Source Material: Controversy: The Kennedy Tapes: Past and Future

We are glad to reply to the concerns Sheldon M. Stem (2000) and Terry Sullivan (2000) have expressed in Presidential Studies Quarterly about The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They axe quite right to be attentive to the quality of transcription of presidential recordings. We hope we can reassure them and other scholars of our dedication to the perfection of this task. Between 1940 and 1973, presidents of the United States secretly recorded hundreds of their meetings and conversations in the White House. Although some recorded a lot, others just a little, they created a unique and irreplaceable source for understanding not only their presidencies and times but the presidency as an institution and, indeed, the essential process of high-level decision making. These recordings of course do not displace more traditional sources such as official documents, private diaries and letters, memoirs, and contemporaneous journalism. They augment these sources much as photographs, films, and recordings augment printed records of presidents' public appearances. But they do much more than that. Indeed, we think it will take some time before the wider public and scholarly community can adequately come to grips with the significance of this unique material. Of the six presidents who used secret recording devices, three did so extensively. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower recorded to a limited extent. John Kennedy, however, after installing a more elaborate taping system in July 1962, used it frequently during the sixteen months before his murder in November 1963. Using a different system, Lyndon Johnson made recordings throughout his presidency, especially in his last, tumultuous year in office. Richard Nixon, after two years in office without using any recording devices, installed a system which, because it was voice-activated, captured every conversation in a room with a microphone. Installed in various locations, his system operated in this way for two-and-a-half years. We began working in 1995 on a tiny fraction of these materials, the tapes made by Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. We were not the first to examine the missile crisis tapes. In 1983, the John E Kennedy Library released its transcript of meetings on October 16, 1962, as well as a rough, paraphrased transcript prepared by McGeorge Bundy for meetings on October 27. They released only illustrative snippets of the tapes themselves, so the quality of the transcripts they had released could not be checked by scholars. Shortly after this release, the National Archives made a policy decision to cease preparing transcripts of presidential recordings, citing the difficulty and expense. Scholars naturally seized on the 1983 transcripts from these two days of the missile crisis. They were published in International Security and used in the relevant volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States, published as recently as 1997. These transcripts were conscientiously prepared but nevertheless contain numerous errors, several of which are significant. The library's transcripts for October 16 contributed to a revisionist portrait of a more passive, diffident Kennedy, one who was unaware of such important matters as the deployment of his own country's Jupiter missiles to Turkey. Bundy's work on the October 27 tapes also had many errors in detail, but the errors were not terribly important More important were the omissions, the material he did not transcribe at all from that day's conversations. There matters rested for about fourteen years. Stem stated that he was the historian of the Kennedy Library during practically all of this period. The introduction to his essay states that he worked with the Kennedy tapes from 1981 to 1996. Although we have no reason to believe he actually prepared any of the transcripts released by the library, we remain puzzled that, given his position and access, he did not attempt over the years to correct or improve the transcripts the library had released. …