of principle that the library shouldnot give official standing to transcripts that might contain transcribers’errors. In the view of the National Archives and Records Administration,only the tapes themselves are archival records. All transcripts are works ofsubjective interpretation. The effort at transcription came to an end in1983, and almost all the tapes remained under lock and key.

In 1993 the library acquired new equipment and began putting therecordings onto Digital Audio Tape (DAT). These could be reviewed inWashington and digitally marked without transcripts. Changes in proce-dures, along with determined efforts by two archivists, StephanieFawcett and Mary Kennefick, accelerated the pace of declassification.Between 1996 and 2000 about half of the recordings in the KennedyLibrary became available for public release; the rest await declassifica-tion review.

While the Kennedy Library has been careful to make no deletions orerasures from tapes and dictabelts in its possession, the copies publiclyreleased, and used for these volumes, do have carefully annotated exci-sions of passages still security classified. These passages were excised

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digitally, not literally, and remain intact on the library’s preservationmasters. It is to be hoped that future, more tolerant declassificationreviews may someday release some of the material that currently isexcised. But even for the sanitized tapes, the library issues no transcripts.

Our work on these tapes commenced in 1995. We obtained analogcassettes of tapes relating to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis as soon as theywere released. Painstakingly, we listened to and transcribed those tapes.Each of us spent many hours listening to each hour of tape. Even so, ourtranscripts contained large numbers of notations for words or passagesthat were unclear or speakers that could not be identified. The resultanttranscripts were published by Harvard University Press in 1997 as TheKennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Because of support from the Governing Council of the University ofVirginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, and W. W. Norton, the tran-scripts of meetings on the missile crisis in volumes 2 and 3 of this seriesare more complete and accurate than were our original products. Wewere able to decipher in those tapes large numbers of words and pas-sages previously incomprehensible and to identify speakers with greatercertainty. We were also able to draw on the assistance of other historiansemployed in the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Project,employing and benefiting from the team method we describe in our gen-eral preface on the project.

Some questions nevertheless linger because of uncertainties, alreadydescribed, concerning the completeness and integrity of the tapes nowavailable. Why were they made? Did Kennedy use the on/off switch with aview to controlling, even distorting the historical record? Did others, afterhis murder, tamper with the tapes in order artificially to shape the recordof events? In view of the possibility that a small fraction of the meetingtapes were removed or mangled after the fact, can they really be regardedas better sources than self-serving memoirs or oral histories? To theextent that they are valid, undoctored records of conversations and meet-ings, do they tell us much that could not be learned from other sources?

Our judgment is that any tampering with the tapes was so crude andham handed that it extended only to removals. The extent of suchremovals may have been constrained by the original Secret Service cata-loguing system. Since missing tapes would be noticed, too many missingtapes might cause an outcry and lead to unwelcome inquiries. So theremovals of meeting tapes, if that is the explanation for the anomalies,were relatively limited. The situation of the dictabelts is different. Sincethey were not catalogued at the time they were made, we cannot knowhow many—if any—are missing.

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The most plausible explanation for Kennedy’s making secret taperecordings is that he wanted material to be used later in writing a mem-oir. Since he seems neither to have had transcripts made (with two minorexceptions in 1963) nor to have listened to any of the tapes, it is unlikelythat he wanted them for current business. He had himself written histo-ries and was by most accounts prone to asking historians’ questions:How did this situation develop? What had previous administrationsdone? He knew how hard it was to answer such questions from surviv-ing documentary records. And he faced the apparent likelihood that,even if reelected in 1964, he would be an out-of-work ex-president whennot quite 51 years old.

Did Kennedy tape just to have material putting himself in a favorablelight? On some occasions, he must have refrained from pushing an “on”button because he wanted no record of a meeting or conversation.Especially on early tapes, there are pauses at moments when the Presidentwas speaking of tactics for dealing with legislative leaders. Almost cer-tainly, he made recordings only when he thought the occasions important.As a result, the tapes record relatively little humdrum White House busi-ness such as meetings with citizen delegations or conferences with con-gressmen and others about patronage.

Those who have spent much time with the tapes and those who havecompared the tapes to their own experience working with Kennedy findno evidence that he taped only self-flattering moments. He often madestatements or discussed ideas that would have greatly damaged him hadthey become public. Early in the missile crisis, for example, he musedabout his own possible responsibility for having brought it on. “Lastmonth I said we weren’t going to [allow it],” he said. “Last month Ishould have said that we don’t care.” He never seemed to make speechesduring a meeting for the benefit of future listeners. His occasional tapedmonologues were private dictation about something that had happenedor what he was thinking, obviously for his own later reference.

Two other points apply. First, he had no reason to suppose that thetapes would ever be heard by anyone other than himself unless he choseto make them available. They were completely secret. Second, he couldhardly have known just what statements or positions would look good toposterity, for neither he nor his colleagues could know how the storieswould turn out.

The tapes of missile crisis debates establish far more clearly than anyother records the reasons why Kennedy thought Soviet missiles in Cubaso dangerous and important. They make abundantly clear that his preoc-cupation was not with Cuba or the immediate threat to the United

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States. He feared that, if he did not insist on removal of the missiles,Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev would be emboldened to try to takeover West Berlin, in which case he—Kennedy—would have only twochoices. He would either have to abandon the two and a half millionWest Berliners theretofore protected by the United States, or he wouldhave to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, for there was noimaginable way of defending West Berlin with conventional militaryforces. The Soviet missiles in Cuba would then be a “knife in our guts”constraining the U.S. nuclear threats to save Berlin.

The tapes also explain as do no other sources Kennedy’s approach tothe Mississippi civil rights crisis. They show him worrying about inter-national economics, specifically the drain on U.S. gold reserves, to suchan extent that he questions whether the United States can or shouldcontinue to keep troops in Europe. The tapes in some instances disclosefacts still hidden by walls of security classification, as, for example, thatthe Kennedy administration had plans to create an illegal CIA unit toinvestigate U.S. journalists and officials.

But the greatest value of these recordings does not reside in specificrevelations. It comes, as is said in the general preface to the project, fromgiving a listener or reader unique insight into the presidency and presi-dential decision making. We are proud to be able to put this extraordi-nary source into the hands of students of history and politics.

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Editors’ Acknowledgments

These initial volumes of the John F. Kennedy Presidential RecordingsSeries represent the work of a team of dedicated people. Besides thescholars listed on the title page, the editors are grateful to LorraineSettimo, the executive assistant of the Miller Center’s Presidential Record-ings Project, and to Andrew P. N. Erdmann, the scholar who assistedwith the Eisenhower conversations. At the John F. Kennedy Library, JimCedrone, Alan Goodrich, William Johnson, and Mary Kennefick wereespecially helpful. And at the National Archives, Nancy Keegan Smithwas of special assistance. Lastly, we are deeply grateful to our editors atNorton, Drake McFeely and Sarah Stewart, who exhibit such a rarecombination of qualities: attention to detail, patience, and vision.

Areas of Specialization for Research Scholars

RESEARCH SCHOLARS

David ColemanCuba, Nuclear Test Ban

George EliadesVietnam, Laos, Nuclear Test Ban

Francis GavinBerlin Crisis, International Monetary Policy

Max HollandDomestic Politics

Jill Colley KastnerU. S.-German Relations

Erin MahanBerlin Crisis, U.S.-European Relations, Congo, Middle East,

United Nations, China

Timothy NaftaliU.S.-Soviet Relations, Cuba, General Latin America,

Intelligence Policy, Nuclear Test Ban

Paul PitmanU.S.-European Relations

Jonathan RosenbergCivil Rights

David ShreveCongressional Relations, Tax and Budgetary Policy,

International Monetary Policy

CD-ROM DEVELOPER AND MULTIMEDIA COORDINATOR

Kristin Gavin

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

Brett Avery BushW. Taylor Fain

Laura Moranchek

A Note on Sources

In addition to the various memoirs and other writings cited as sources inour footnotes, we have relied upon the relevant archival holdings for theWhite House and the various agencies of the U.S. government, heldmainly in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and the NationalArchives, Washington, D.C. We have also relied on the less formal hold-ings of that useful private institute, the National Security Archive,Washington, D.C.

Each footnote appearing for the first time in a chapter is fully citedon first reference. The one exception made was for the many footnotesciting the U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States1961–63 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office). Footnotesthat include references to Foreign Relations of the United States are abbre-viated as FRUS and include the volume number and page numbers. ForFRUS references other than those from 1961 to 1963, the appropriateyears are included.

Meeting Participants and OtherFrequently Mentioned Persons

The following is a concise guide to individuals who participated intaped conversations. We have supplemented these brief descrip-tions, when possible, with the thumbnail sketches made by for-mer presidential special consultant Richard E. Neustadt in his bookReport to JFK: the Skybolt Crisis in Perspective (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1999). Neustadt met the people he has written about.We feel that his vivid brush strokes add some additional color that we, atthis distant remove, do not feel qualified to provide. We also include fig-ures mentioned frequently in the conversations, such as foreign heads ofgovernment, who were not present at the meetings.

Abrams, Creighton W., Colonel, U.S. Army; Assistant Deputy Chief ofStaff and Director of Operations, Office of the Deputy Chief of Stafffor Operations, 1962–1963

Ackley, H. Gardner, Member, Council of Economic Advisers, 1962–1968(Chairman, 1964–1968)

Adenauer, Konrad, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany,1949–1963

Alexander, Henry, Chairman, Morgan Guaranty Trust in 1962Allen, Ward P., Director, Office of Inter-American Regional Political

Affairs, Department of StateAnderson, George W., Admiral, U.S. Navy; U.S. Chief of Naval Operations,

1961–1963Ausland, John C., State Department Representative to the Berlin Task

Force, 1961–1964Ball, George W., Under Secretary of State, 1961–1966

A Washington lawyer with an international practice, wartime associate ofJean Monnet (the advocate of European Union), adviser to Adlai Stevensonin 1952, ’56 and ’60, Ball had come into the Kennedy Administration as

xxxi

Under Secretary for Economic Affairs; his focused energy, intelligence, andapplication already had won him a promotion.

Barbour, Walworth, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, 1961–1973Barnett, Ross R., Democratic Governor of Mississippi, 1960–1964Bell, David E., Director of the Budget, 1961–1962; Director, U.S.

Agency for International Development after December 1962An economist, former Secretary of Harvard’s Graduate School of PublicAdministration, as it then was, and before that Administrative Assistant toPresident Truman, Bell was personable, thoughtful, analytic, and experienced.

Billings, LeMoyne, Personal friend of President Kennedy; a roommate ofthe young JFK at Choate and, briefly, Princeton

Blough, Roger, Chairman, U.S. Steel Corporation, 1955–1969Boeschenstein, Harold, Senior Executive, Owens-Corning Fiberglass

Corporation in 1962Boggs, Thomas Hale, U.S. Representative, Democrat, from Louisiana,

1941–1943, 1947–1972; House Majority Whip, 1961–1971Bohlen, Charles E., Special Adviser to the President, 1961–1962; U.S.

Ambassador to France, October 1962–1968One of the two top Russian specialists in the State Department, recentlyappointed Ambassador to France. More a thoroughly skilled operator than adeep analyst, Bohlen was bored in Paris, feeling out of things.

Bundy, McGeorge, Special Assistant to the President for NationalSecurity Affairs, 1961–1966Formerly Dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard at a young age, co-author ofHenry Stimson’s memoirs, “Mac” was bright, quick, confident, determined,striving to be the perfect staff man, juggling many balls at once.

Bundy, William P., Deputy Assistant of Defense for InternationalSecurity Affairs, 1961–1963

Carter, Marshall S., Lieutenant General, U.S. Army; Deputy Director ofCentral Intelligence, 1962–1965

Castro Ruz, Fidel, Premier of Cuba, 1959–Celebrezze, Anthony J., Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare,

1962–1965Charyk, Joseph V., Under Secretary of the Air Force, 1960–1963Clark, Ramsey, Assistant Attorney General of the United States,

1961–1965Clay, Lucius D., President’s Special Representative in Berlin, 1961–1962;

Special Consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1962–1963Cleveland, J. Harlan, Assistant Secretary of State for International

Organization Affairs, 1961–1965Clifford, Clark, Personal Attorney to the President; Member, President’s

M E E T I N G PA RT I C I PA N T Sxxxii

Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1961 (Chairman from May1963)

Cline, Ray S., Deputy Director for Intelligence, Central IntelligenceAgency, 1962–1966

Cox, Archibald, Solicitor General of the United States, 1961–1965Day, J. Edward, Postmaster General of the United States, 1961–1963Dean, Arthur H., Chairman, U.S. delegation, Conference on the Discon-

tinuance of Nuclear Weapons Tests, Geneva, 1961–1962; Chairman, U.S.delegation, Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Committee, Geneva, 1962

de Gaulle, Charles, President of France, 1958–1969Dennison, Robert S., Admiral, U.S. Navy; Commander-in-Chief, U.S.

Atlantic Fleet and Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, 1960–1963Dillon, C. Douglas, Secretary of the Treasury, 1961–1965

Dillon was engagingly direct, practical, experienced, disinclined to reach beyondhis own (broad) departmental boundaries, except on Kennedy’s invitation.

Dirksen, Everett M., U.S. Senator, Republican, from Illinois, 1950–1969;Senate Minority Leader, 1959–1969

Dobrynin, Anatoly, Soviet Ambassador to the United States, 1962–1985Dowling, Walter C., U.S. Ambassador to the Federal Republic of

Germany, 1959–1963Duncan, John P., Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, 1961–1963Duvalier, François, President of Haiti, 1957–1971Eastland, James O., U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Mississippi, 1943–1978Eisenhower, Dwight D., 34th President of the United States, 1953–1961Feldman, Myer, Deputy Special Counsel to the President, 1961–1964Fisher, Adrian, Deputy Director, Arms Control and Disarmament

Agency, 1961–1969FitzGerald, Desmond, Chief, Far Eastern Division, Deputy Directorate

for Plans, Central Intelligence Agency, 1958–1963Forrestal, Michael V., Senior Staff Member, National Security Council,

1962–1965Foster, William, Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,

1961–1969Fowler, Henry H., Under Secretary of the Treasury, 1961–1964Fowler, James R., Deputy Administrator, Far East, U.S. Agency for

International DevelopmentFreeman, Orville L., Secretary of Agriculture, 1961–1969Fulbright, J. William, U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Arkansas, 1945–1974;

Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1959–1974Gilpatric, Roswell L., Deputy Secretary of Defense, 1961–1964

Wall Street lawyer, skilled, sophisticated, broad-gauged, loyal to McNamara.

M E E T I N G PA RT I C I PA N T S xxxiii

Goldberg, Arthur J., Secretary of Labor, 1961–1962; Associate Justice,U.S. Supreme Court, 1962–1965

Goodwin, Richard N., Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, 1961–1963

Gordon, A. Lincoln, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, 1961–1966Gordon, Kermit, Member, Council of Economic Advisers, 1961–1962;

Director, Bureau of the Budget after December 1962Gore, Albert, Sr., U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Tennessee, 1959–1971Goulart, João, President of Brazil,1961–1964Graham, William Franklin (Billy), Baptist minister and evangelistGraybeal, Sydney N., Division Chief, Foreign Missile and Space

Activities, Central Intelligence Agency, 1950–1964Greenewalt, Crawford H., Chairman, E. I. DuPont de Nemours and

Company, 1962–1967Gromyko, Andrei A., Soviet Foreign Minister, 1957–1985Halaby, Najeeb E., Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration,

1961–1965Halleck, Charles A., U.S. Representative, Republican, from Indiana,

1935–1969; House Minority Leader, 1959–1965Harriman, W. Averell, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern and

Pacific Affairs, 1961–1963Hart, Philip A., U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Michigan, 1959–1976Haworth, Leland, Member, Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 Heller, Walter W., Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers, 1961–1964Helms, Richard M., Deputy Director for Plans, Central Intelligence

Agency, 1962–1965Hickenlooper, Bourke B., U.S. Senator, Republican, from Iowa, 1945–1969;

Chairman, Republican Policy Committee, 1961–1969Hillenbrand, Martin J., Director, Berlin Task Force and the Office of

German Affairs, Bureau of European Affairs, Department of State,1961–1963

Hilsman, Roger, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence andResearch, 1961–1963

Hodges, Luther H., Secretary of Commerce, 1961–1965Hoover, Herbert H., 31st President of the United States, 1929–1933Humphrey, Hubert H., U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Minnesota,

1948–1964; Senate Majority Whip, 1961–1964Johnson, Lyndon B., Vice President of the United States, 1961–1963Johnson, U. Alexis, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political

Affairs, 1961–1964

M E E T I N G PA RT I C I PA N T Sxxxiv

A senior career Foreign Service officer, most recently Ambassador to Thailand;successful in the Service in all senses of the phrase.

Katzenbach, Nicholas deB., Deputy Attorney General of the UnitedStates, 1962–1966

Kaysen, Carl, Deputy Special Assistant to the President for NationalSecurity Affairs, 1961–1963A professor of economics on leave from Harvard, Kaysen worked up expert-ise in defense policy and weaponry, among other things; brilliant, subtle,confident, analytic but also a looker-around-corners.

Keeny, Spurgeon, Deputy Special Assistant to the President for Scienceand TechnologyA physicist with training in international relations, associated from thestart with the President’s Science Adviser’s Office, Keeny was personable,sophisticated, discreet, and a great gatherer of bureaucratic intelligence.

Kennedy, John F., 35th President of the United States, 1961–1963Kennedy, Robert F., Attorney General of the United States, 1961–1964Keogh, Eugene J., U.S. Representative, Democrat, from New York,

1937–1967Khrushchev, Nikita S., First Secretary of the Central Committee of the

Soviet Communist Party and Soviet Premier, 1953–1964Killian, James R., Special Assistant to the President for Science and

Technology, 1957–1959King, J. C., Chief, Western Hemisphere Division, Directorate of Plans,

Central Intelligence AgencyKirkpatrick, Lyman B., Jr., Executive Director, Central Intelligence

Agency, 1962–1965Kirwan, Michael, U.S. Representative, Democrat, from Ohio, 1937–1970;

Chairman, Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, HouseAppropriations Committee in 1962; Chairman, Democratic Congres-sional Campaign Committee

Kohler, Foy, Assistant Secretary of State for European and CanadianAffairs, 1959–September 1962; U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union,September 1962–1966

Kreer, Robert G., Director of the Diplomatic Communication Services,Department of State

Kuchel, Thomas H., U.S. Senator, Republican, from California,1953–1969; Senate Minority Whip, 1959–1969

Land, Edwin, physicist and inventor; member, President’s ForeignIntelligence Advisory Board in 1962

Leddy, John M., Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State until

M E E T I N G PA RT I C I PA N T S xxxv

April 1961; Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, April 1961–June1962; U.S. Representative to the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development after October 1962

LeMay, Curtis E., General, U.S. Air Force; U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff,1961–1965

Lemnitzer, Lyman, General, U.S. Army; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, 1960–1962; Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command,1962–1969

Lincoln, Evelyn, Personal Secretary to President Kennedy, 1952–1963Loeb, James, U.S. Ambassador to Peru, 1961–1962Long, Franklin, Assistant Director for Science and Technology, U.S.

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1962–1963Lovett, Robert A., Special Counselor to the President, 1961–1963; mem-

ber, Executive Committee of the National Security Council, October1962

Lundahl, Arthur C., Assistant Director of Photographic Interpretation,Central Intelligence Agency, from 1953

MacArthur, Douglas, General of the Army, 1944–1964MacDonald, Torbert, U.S. Representative, Democrat, from Massachusetts,

1955–1976Macmillan, M. Harold, Prime Minister of Great Britain, 1957–1963

A one-nation Tory in Parliament from the 1930s, close to Eisenhower sinceNorth Africa in the ’40s, complex, shrewd, detached and tough behind abland, Edwardian exterior. Macmillan’s private humor and wry outlook onlife endeared him to Kennedy, despite their age difference.

Mansfield, Michael J., U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Montana; SenateMajority Leader, 1961–1977

Marshall, Burke, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights,1961–1965

Martin, Edwin M., Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-AmericanAffairs, 1962–1964

Martin, William McChesney, Chairman, Board of Governors of theFederal Reserve System, 1951–1970

McCloy, John J., Special Adviser to the President on DisarmamentMatters, 1961–1963

McCone, John A., Director of Central Intelligence, 1961–1965McCormack, John, U.S. Representative, Democrat, from Massachusetts,

1928–1971; Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1961–1971McDonald, David, President, United Steel Workers of America,

1952–1965McNamara, Robert S., Secretary of Defense, 1961–1968

M E E T I N G PA RT I C I PA N T Sxxxvi

Recruited from the presidency of the Ford Motor Company, a driving, man-aging, no-nonsense—and also no-pomposity—rationalist; his adherence toreason and duty was so passionate as to hint at emotion hidden beneath.

Meany, George, President of the AFL-CIO, 1955–1979Meredith, James H., First African American student admitted to the

University of Mississippi, 1962–1963Mills, Wilbur D., U.S. Representative, Democrat, from Arkansas, 1939–1976;

Chairman, House Ways and Means Committee, 1957–1976Morgan, Thomas E., U.S. Representative, Democrat, from Pennsylvania,

1945–1977; Chairman, House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1962;member, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1962

Moscoso, Teodoro, Assistant Administrator, U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment; U.S. Coordinator for the Alliance for Progress

Murrow, Edward R., Director, U.S. Information Agency, 1961–1964Nasser, Gamal Abdul, Prime Minister of Egypt, 1954–1956; President of

Egypt, 1956–1958; President of the United Arab Republic, 1958–1970Nitze, Paul H., Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security

Affairs, 1961–1963Experienced in defense and diplomacy since 1940, sophisticated, competent,cool, public cold warrior and private philanthropist, Nitze had all the skillsand some of the limitations of the driving young banker he had once been.

Norstad, Lauris, General, U.S. Air Force; NATO Supreme AlliedCommander, Europe, 1956–1963

O’Brien, Lawrence F., Special Assistant to the President for CongressionalAffairs, 1961–1963

O’Donnell, Kenneth, Special Assistant to the President, 1961–1963Okun, Arthur, Staff Economist, Council of Economic Advisers,

1961–1964Ormsby-Gore, Sir David, British Ambassador to the United States,

1961–1965Former Tory MP, intelligent, sensitive, quick on the uptake and well con-nected: related both to Macmillan’s wife and to Kennedy’s late lamentedbrother-in-law, the Marquis of Hartington, killed in World War II.

Pérez Godoy, General Ricardo Pío, leader of Peruvian military coup ofJuly 1962; leader of the military junta, 1962–1963

Pittman, Steuart, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Civil Defense,1961–1964

Prado y Ugarteche, Manuel, President of Peru, 1956–1962Reuther, Walter, President of the United Auto Workers,1946–1970Roosa, Robert V., Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary

Affairs, 1961–1964

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Rosenthal, Jacob, Executive Assistant to the U.S. Under Secretary ofState, 1961–1966

Rostow, Walt W., Counselor of the Department of State and Chairmanof the Policy Planning Council, 1961–1966MIT economist, a driving enthusiast and conceptualizer with a tendency tolisten to himself.

Rusk, Dean, U.S. Secretary of State, 1961–1969Experienced, thoughtful, conventional, perhaps essentially shy, temperamen-tally at odds with his presumed model and undoubted mentor, GeneralMarshall, Rusk may never have felt at ease with JFK, to say nothing ofarticulate aides like Kaysen.

Russell, Richard B., U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Georgia, 1933–1971;Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee

Salinger, Pierre E. G., White House Press Secretary 1961–1964Saltonstall, Leverett, U.S. Senator, Republican, from Massachusetts,

1945–1967; ranking minority member, Senate Armed ServicesCommittee, in 1962

Samuelson, Paul A., Economist; member, Council of Economic Advisers,1960–1968

Schaetzel, J. Robert, Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State forEconomic Affairs, February 1961–March 1962; Special Assistant tothe Under Secretary of State, March 1962–September 1962; DeputyAssistant Secretary of State for European Affairs after September 1962

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., Special Assistant to the President,1961–1964

Schroeder, Gerhard, Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany,1961–1966

Schultze, Charles L., Assistant Director, Bureau of the Budget, 1961–1965Seaborg, Glenn T., Chairman, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission,

1961–1971Shoup, David M., General, U.S. Marine Corps; Commandant of the U.S.

Marine Corps, 1960–1963Sloan, Frank K., Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International

Security Affairs in 1962Smathers, George A., U.S. Senator, Democrat, from Florida, 1951–1969Solow, Robert M., Member, Council of Economic Advisers, 1962–1968Sorensen, Theodore C., Special Assistant to the President, 1961–1964Sproul, Alan, President of the New York Reserve Bank, 1941–1956;

Chairman, Task Force on the International Balance of Payments,November 1960–January 1961

Staats, Elmer B., Deputy Director, U.S. Bureau of the Budget, 1958–1966

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Stevenson, Adlai E., U.S. Permanent Representative to the UnitedNations, 1961–1964

Strong, Robert C., Director, Office of Near East Affairs, Department ofState, 1961–1963

Sullivan, William H., U.N. Adviser, Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs,Department of State until April 1963

Sweeney, Walter C., General, U.S. Air Force; Commanding General,Tactical Air Command, 1961–1965

Taber, John, U.S. Representative, Republican, from New York,1923–1963; ranking minority member, House AppropriationsCommittee in 1962

Talbot, Phillips, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern andSouth Asian Affairs, 1961–1965

Taylor, Maxwell D., General, U.S. Army; Military Representative of thePresident, 1961–1962, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,1962–1964[H]e had come out of retirement after a distinguished career to support JFKin 1960: one person at the Pentagon the President knew well enough to trust.

Thant, U, Secretary-General of the United Nations, 1961–1971Thompson, Llewellyn E., Jr., Ambassador-at-Large, U.S. Department of

State, 1962–1966Tobin, James, Member, Council of Economic Advisers, 1961–1962Tretick, Stanley, Staff photographer for Look magazine in Washington,

1961–1971Troutman, Robert, Member, President’s Committee on Equal Employ-

ment Opportunity, 1961–1962Tshombe, Moise Kapenda, Leader of the secessionist Katanga Province,

the Congo, 1960–1963Turner, Robert C., Assistant Director, U.S. Bureau of the Budget,

1961–1962Tyler, William R., Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs,

September 1962–1965 Vance, Cyrus R., U.S. Secretary of the Army, 1962–1963Vinson, Carl, U.S. Representative, Democrat, from Georgia, 1914–1966;

Chairman, House Armed Services Committee, in 1962Wagner, Aubrey, Chairman, Tennessee Valley Authority, 1962–1978Webb, James E., Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space

Administration, 1961–1968Wehrley, Roy, Director, U.S. Agency for International Development

mission in Vientiane, LaosWheeler, Earle G., General, U.S. Army; Army Chief of Staff, 1962–1964

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White, Lincoln, Spokesman, U. S. Department of State, 1961–1963Wiesner, Jerome B., Special Assistant to the President for Science and

Technology, 1961–1964Williams, G. Mennen, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs,

1961–1966Wilson, Donald M., Deputy Director, U.S. Information Agency, 1961–1965Wirtz, W. Willard, Secretary of Labor, 1962–1969Zorin, Valerian A., Soviet Representative to the Eighteen-Nation

Disarmament Committee, Geneva, 1962–1964Zuckert, Eugene M., Secretary of the Air Force, 1961–1965

M E E T I N G PA RT I C I PA N T Sxl

Introduction: Five Hundred Days

BY TIMOTHY NAFTALI

It was July 1962, just past his five-hundredth day in office, and JohnF. Kennedy was becoming concerned about the fate of his presidency.He had set the bar high. A friend, the writer Gore Vidal, noted in anearly portrait of the President that Kennedy “intends to be great.”1 Atstake was not simply personal glory. Having been elected at 43, Kennedysymbolized the coming of age of a new generation of Americans. On acold day in January 1961 the junior officers of World War II had troopedto Washington, D.C., to replace the aging generals of the Eisenhoweradministration. Kennedy challenged these young leaders, as he did him-self, to seek a New Frontier, whether that frontier lay in the inner citiesor in outer space. Like the men assembled by Frank Sinatra’s Danny Oceanin the 1960 Rat Pack film, Ocean’s Eleven, the New Frontiersmen wereunited by a code of honor earned through the hardship of the Depressionand the experience of fighting in World War II. Kennedy himself had notexperienced the Depression. His father had made his money duringProhibition, leaving the family well fortified during the difficulties of the1930s. But he understood combat. In 1943, a PT boat he commanded wasrammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Kennedy had saved his crew.Too ironic by nature to cast himself in the role of political savior,Kennedy nevertheless took seriously that as president, he carried thehopes of his generation. And he worried that it might seem he was lettinghis peers down.

In mid-1962 Kennedy could be excused if he doubted he would everhave a lasting effect on the American consciousness. That summer hispresidency was not going terribly well. Kennedy had just suffered atelling legislative failure. In what the Los Angeles Times described as“Kennedy’s Blackest Week with Congress,” his plan for medical assis-tance for the elderly had been defeated on July 21, 1962, by a slim mar-

1. Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952–1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 803.

gin in the Senate, despite a overwhelming Democratic majority in thatbody.2 The outcome had stung Kennedy, who reacted by holding a pressconference the night of the Senate vote to decry this “most serious defeatfor every American family.”3

That legislative failure was the latest in a series of signs that theKennedy magic was not having the effect that many had hoped and hehad expected. The key areas of his presidency were marked by frustra-tion and mistakes, high promise but middling result. The U.S. economy,for example, was in the doldrums. The hoped for expansion after therecessions of the late Eisenhower years had not happened. DespiteKennedy’s promise to “get the country moving again,” unemploymenthovered at 51/2 percent, much lower than what the United States wouldexperience in the 1970s and 1980s, but for this period unacceptably high.Business investment was also falling short of administration projections,though corporate earnings were strong and rising. And there were signsthat the U.S. economy might even get weaker. New orders for durablegoods—a bellwether for the industrial economy of the 1950s and1960s—had been falling since January 1962. The stock market had takena 25 percent tumble in the spring and had not recovered. Finally, due tooutflows in foreign aid, overseas investment, and the cost of militaryoperations and installations around the world, the U.S. balance of pay-ments situation was difficult. The gold supply was down to its lowestlevel since the Depression.4

The state of the U.S. economy that summer seemed to confirm someof the early criticisms of the young President. Conservative businessmenhad always been wary of Kennedy, who seemed too liberal despite theviews of his businessman father, Joseph P. Kennedy. As president-electKennedy had averted a run on the U.S. dollar by assuring Wall Streetthat the liberal economist and Kennedy adviser John Kenneth Galbraithwould not be designated secretary of the Treasury. Nominating insteadRepublican C. Douglas Dillon (who brought with him the talented finan-cier Robert Roosa to handle foreign economic policy), Kennedy pur-chased an uneasy truce with Big Business, but by the summer of 1962that truce seemed increasingly untenable. In April Kennedy had used his

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2. Los Angeles Times, 22 July 1962.3. New York Times, 22 July 1962.4. The United States covered 30 percent of the infrastructural cost of NATO; this meant anannual outflow to Europe of $1.5 billion. In the Kennedy era, exchange rates, the relationshipbetween national currencies, were fixed and imbalances in the accounts of the major Westerneconomies were redeemable in gold.

power to talk down the U.S. steel industry, which had announced a pricehike. Steel prices returned to their pre-showdown level—a victory forthe administration. But the defeat of Big Steel spread fears of more gov-ernment intervention and the Dow Jones industrials plummeted. “Notsince the days of FDR and the New Deal,” intoned the magazineNewsweek, “had the level of attack on a President, his family, and his poli-cies seemed quite so heated.”5 Becoming popular with some businessmenwere buttons emblazoned with “I Miss Ike.”

The condition of the economy also inspired some criticism from theLeft.6 Keynesian economists were pushing the President to ward off arecession by stimulating the economy. In a reversal of the politics of the1980s and 1990s, the Left advocated a tax cut, while the Right arguedthat tax cuts were unacceptable because they were inflationary. Liberalswere impatiently waiting for Kennedy to act on a tax plan.

Criticism of the President was not simply directed at the economicperformance of his administration. A little less than two hundred yearsearlier, the country had rid itself of George III and the Hanoveriandynasty. The Kennedys now seemed to some to be acting as if they werethe country’s newest royal line. Just after the election, John Kennedy hadappointed his brother Robert to his cabinet as Attorney General. Theyounger Kennedy had run the campaign for John F. Kennedy but lackedextensive judicial experience. More than a year later, Bobby Kennedyseemed to be working out in his job, though newspaper accounts of thehorseplay around the Kennedy pool in Virginia were confirming an imageof the Kennedys as spoiled and immature. But the most recent challengeto the President’s reputation was a storm of protest over the attempt toextend presidential coattails to an even younger member of the clan. Thatsummer Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy announced that he would be runningfor the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. “We could take Jack and Jackieand Bobby and Caroline,” said one wag, “but Teddy was too much.”7

In foreign affairs, the Kennedy record was also not flattering.Kennedy had criticized Eisenhower for his unimaginative foreign policy,accusing him both of having missed opportunities to reduce the chanceof nuclear war with the Soviet Union and of having undermined U.S.interests in the Third World. In the initial months of his term, Kennedyhad initiated more dialogue with the Soviets, at times involving his

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5. “Kennedy and His Critics,” Newsweek, 16 July 1962.6. New Republic, 16 July 1962.7. “Kennedy and His Critics,” Newsweek, 16 July 1962.

brother as a secret back channel to Moscow. Yet relations with Moscowseemed to be worse now than they had been in January 1961. A summitconference with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961 hadturned out badly, with the two leaders’ disagreeing over the precondi-tions for peace and stability in the world. As a result, there was littlemovement on controlling the nuclear arms race or even on getting asuperpower ban on testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere or under-ground. The latter goal was of special interest to the President, who sawa nuclear test ban as essential to preventing the diffusion of nuclear tech-nology to nonnuclear states.

The results were no better in the Third World. Efforts to removeCuban strongman Fidel Castro in early 1961 had led to the fiasco at theBay of Pigs, where a 1,200-man Cuban emigré army was stopped at thebeach and captured. A presidential promise to provide some air cover tothe force was rescinded at the eleventh hour, and the United States, forall Kennedy’s efforts to limit his public exposure to the failure, receivedthe brunt of criticism for the affair from Bogotá to Berlin. Meanwhilecarrots seemed to be as unproductive as sticks in pushing the adminis-tration’s goals. Having announced the Alliance for Progress in March1961 as a long-term crusade to combat Communism and shore up LatinAmerica’s fledgling democracies through trade and economic assistance,Kennedy found these goals seemingly incompatible in the short run. Bymid-1962, military leaders had removed friendly elected governments inArgentina and Peru and were threatening to do the same in Brazil, thelargest country in Latin America. These coups posed a threat to thecherished concepts of constitutionalism and democracy in the region anda challenge to the spirit of the Alliance for Progress. Yet the dilemma forKennedy was that the political generals in Latin America shared hisassessment of the threat to regional stability from Fidel Castro and theSoviet Union to a greater extent than did the democrats they overthrew.Should the United States work with these generals or not? The onlypossible exception to this dismal picture of U.S. policy in the ThirdWorld was in Southeast Asia, where a cease-fire had been negotiated inlandlocked Laos. But even there the policy had flaws: Kennedy knew thatthe North Vietnamese were not fully respecting their promise to let Laosbe neutral in the Cold War. Moreover, further south in the region there wasno cease-fire of any kind. Kennedy had made very little headway in helpingthe South Vietnamese defend themselves.

By the standards of the presidents who succeeded him, John F.Kennedy was extremely popular as he neared the midterm elections of1962. Yet Kennedy had reason not to be pleased with the polls that sum-

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mer. The recent defeats in Congress, uncertainty over the future courseof the U.S. economy, and the bashing by his critics had taken their toll.Kennedy’s public approval rating had dipped below 70 percent. For allthe glamor of the Kennedy White House and all the freshness of spiritbrought by this handsome young leader with the photogenic family,Kennedy was now less popular than Dwight Eisenhower had been.

It was in this moment of disappointment that Kennedy decided tocreate an unprecedented record of his actions as president. He had longbelieved that few if any outsiders could understand the burdens ofoffice.8 A few months earlier Kennedy had gotten into a spirited debatewith Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian who served asone of his special assistants in the White House, about how historiansevaluated presidential performance. Schlesinger had provoked theexchange by asking Kennedy’s opinion of a system to rank U.S. presi-dents. “Only the President himself can know,” Kennedy replied, “what hisreal pressures and his real alternatives are.”9 A less self-conscious leadermight well have shrugged off the inevitable chasm between the way hesaw his leadership and how it was perceived by others. But Kennedy wasan atypical politician in that he was also an historian at heart. In his sen-ior year at Harvard he had written an analysis of British foreign policybefore World War II. The thesis, published as Why England Slept, wasthe work of a young man who believed that democracies needed strong,vital leadership to fight dictatorships. That belief and the need to chroni-cle the struggles of the powerful never left Kennedy.

In mid-July 1962, Kennedy directed his Secret Service staff to installa recording system to tape his conversations in the Oval Office, theCabinet Room, and the residential portion of the White House. This wasnot unheard of for a U.S. president. To varying degrees, three ofKennedy’s predecessors had made secret tapes. But these had been small-scale operations, limited to the Oval Office and, at least in the case ofRoosevelt and Truman, rarely used. Kennedy had in mind somethingbigger.10 By the time of Dallas, 16 months later, he had recorded over270 hours of high-level deliberations in the White House.

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8. Author’s Interview with Theodore Sorensen, April 2000.9. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Greenwich,CT: Fawcett Crest, 1965), p. 619. On 29 July 1962 the New York Times published the first presi-dential ranking since 1948, which was done by Schlesinger’s father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.10. Franklin Roosevelt had a system installed in a closet of the Oval Office in the summer of1940. Although it appears that Roosevelt lost interest in this system after he was elected to anunprecedented third term in 1940, he never ordered its removal. Harry Truman inherited the

Robert Kennedy once joked that among the things their father hadtaught the brothers was “never write it down.”11 John F. Kennedy, despitea love for language and history, had followed his father’s advice for over ayear in the White House. But now he wanted a fuller record. The diffi-culties of his presidency had set the stage for this decision to install ataping system. Kennedy assumed that historians would not get his presi-dency right and secret recordings would give him fodder for a futurememoir. But the precise timing of Kennedy’s decision to tape and theenthusiasm with which he used the machine once the decision was madewere more likely the result of his desire to be sure to chronicle one par-ticular challenge of the many swirling about him that summer.

Amidst the many difficulties at home, Kennedy concluded that theUnited States faced its greatest foreign danger since the early 1940s.The President sensed that events were pushing the United States andthe Soviet Union closer to war than they had been for some time. Earlierin the year, Kennedy had read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, awell-written history of the coming of World War I. Kennedy, who readwidely, would on occasion come across something that profoundly influ-enced him. Tuchman’s work was important to him in that the narrativedemonstrated how none of the major players in Europe at the time—German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the Russian czarNicholas II, or British foreign minister Edward Grey—had wanted war.12

Yet war was the sum total of all of their actions. Kennedy saw a disturbing parallel between 1914 and 1962. Instead of

the Balkans, the tinderbox this time would be Adolf Hitler’s former capi-tal, Berlin. As partners in the Grand Alliance against fascism, the UnitedStates, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union had in 1945 eachearned the right to occupy the city. Since November 1958, however, theSoviets had intermittently threatened unilateral action to change thepostwar status quo and end the Allied occupation of the western sectorsof Berlin. In the late spring of 1962 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchevhad resumed pressure on the West to quit Berlin, insisting that otherwise

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system and used it intermittently. He left just over ten hours of tapes from 1945 and 1948.Dwight Eisenhower used a different system and taped quite a few meetings from 1954 to 1956,though only about a dozen hours have been found by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.11. Quoted in Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy, His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000),p.172. Robert Kennedy made this comment in a note to the director of central intelligenceJohn McCone on 2 May 1962.12. Robert Kennedy recounted this in Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (NewYork: Norton, 1969), p. 62.

peace would be impossible in Central Europe. Kennedy, for his part, wasvery clear that the United States would never abandon West Berlin. “It isa vital interest of the United States,” Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador,Anatoly Dobrynin, on July 17.13 Nevertheless, Khrushchev would not letup. In the third week of July, when negotiations between the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union ground to a halt over the future of a Westernpresence in the German city, Khrushchev warned U.S. ambassadorLlewellyn Thompson that “he would have no choice but to proceed with asignature of [a peace] treaty [with East Germany] after which ourrights there, including right of access, would end.”14 Khrushchev made nosecret about expecting a major crisis in the fall. He even asked Thompsonwhether Kennedy wanted the Berlin question “brought to a head” beforeor after the midterm elections in the United States.15

What made the Berlin issue so difficult was that the North AtlanticTreaty Organization (NATO) could not defend West Berlin ifKhrushchev lost patience and sought a forceful solution. West Berlinwas about 100 miles inside the territory of East Germany and could eas-ily be swallowed up by the Soviet force stationed in East Germany. Evenif Khrushchev decided not to invade, this NATO enclave was in a per-ilous position. The Soviets could starve West Berlin into submission byclosing down all access routes, including those by air, between WestGermany and the city. Weighing down file cabinets in the White Housewere contingency plans listing responses to various Soviet actionsagainst the city. What would the West do if the Kremlin announced thatthe East Germans were in charge of all access routes to West Berlin andthen the East German government closed them? How would NATOrespond if the Soviets prevented the use of Allied airfields? Conversely,would the Soviets react with force to a NATO move to defend WestBerlin? Would this chain of events lead to nuclear war?

In Kennedy’s eyes, the danger posed by the geography of Berlin wasmagnified by the personality of his adversary. A year earlier in Vienna, attheir only meeting, Kennedy had tried to engage Khrushchev on theproblem of misunderstanding and miscalculation in international poli-tics. The effort was a painful failure. Every time the U.S. president raised

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13. Memorandum of Conversation, 17 July 1962, FRUS, 15: 223–24.14. Telegram from the U.S. Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, 26 July1962, FRUS, 15: 253.15. Telegram from the U.S. Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, 25 July1962, FRUS, 15: 252–53.

his concern over the disastrous consequences of a misunderstandingbetween the two superpowers, the Soviet leader responded as if it wasonly Moscow that was ever misunderstood.

Kennedy did not want a war, and despite his suspicions of Khrushchev,he assumed that the Soviets were equally disinclined. Yet the superpowerconflict was intensifying over Berlin, making a miscalculation more likelyand potentially catastrophic in its result. The Soviet Union and the UnitedStates had nuclear weapons in Europe that might figure in any strugglethere. In these circumstances, a detailed record of the steps the UnitedStates was taking to defend its position in Central Europe could be ofgreat historical importance. Rather than starting a journal on July 30,1962, however, John F. Kennedy opted to begin a program of taping keyconversations with his advisers.

Kennedy was no stranger to the tape recorder. The Dictaphone, amachine the size of a suitcase that sat on an credenza, was standard issue inU.S. offices in the mid-1950s. President Eisenhower used one. When he wasa senator, Kennedy had used his Dictaphone as an administrative conven-ience. Kennedy dictated first drafts of his speeches into the machine, whicha secretary would transcribe and his aide, Theodore Sorensen, would thenpolish. By the standards of the twenty-first century, this was an unusualsystem for a political leader. Ordinarily the speech writer produces the firstdraft, which the leader then edits and improves. But Senator Kennedyunderstood the issues he was writing about, and when the subject was for-eign policy, he knew more than his staff. Moreover his staff was very small,and it was a polished literary style that he needed, not ideas.16 On occasion,Kennedy used the machine to dictate notes after an important meeting, butin those days he did not intentionally tape the meetings themselves.17

The most lasting use of taping in Kennedy’s Senate period came as a

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16. The earliest surviving Kennedy senatorial tapes were made in mid-January 1954. One hasKennedy preparing a speech attacking President Eisenhower’s new foreign policy strategy forrelying too heavily on the threat of nuclear war to deter Soviet aggression. While dictatingthis speech, Kennedy called Sorensen in and mused with him over some of the phrasing.Forgetting to turn off his dictating machine, the resulting conversation was recorded.Kennedy ultimately delivered this speech on 21 January 1954 to the Cathedral Club inBrooklyn, New York. See Dictabelt MR 77-18:2, John F. Kennedy Library.17. In June 1954, during the Geneva conference over the future of Indochina, Vice PresidentRichard Nixon dropped by to discuss with Kennedy the situation in Southeast Asia. Despitetheir political differences, the two men were friendly. Nixon’s office was actually across thehall from Kennedy’s and the Vice President often popped his head in. Kennedy did not recordthis conversation, but after the meeting he dictated his recollections (see Dictabelt MR 7718:10, John F. Kennedy Library).

result of his decision to author a book on congressional leaders who hadchampioned unpopular causes. Kennedy first conceived the idea for whatwould become Profiles in Courage in the fall of 1954.18 Originally the goalwas to produce a long article for a national magazine, but a series ofhealth setbacks in 1954–55—his back was operated on twice in sixmonths—left Kennedy with time on his hands.19 So he began to think ofwriting a book. In February 1955, Kennedy had his Dictaphone machinebrought south to Palm Beach, where he was convalescing. Over the nextthree months, the tape recorder served as the young Senator’s lifeline tothe activity of his Senate office. Part of the time he used it to keep upwith his official correspondence, but the rest of the time he used it to dic-tate at least 100 pages of notes for his amanuensis, Theodore Sorensen,who stayed in Washington. Kennedy’s notes consisted of quotations andobservations—his own and those of the historians whom he had read—which Sorensen apparently wove into a narrative.20

In his first year as president, Kennedy continued this practice of usingtape recorders primarily as management tools. On the one Dictaphonetape (or dictabelt) that survives from 1961, Kennedy is dictating some ofthe earliest National Security Action Memoranda (NSAM) of his admin-istration.21 Earlier, during the campaign, Kennedy had used a taperecorder to dictate a piece on why he had entered politics.22 OtherwiseKennedy taped neither telephone calls nor meetings in his office untilmid-1962.

In July 1962 Kennedy let only a few people know of his decision to

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Documents

OHN F KENNEDY - Chicago Tribune...JOHN F. KENNEDY THE GREAT CRISES, VOLUME ONE JULY 30–AUGUST 1962 Timothy Naftali Editor, Volume One George Eliades Francis Gavin Erin Mahan Jonathan