Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy

by Ted Widmer

  About six hours earlier, a long noontime meeting about Vietnam tried to salvage U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, with far-reaching consequences. It can be dizzying to realize the range of issues that were pressing upon the Oval Office with hourly urgency. As protected as the White House may seem, it was never that far away from the street, and I thought, by listening hard, that I could hear the sound of the marchers going down the Mall, demanding civil rights, even as the Vietnam meeting was unfolding. Much of the subsequent history of the 1960s was written inside that room, on that single afternoon.

  Of course, not all of the topics discussed have the same epic sweep. I tried for topicality with these selections, but they represent only a tiny percentage of the total recorded output. It may surprise students of other presidencies to realize how deeply JFK delved into policy matters that would seem, at first glance, to be sub-presidential. The meetings cover a wide swath of federal governance, from the deeply domestic concerns of local politicians, to the international events that so clearly absorbed Kennedy, to the distant reaches of outer space. Relentlessly, he grilled his advisors on the effects of policies, their vulnerabilities, and the need for follow-up action. Part of his mind was always occupied with the challenge of getting his expansive agenda through Congress, for there was little point in adopting idealistic positions if they had no chance of succeeding. Many of these meetings record that process, winning over senators one vote at a time. But at the same time, there was constant pressure to think beyond Washington and set in motion the enormous engine of the United States government, at home and around the world. Kennedy must have frustrated the State Department nearly as much as it frustrated him, with long meetings about every corner of the earth, often with foreign ministers and ambassadors of other countries who must have been astonished to be speaking directly to the leader of the free world.

  Clearly, he loved the job, and loved it precisely for the chance it gave him to translate thought into action. Kennedy called the presidency “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government.” These conversations reveal a man very much inside that center. “The presidency is the place,” he says to his dinner party companions in the tape of January 5, 1960, that appears near the beginning of this book—and then over and over again: “it is the seat of all power,” “it is the center of the action,” and “it’s the President who really functions.”

  These tapes eminently bear out that theory. His vigor—to borrow an overused word of the era—is palpable. There he is, urging his advisors to work harder and think better, impatient with lazy answers. He drives the meeting forward, tapping his fingers, asking clipped questions, shaving away irrelevancies like a carpenter with a lathe. Or when making a phone call, he speeds up the other speaker with staccato “yeahs,” until a terminal “righto” ends the call abruptly. Sometimes, when a slower speaker has the floor (Averell Harriman, for example, or Dean Rusk), one can sense Kennedy’s impatience.

  When asked, during that same 1960 dinner party, why he would urge a young college student to go into politics, he answers that “it provides an opportunity for him to participate in the solution of the problems which interest him.” It was an understated way of saying that politics gave him a chance to answer the great challenges of his time, and perhaps to achieve the Greek definition of happiness which he often quoted—“full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.” The stakes were big. So were the rewards, but so too were the difficulties. In an age that has become far more cynical about politics and politicians, there is something encouraging about the zeal with which Kennedy and his staff tried to tackle the problems they encountered.

  The Kennedy management style can certainly be criticized for unorthodoxy. He favored restless intellects like his own, and those who would argue with him—as James Webb, the head of NASA, does in one of the meetings. It was well known that he disliked the buttoned-down approach of the Eisenhower White House, with carefully groomed meetings and few disagreements. Bluntly, he said, “Cabinet meetings are simply useless. Why should the postmaster general sit there and listen to a discussion of the problems of Laos?” The result is that these Oval Office bull sessions were all the more important for shaping the course of the New Frontier. And they seem, on the face of the evidence, to have generally shaped it well. Not all of these meetings resulted in favorable outcomes. Vietnam presented Kennedy with an array of possible outcomes, all unattractive, in the fall of 1963, and he was deeply troubled by the violent coup of November 2, as a privately recorded dictation in this collection indicates. Another private reflection, from around November 12, indicates that his support for Civil Rights was already raising alarm bells about his reelection prospects. So there were dark clouds on the horizon. But still, the record, as conveyed by these working conversations, is one of a presidency adapting aggressively to the demands of the times and leading the nation forward, exactly as the 1960 campaign had promised to do.

  As a student of the past, Kennedy knew well that presidential reputations are variable and depend on a wide range of factors, many of which are beyond the control of the office. In irritation, he once complained to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose father (Sr.) had pioneered the presidential ranking system we now cannot escape, “How the hell can you tell? Only the President himself can know what his real pressures and his real alternatives are.”

  Kennedy continues to do very well in those rankings, but for reasons that would probably irritate him, or at least touch upon his finely honed sense of irony. He deplored helpless sentimentality, which is exactly what we bring to the memory of our presidents, and to him in particular. He admired unblinking realism, which is in as short supply now as it was then. Critics will point out that he benefited handsomely from well-managed publicity campaigns throughout his career, and after, with a nostalgia for Camelot that has never lost its power, even a startling half century after the fact. But the creation of these tapes in 1962, and their final release in 2012, has done much to sweep away the sentiment and restore the substance that was at the heart of this presidency.

  Mythology exists for a reason; we tell ourselves stories to explain complicated subjects, and the presidency of the United States is nothing if not complicated. But in the final analysis, John F. Kennedy preferred history, because its verdicts emanate from facts. The public has a right to as full an accounting from the past as it does from the politics of the present—the mistakes as well as the successes. Thanks to these recordings, and the completion of the fifty-year process that led to their release, a fuller accounting is now possible. We will never know all of the reasons that President Kennedy established this remarkable repository of recorded information. But we can take solace that he did. I hope that readers enjoy this opportunity to listen to these dialogues, from the innermost chamber of the republic, unfiltered and immediate.

  The Yale speech that I began with went to the core of the matter:

  For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

  Now, thanks to these tapes, readers can move past the myth, and judge the essence of a presidency for themselves.

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY IN NEW ROSS, IRELAND, JUNE 27, 1963

  John F. Kennedy may have been the youngest president elected and a supreme modernist in a modernist age, but he also possessed an acute sense of his nearness to the American past. He invited historians to work and speak in the White House, and unlike most presidents, he formally joined the fraternity by enlisting in the American Historical Association, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had before him. He read widely in British and American history and wrote with surprising breadth for a hard-charging politician. Profiles in Courage explored the great and not-so-great with an impressive disregard for the
big names guaranteed to sell a book in 1957—Lincoln or Jefferson or Washington. Instead, Kennedy chronicled the little known (who ever heard of Edmund Ross?) along with the well known but not especially well liked (Daniel Webster) and, surprisingly, made a best-seller and a Pulitzer out of it all.

  But Profiles was only one point of entry into history. It is a commonplace to lament that Kennedy did not live a longer life, but what is remarkable is how much he saw and achieved in the time that was allotted to him. He witnessed Germany writhing under the madness of Nazism on the eve of the war and attended the anguished debates in Parliament as England wrestled with the vexing question of how to respond to Hitler. He famously served in a distant Pacific outpost of the global conflict that ensued, and in the spring of 1945, as a cub reporter, he covered the San Francisco conference that launched the United Nations and painted a more hopeful vision of the world to come. A month later, he walked through the ruins of Berlin with the secretary of defense and the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower. All of this took place before he launched his political career in 1946.

  Despite the newness so palpably in the air in the 1960s, history colored all of the great events of the Kennedy presidency. Without a doubt, the centennial of the Civil War gave additional urgency to the Civil Rights Movement and even to the geopolitical situation (Kennedy called the Cold War “a global civil war”). The waste and carnage of World War I were not all that far from memory, and in 1962, Kennedy was so taken by Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August that he ordered it sent to military installations around the country. That book, which explored the question of how self-destructive wars are started, could not have been more appropriate on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And of course, World War II was the experience that unified everyone in the upper reaches of political life, in the United States as well as abroad.

  Inevitably, John F. Kennedy’s sense of history seeped into the conversations that he recorded. Two remarkable tapes from early 1960 reveal that he was thinking deeply about the circumstances of his life, from primal forces to small accidents of fate, that were leading him to grasp for the great prize in American politics. One of the tapes records him parrying good-natured questions from a group of friends at a Georgetown dinner party, the other dictating more serious reflections on his life. This may have been the natural instinct of a candidate to set the record straight, or to convey a sense of his origins to the American people—much as Lincoln had issued a short autobiographical sketch when he ran a century earlier. But it seems more likely that Kennedy was contemplating a memoir of some kind, a book (to be written later) that he often mentioned in the White House. These conversations take us closer to that book than one might expect.

  On October 3, 1961, Kennedy greeted a group of historians who had issued a set of the papers of John Adams, the first occupant of the White House. Revealingly, he told them, “Some of us think it wise to associate as much as possible with historians and cultivate their good will.” Then, with typical irreverence, he added that he liked the approach of Winston Churchill, who predicted that history would treat him gently, “because I intend to write it.”

  That was tongue-in-cheek, of course; Kennedy admired the skepticism of the historical fraternity he had joined, and knew that he would inevitably be judged by them after leaving office, in ways that were beyond his control. He said as much at Amherst College in October 1963, when he praised those who question power, “for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.” Clearly, he wanted to tell his part of the story. The tapes offer a beginning.

  RADIO INTERVIEW, ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA, 1940

  Kennedy published his first book, Why England Slept, in 1940, the year that he graduated from Harvard College. A study of England’s failure to increase defense spending in response to the rise of Nazism, it showed a serious grasp of international affairs, and its call on the United States to prepare for war flew in the face of many of the pronouncements of his father, former ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Nevertheless, Ambassador Kennedy was instrumental in supporting the book’s publication, and a range of influential opinion-shapers praised the new work, including the greatest of them all, Henry R. Luce, the force behind Time and Life. Exactly one radio interview survives from the media blitz, a recording made from a station in Rochester, Minnesota, featuring a very young author not long out of college.

  ANNOUNCER: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. At this time, we are indeed pleased to have with us in our studios Mr. John F. Kennedy, son of Ambassador and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, who is in our city visiting Dr. and Mrs. Paul O’Leary. Mr. Kennedy is the author of the recently published book, Why England Slept....

  JFK SIGNING A COPY OF HIS BOOK WHY ENGLAND SLEPT FOR ACTOR SPENCER TRACY, NOVEMBER 1940

  [break]

  This young man from Boston has a clear-headed, realistic, unhysterical message for his countrymen, and for his elders. And with that, we want you, too, of the radio audience, to meet Mr. John F. Kennedy, who is known to his friends as Jack Kennedy. But first, before we get into questions about this much-discussed book, I’d like to ask a few questions about how our guest has spent some of his twenty-three years. Tell me, Mr. Kennedy, where did you go to school?

  JFK: Well, I attended Harvard, I just finished there this June.

  JFK AT HIS HARVARD GRADUATION, 1940

  ANNOUNCER: And what are you studying at the present time?

  JFK: Well, I studied international relations there, and I plan to go on to law school the next three years, and study law at Yale University.

  ANNOUNCER: And may I ask what are your plans for the future?

  JFK: Well, I don’t know exactly yet. I’m interested more or less in working sometime in my life for the government, but I haven’t really decided as yet.

  KENNEDY CAMPAIGN SONG, 1952

  In the pre-television age, songs were more essential to campaigns than now, and a small number of recordings preserve music from the early Kennedy campaigns. This selection, from the 1952 Senate race, in which Kennedy defeated the incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, offers a robust set of rhyming reasons for a Kennedy vote.

  When we vote this November,

  Let’s all remember,

  Let’s vote for Kennedy!

  Make him your selection,

  In the Senate election,

  He’ll do more for you and me!

  Look at Kennedy’s history,

  You’ll see it’s no mystery,

  Why he suits us to a tee.

  He’s your kind of man,

  So do all that you can,

  And vote for Kennedy!

  PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN HELPS THE KENNEDY SENATE CAMPAIGN, BOSTON PUBLIC GARDEN, OCTOBER 1952

  LETTER TO JACQUELINE KENNEDY, CIRCA 1959

  Probably recorded in 1958 or 1959, this dictated letter reveals Kennedy speaking with considerable irony as he records his sharp observations of the summer scene in Newport, Rhode Island, for the benefit of his wife. A previous Newport resident, Edith Wharton, might not have disavowed this tart account of the mores of an elite group of Americans, as the author, both of them and separate from them, prepared his ascent.

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY, JR., AT BAILEY’S BEACH, NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND, SEPTEMBER 15, 1963

  JFK: Dearest Jackie, I’m divid[ing] this letter into two parts, one typewritten and the other handwritten, the typewritten part to give you the news of my visit to Newport. I went up there last Friday afternoon, and Caroline looks beautiful. Miss Shaw.1 She evidently felt rather strange that first three or four days, but since then has spread her charm out, and seemed in great form when I saw her. Yusha2 had his two twins there, who looked very Slavic and rather green. He drove them up in his open car, with his great Irish nurse holding them both in the back seat of his Buick with the top down for six hours, which may have been responsible for their color. Alice looks as, looks beautiful and as noncommittal as ever. She walks ten yards ahead of Yusha on the beach, and I
think will be walking increasingly far ahead of him as time goes on. She’s planning to enter the Actors Studio this fall, and I would think that this would produce numerous results. She spent the three days of the weekend in close conversation with [unclear]. Both being artists, they had a good deal in common.

  Everyone was up there for the golf weekend. Stanley Mortimer3 was heard to tell Sarah Russell that they’d had a long discussion the night before and decided that Blenheim4 was an “inn.” The Smiths were there, Leverett Shaw and his wife. I did not, I went over and played with Denny—Governor Roberts5—at Narragansett on Saturday and stayed only, and went to the Ishams’ on Saturday evening. John Isham made several speeches after dinner of the kind that we heard at the wedding. The group was very nice. I was taken into the kitchen and introduced to all the help who were just over from Ireland. I found them more attractive than the guests. I saw Chris Dunphey, who told me Mrs. Fraser’s sister, Mrs. Ayres, does not think that I’m serious about politics and therefore cannot support me.