On the Record - Literally

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Guess what: Kennedy also taped his Oval Office conversations

When the existence of Richard Nixon's self-destructive, secret taping system was dramatically revealed early one afternoon at the Senate Watergate hearings in July 1973, Democrats rose in righteous wrath to assail the President. "It's an outrage," fumed House Speaker Carl Albert. "It's so fantastic as to be almost beyond belief," stormed AFL-CIO President George Meany. "A violation of privacy," snapped Nixon's defeated 1972 election opponent, George McGovern. And when Nixon's defenders suggested that he was only doing what John F. Kennedy had quietly practiced, Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy friend and onetime aide, found it "inconceivable" that J.F.K. had bugged his visitors. Schlesinger insisted haughtily: "It was not the sort of thing Kennedy would have done." Declared Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General: "I don't believe it happened. It's a shameful thing to do."

To their credit, officials of the Kennedy Library in Boston, which had revealed the existence of the J.F.K. tapes the same week the disclosure of the Nixon recordings was made, announced that they were then storing 68 Dictabelt recordings of telephone conversations and 125 tapes of meetings in which President Kennedy took part. But they did not detail just how the J.F.K. taping worked, tell who had been recorded or reveal the subjects discussed. Last week the Washington Post published most of the library's logs of these tapes, and any real distinction between the Nixon and Kennedy recording practices seemed insignificant.

Once again it was clear that the words of historic figures dealing with both minor and momentous events had been preserved while only the President was aware that every comment, however unkindly phrased or crudely expressed, might one day be revealed. The names on the Kennedy logs evoked an eventful era: General Douglas MacArthur, former Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The topics they discussed included post-mortems on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the U.S.-Soviet showdown over missiles in Cuba, the building of the Communist Wall in East Berlin and the fateful decisions to send more U.S. military advisers into South Viet Nam. As the tapes ran, Kennedy wrestled with civil rights in the South and worked with his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to pressure Mississippi officials into accepting James Meredith as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

The logs also disclose the curious range of conversations that J.F.K. taped: a meeting about "the gift of two tame deer" and the retirement of two White House policemen; a telephone call to congratulate California's Governor Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown on his election victory over Nixon in 1962; a talk with his brother in 1963 to discuss articles in TIME and Newsweek; even chats with his wife Jacqueline, on topics blacked out in the logs.