For the White House tapes, usually only the president and his inner circle knew of the recording while others in the room, or on the phone, did not. The result is an unbalanced intimacy in which the president, knowing he is speaking for the ages, fashions his remarks accordingly, while all others think they are speaking in private. In a telling aside, Shesol notes that Bobby, at a White House meeting in the summer of 1964, saw that a speakerphone was set to record the occasion - and therefore did not speak candidly. In general, the tapes quoted by Shesol provide a bracing immediacy and drama but do not alter our essential sense of what happened. The whole story has never before been told so well, in such detail, and with such authority.
Events pile up, closing some doors while opening others, and take on their own inexorable momentum.
Ultimately the 1960s would probably not have happened any differently in broad outline had Johnson and Kennedy not loathed each other. Kennedy doubted the war in part because it was Johnson's war, and LBJ resisted his Vietnam critics in part because Bobby was one of them - but both men already had fully adequate reasons for those actions. The events of the era consumed all its personalities, even the largest. Our lasting sense of Johnson and Kennedy is of two monumental yet touchy egos, bouncing around and colliding randomly in a cosmic pinball game, and finally defeated by their tragic times. Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America.