Listening In (6 page)

But it is hard to explain why Kennedy would have let a year go by before installing the new system. Why not launch the tapes in the summer of 1961? Why, suddenly in July 1962, did the Oval Office turn into a secret recording studio? The solution to that mystery may be irretrievable. Certainly there was a high degree of enthusiasm for recording technology in those years; it was a rare magazine that did not include an advertisement for the latest in stereo equipment, and Tandberg, a Norwegian brand, was well known to audiophiles. It may mean something that on July 23, 1962, the new communications satellite, Telstar 1, beamed its first live television signal across the Atlantic Ocean. The world was quickly becoming wired, and everyone was listening in.

The Bay of Pigs also taught the Kennedy administration that White House communications were inherently balky, and in its immediate aftermath, McGeorge Bundy modernized the West Wing by bringing the latest technological wizardry into the brand-new Situation Room. In that time of expanding capacity, it may have made sense to add audiotapes to the President’s arsenal of information. And to use great discretion, since so many others were interested in his conversations. That he asked agents of the Secret Service to carry out the installation suggests that President Kennedy wanted to maintain tight personal control over the tapes. There were certainly military aides available to install recording devices—but that would have exposed the plan to a wider audience. This was a small operation by design.

Surely there were political as well as military reasons for wanting to capture conversations on tape. During the various crises of the Civil Rights Movement, President Kennedy walked a difficult tightrope with the governors of Southern states—Alabama and Mississippi in particular—as they all tried to negotiate face-saving ways to defuse the tensions. In the midst of these highly charged conversations, it would have brought a negotiating edge to reveal to the governors—as Robert Kennedy apparently did—that their private promises to work with the federal government were now an irrevocable part of the record. To have their personal expressions of goodwill exposed would have hurt them at home—which is another way of saying, as Kennedy did to the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, “I give you full permission to denounce me in public, as long as you don’t in private!”

Furthermore, it may have occurred to President Kennedy, an omnivorous consumer of intelligence, that leaving the tapes rolling was an interesting way to hear the conversation when he left the room. There is no evidence that he did this—in fact, Evelyn Lincoln later expressed her opinion that he never listened to any of the tapes at all. But a revealing moment in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis occurs when Kennedy leaves and his most shrill critic, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, complains about his leadership. Though it is unlikely Kennedy heard these remarks, definitely
not
intended for the ears of the President, it is fascinating to be able to hear them today, and comforting to know that none of LeMay’s reckless suggestions for invading Cuba and launching a nuclear war were heeded. In one of the last tapes declassified, in January 2012, Defense Secretary McNamara reveals to the President that one of his naval commanders was insubordinate at the height of the crisis and wanted to sink a Soviet vessel against his strict orders. If anything, these recordings make the Missile Crisis even more terrifying.

A final reason that Kennedy may have recorded his meetings and calls is simply that he respected the verdict of history and recognized his obligation to record conversations of great consequence for future generations. Mrs. Lincoln voiced her support for this explanation as well, and it makes intuitive sense, judging from his tendency to turn on the machines during important meetings (and not just confrontations with potential adversaries).

It has been a problem since the dawn of the presidency—how do we capture the words and thoughts of the individuals to whom we give so much power? Do they not have a certain obligation to report back to us? The first president, George Washington, kept a diary—a highly imperfect diary, with relatively little of interest and episodic entries. (The first entry, recorded five months after he took office, was “Exercised in my Carriage in the forenoon.”) Still, he kept it. And how impoverished our understanding of Lincoln would be without the detailed personal observations written by his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay. But for the most part, we have not known what presidents were saying behind closed doors. For the first 150 years of the United States, there is almost nothing on this subject, though presidents were presumably speaking volubly. We have their letters and their official pronouncements, but not the stuff of daily life. It is a significant loss.

Like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy was himself a historian (his book of senatorial portraits,
Profiles in Courage
, won a Pulitzer for biography in 1957). And personal history must have been on his mind as well. Dating back nearly to the dawn of the presidency, presidents have been expected to write memoirs. In 1821, at the age of seventy-seven, Thomas Jefferson began to write out “some recollection of dates and facts concerning myself,” although he stopped before his election in 1800. Lincoln wrote an abbreviated recollection of his life for a campaign sketch in 1860. Grant famously wrote the first presidential memoir that sold well—though he, too, ignored his presidency (for reasons that were all too easy to understand). In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt wrote an account that included the White House years, thereby obligating nearly all of his successors to do the same and launching an armada of autobiographies that may have undone some of his environmental legacy, by wiping out a forest or two. But with most of these laboriously written efforts, there is the feeling of a monument being chiseled.

The Kennedy tapes are different—this is a president being president. There is no chisel in sight; he simply thinks, and talks, and argues, in the heat of the moment. And he reflects on himself, from time to time, almost as if this were a memoir in spoken form—an audiobook before the concept was invented. On a small number of important occasions, he speaks directly into a Dictaphone to record his impressions of a historic day—the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the day that he hears that South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, has been killed.

After so many words have been written about John F. Kennedy, it feels right to let him speak for himself. This is the closest to an autobiography we will ever get. Kennedy often mentioned his forthcoming memoir in jocular comments, usually at his own expense, on days when things were not going well (he speculated, all too prophetically, that this book might be titled:
Kennedy: The Only Years
). Two of the recordings in this collection predate the presidency and reveal that in early 1960, just after declaring his candidacy, Kennedy was already thinking deeply about the story of his life and the unlikely journey that had brought him so far, so fast. These two recorded documents seem to constitute a first draft of sorts toward a book that was regrettably never written.

Immediately after the assassination, Bouck dismantled the system, and from there, the tapes went on a long journey into warehouses and federal storage facilities before the opening of the Kennedy Presidential Library in 1979. It is impossible to know exactly what happened to them in these years, or if any disappeared. Some recordings found their way into private possession, but over the years many have been tracked down and reunited with the collection.

The existence of the tapes was first revealed in the summer of 1973. Sensationally, the Watergate hearings elicited a remark on July 16 from a Nixon aide, Alexander Butterfield, who told Congress that the president’s meetings were routinely recorded. That had immense ramifications for the hearings and Richard Nixon’s rapidly plummeting fortunes. But it also resonated with the community of presidential libraries, and that same summer, the Kennedy Library director stepped forward and announced that it, too, had presidential recordings. In fact, we now know that taping was common in the modern presidency. Nearly every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan taped meetings at one point or another.
¹
Franklin D. Roosevelt had experimented in the summer of 1940 with a recording system installed by sound engineers from RCA. One microphone was placed in a lamp on the president’s desk and another in his telephone, but FDR’s interest waned after 1940, and only fifteen hours of tape have survived. Harry Truman briefly experimented with the system, then ordered it dismantled. There are nine and a half hours of his recordings extant, of low sound quality. Dwight D. Eisenhower showed slightly more interest, and records suggest that he made recordings on approximately two dozen occasions, but what survives is of modest importance.

What began in 1962 was a commitment to taping on a very different order. For both quantity and quality, the Kennedy tapes signaled a quantum leap forward. But if the tapes are part of a long continuum they still came as a shock to Kennedy intimates. Ted Sorensen, the President’s speechwriter and one of his closest aides, claimed to be “dumbfounded.” Other top staffers—McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—confessed that they had no idea. The President’s brother, Edward M. Kennedy, did not know at the time. The tapes fit into no known category of presidential information—they were not official documents, they were not classic JFK speeches, and they were not press conference transcripts. They were not rehearsed or prepared for the public in any way. They were simply the raw material of history—and specifically, the hard and not always glamorous work of leading an enormous federal bureaucracy. It can be easy to forget that this unusually photogenic President actually had a day job, and that he spent most of his time in meetings, advancing his domestic and foreign agenda, calming down senators and congressmen, twisting arms here and there, and considering tactics with his hardworking staff. They are the supporting actors in this drama. For every split-second photo op, there were hours and hours of these meetings, driving the business of the nation forward. These were long meetings, in which every point of view was exhausted, and most of the participants as well—but they were effective at lighting a fire when it needed to be lit. The Oval Office is an important ceremonial space, but it is also the boiler room of the ship of state.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY ON THE TELEPHONE DURING A CAMPAIGN STOP IN MCKEESPORT, PENNSYLVANIA, OCTOBER 13, 1962

What to do with the tapes was a mystery at first. Initially, they were considered the private property of the Kennedy family. But over time, a consensus grew that these irreplaceable sources of information belonged in the public record. The Kennedy family gave the tapes to the National Archives in 1976. Beginning in 1983, the Kennedy Presidential Library began releasing the tapes to the historical community. The process was slow and clunky at first, for many reasons—bits of conversations were made available on cassette audiotapes, and transcripts made, to the best of the ability of librarians. Early releases focused on topical themes like the Civil Rights Movement, and were targeted at relatively small audiences of scholars.

But now we can do vastly better, and this book is designed to celebrate that fact. By the time it is published, the Kennedy Presidential Library will have completed a heroic task, by not only releasing the tapes but putting many of them online in a form that is easily streamed and audible anywhere there is an Internet connection. This is the first publication to draw from the entirety of the tapes. In January 2012 the final forty-five hours of tapes were released, taking the story to the third week of November 1963, and not the first week as previously believed. In effect, the audio archive is now complete.
²

Of course, nothing fifty years old is perfect, and these tapes are no exception. The sound quality varies widely. Extraordinarily, the most powerful office on earth—an office that could launch a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile—encountered some difficulty in recording the human voice. In Evelyn Lincoln’s memoir, she recounts an amusing anecdote in which she and President Kennedy tried to install a “squawk box” for interoffice communication but realized that they had no idea how to work it. With the tapes, they fared better, but the results were unpredictable. The sound quality has been notably improved for this publication, but still, there are hisses and crackles and pops. People speak over one another. A voice near a microphone will sound much louder than one farther away. Sometimes the sound drops out for no clear reason, or becomes much too loud. Even the rustling of papers can be deafening. Many of the Dictabelt recordings have skips. These noises offer some verisimilitude and remind us just how simple the recording system was. At other times the tapes continue to roll long after everyone has left the room, including one lilting moment when I could hear the singing of Christmas carols far off in the distance.