The Kennedy tapes.

Lawrence, Mark Atwood

The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, the Great Crises. 3 vols. Edited by Ernest R. May, Timothy Naftali, and Philip D. Zelikow. New York: Norton, 2001. 1,882 pages, plus CD-ROM.

Recordings of presidential meetings and telephone conversations can be both a blessing and a curse for scholars of postwar U.S. politics and diplomacy. On the positive side, the tapes provide a kind of time machine, enabling historians to listen in on the policy-making process as it unfolded. Researchers can discern emotion, idiosyncrasies, and the interplay of personalities in a way that written documents rarely permit. On the negative side, recordings can be maddeningly difficult to use. The sound quality is often poor, and many passages defy comprehension. Policy makers frequently wander from their agenda, making obscure references to names and events unfamiliar to researchers lacking encyclopedic knowledge. Often, too, individuals speak in broken or incoherent sentences, making the flow of conversation difficult to grasp.

Fortunately, help is at hand. Since the mid-1990s, researchers at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs have been working to transcribe and annotate the White House recordings of all six presidents who made them between 1940 and 1973, a mammoth task that will take many years to complete. The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, the Great Crises, a three-volume set of books edited by Ernest R. May, Timothy Naftali, and Philip D. Zelikow, represents the first major step in that process. A landmark achievement, the books not only provide researchers with valuable new material from the crisis-filled year of 1962 but also leave no doubt that the entire presidential recordings project will be a major asset to scholars.

The collection is not, of course, the first effort at transcribing presidential tapes and making them available to a broad readership. In 1997, May and Zelikow began the process by publishing The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, now a standard resource for students of the crisis. Michael Beschloss's two volumes of Lyndon Johnson's telephone conversations, published in 1997 and 2001, have similarly proved valuable to historians working across a range of foreign and domestic topics in the later 1960s.

But May, Naftali, and Zelikow's new collection surpasses these earlier efforts in several respects. Most obviously, it is unprecedented in its completeness. The three volumes, more than eighteen hundred pages in all, contain the entire run of recordings between Kennedy's decision to install the taping system at the end of July 1962 and the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis three months later, a logical end point for the first set of books. Researchers can rest assured that the volumes contain every shred of tape that has been declassified for the period in question, including updated versions of all the material included in May and Zelikow's previous book. Indeed, the new collection now stands as the most authoritative version of the missile crisis tapes.

The volumes are even more impressive for the effort that has gone into assuring accuracy. The project, under Naftali's day-to-day direction, used state-of-the-art sound equipment to increase the tapes' clarity, and as many as four members of the Miller Center's team of young scholars listened to each recording to reduce the chances of error. To be sure, readers will be disappointed by the abundance of the notation "[unclear]" inserted by the editors to indicate indecipherable passages. This unwelcome word appears as many as six or seven times on some pages. On the bright side, however, readers will draw confidence from this practice, which suggests the editors' obvious caution about introducing errors. Readers also can gain a sense of the collection's careful attention to accuracy by comparing its missile crisis transcripts with corresponding sections of May and Zelikow's 1997 book. The new volumes contain innumerable minor adjustments and additions, none of which appear to affect the meaning of the transcripts. Most alterations, in fact, merely increase the wordiness and convolution of language used by the policy makers. If those changes make the transcripts harder to read, they also arguably help to demonstrate the anxiety and confusion experienced by Kennedy administration officials.

The volumes also establish a new benchmark for transcriptions by including large amounts of helpful introductory and explanatory material. For each meeting or conversation, a researcher has prepared a concise introduction providing background and other information about the material that follows. In addition, the books contain brief passages explaining how each session fits into the president's day and how Kennedy spent his time before and after he appears on tape. This feature helps convey a sense of the extraordinary variety of issues that confronted the president on a daily basis and how little time was available for any one of them, easy facts for scholars to overlook as they focus on narrow subjects that may not, for the president, have occupied center stage for more than a few minutes. The volumes also benefit from extensive footnotes that explain names and other peripheral detail mentioned in the recordings. In many cases, these notes rest on research in the Kennedy Library and direct the reader to relevant documents housed there.

Nestled inside the back cover of volume 3 sits perhaps the collection's most innovative feature of all: a CD-ROM containing all of the audiotape transcribed in the books. Researchers can thus enjoy the best of both worlds. While relying on the printed page for substance, they can listen to the recordings for emotion, tone, and pace-qualities that bring conversations alive and often convey as much meaning as actual words do. Developed by the project's multimedia coordinator, Kristin Gavin, the CD-ROM is remarkably easy to use, requiring a computer equipped only with the Apple Quicktime program and a sound card. Users can find specific meetings by date or through a simple keyword search. The computer then puts on an impressive show: as the recording plays, the computer display scrolls through the text of the transcription, highlighting each line as it is spoken. Teachers may find the CD-ROM valuable for illustrating some of the tensest moments of the early 1960s. Predictably, the Cuban missile crisis recordings convey an especially powerful sense of anxiety.

Many scholars will, of course, be drawn to the volumes for the updated Cuba material. But the collection's more important contribution may lie in its coverage of less spectacular policy issues for which no transcripts have been available until now. Students of the Berlin crisis, for example, will find lengthy passages in which Kennedy and his advisers, still consumed by the problem a year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, struggle with the old question of how to defend the city without initiating nuclear war. Researchers interested in U.S.-Latin American relations also will find large quantities of revealing material. Most notably, the tapes capture the president's discomfort as he tries to secure partnerships with right-wing military officers in Peru and Brazil without brazenly contradicting his oft-stated desire for civilian rule in the hemisphere. On Vietnam, volume 2 contains an illuminating discussion between JFK and General Maxwell Taylor, who had just returned from a tour of the Far East. First, Taylor gives Kennedy an upbeat appraisal of the war, disputing pessimistic press reports. "You have to be on the ground to sense a lift in the national morale," Taylor asserts. The two men then decide on procedures for beginning use of defoliants, as the U.S. military advisers had requested. "I'm sure they don't want to screw around any longer," the president says (volume 2, pp. 165-69). Students of international monetary and trade policy, the test ban treaty negotiations, the Congo crisis, and Laos will find similarly valuable material.

Researchers interested in domestic policy will find considerably less. Still, the eighty or so pages devoted to civil rights constitute one of the collection's most vivid and captivating sections. The recordings begin at the end of September 1962 when an unfolding crisis in Oxford, Mississippi, captured the president's attention. A few days earlier, Governor Ross Barnett had violated a federal court order by refusing to allow an African-American student, James H. Meredith, to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Rioting erupted on the evening of September 30 after federal marshals escorted Meredith to campus to register for classes. Kennedy responded by ordering ten thousand national guardsmen to the scene. In a remarkable series of tense round-the-clock meetings with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and other aides, the president monitors the violence and the guardsmen's painfully slow progress in quelling it. "I haven't had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs," Kennedy quips somewhere near midnight (volume 2, p. 274). More seriously, he pleads with Barnett in several telephone calls to deploy state police to restore law and order.

None of these discussions of foreign or domestic policy, of course, qualify as blockbuster revelation. Indeed, probably the most stunning evidence in the collection concerns relatively minor matters: Kennedy's determination to use the CIA to crack down on leaks to the press and to influence elections in Brazil. For the most part, researchers will find the transcripts valuable for colorful detail and insight into the policy-making process. It is notable, for example, that the president remains relatively passive in most of the meetings, confining himself to questioning his aides but avoiding taking strong positions himself. The major exception occurs in Kennedy's meetings with members of Congress, occasions when he presumably felt pressure to show mastery of the issues. All in all, the tapes confirm the longstanding idea that Kennedy moved easily among his advisers and solicited a range of opinions.

The tapes demonstrate as well the extent to which the major problems confronting the administration tended to cut across particular policy issues. Kennedy's concern with the balance of payments and the gold drain, for example, colors the administration's approach to subjects ranging from Laos to European defense. His worries about Berlin also carry over powerfully into his consideration of other subjects, especially Cuba. The volumes add new evidence demonstrating the president's certainty that Moscow would move against Berlin if the United States attacked Cuba during the missile crisis.

The president's determination to avoid embarrassment and the appearance of softness also pervades many of his conversations. The generally even-keeled Kennedy shows most emotion when he detects a threat of this sort. During discussions of Peru, for example, he agonizes over the possibility that a decision to recognize the new military junta, after initially opposing it, would embarrass the United States. "It's going to look like the United States has encountered a stronger man ... and then had to back down," Kennedy complains (volume 1, p. 34). On another occasion, the president raises the possibility that his failure at the Bay of Pigs and his willingness to compromise on Laos may have emboldened Moscow to believe the United States might agree to abandon Berlin (volume 1, p. 267). Elsewhere, he derides allegedly weak-willed U.S. foreign service officers for cutting "a rather languid figure" in many parts of the world and lacking the "cojones" to defend U.S. interests against dictators whose style was "hard and tough" (volume 1, pp. 47-48).

For colorful material of this sort, the editors correctly assert in their introduction that the recordings constitute a source "simply without parallel or counterpart." Still, one must remain attentive to the problems the transcripts pose as historical evidence. For one thing, it is easy to forget that the tapes represent only a small fraction of Kennedy's meetings and telephone calls. Further complicating matters, the president himself sat at the controls, raising the possibility that he recorded certain conversations to distort the historical record in favorable directions. No one knows for sure, after all, why Kennedy made the tapes. One theory holds that he simply wanted material he could use later to write his memoirs. Yet it is impossible to avoid suspicion that Kennedy preserved material that would paint a flattering portrait of him and his administration.

Much as May, Naftali, and Zelikow downplay the matter in their introductions, researchers also must bear in mind the considerable degree to which significant chunks of the tapes remain classified. Many of the transcripts contain editors' notations indicating that a certain number of seconds of material have been excised. Several of the excised passages seem to relate to covert operations and other intelligence matters, including, for example, details of U.S. efforts to manipulate the Brazilian elections. Entire conversations have presumably been withheld as well. According to the volumes' introduction, about half of the approximately 250 hours of Kennedy administration tapes remained classified in 2001.

In these respects, however, the tapes are no more problematic than is the usual stuff of political and diplomatic history--written documents and oral reminiscences-and the risks of exploiting the transcripts as historical sources have the merit of being rather obvious. Used with care and in combination with other kinds of sources, the tapes offer a tremendous new addition to the historical record that will help historians gain a better feel for the ebb and flow of the policy-making process. Further installments of the Miller Center's valuable work will be most welcome.

References

Beschloss, Michael R., ed. 1997. Taking charge: The Johnson White House tapes, 1963-1964. New York: Simon & Schuster.

--. 2001. Reaching for glory: Lyndon Johnson's secret White House tapes, 1964-1965. New York: Simon & Schuster. May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds. 1997. The Kennedy tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

--Mark Atwood Lawrence
University of Texas at Austin