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THE JFK TAPES: ROUND THREE
David Coleman, ed. The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Volumes IV-VI: The Winds of Change. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. 1,594 pp. Index. $150.00.
In my nearly quarter-century as Historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, I did extensive work with sound recordings, particularly the then-classified White House tapes made during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. I was the first nonmember of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) and the first professional historian to evaluate these recordings, and I soon learned how difficult it was to work with these noisy, low-fidelity, reelto-reel tapes. Nonetheless, it was the historian's ultimate fantasy: the chance to be on the inside during the most perilous chapter in Cold War history and to learn-within the technical limits of the recordings-what really happened.
In that context, readers should be aware at the outset that this reviewer has publicly questioned the accuracy of the work by the editors of the 1997 Harvard Press JFK Cuban Missile Crisis transcripts and the 2001 Miller Center/Norton transcripts of President Kennedy's overall White House recordings. Tensions began after I reviewed the 1997 transcripts (listening to one full meeting and spot-checking the others) and found they were riddled with major errors that distorted the historical record and seriously undercut the entire rationale for even publishing transcripts. None of the academic reviewers had listened to any of the tapes to confirm that the transcripts were reliable. They took for granted, based on the academic status of the editors and the claims by the publisher, that these "full and authenticated transcripts" were "the most accurate . . . that is at present possible."1
The editors responded by insisting that my corrections, which they described as "amendments," were not "very important" and that "none of them change what a reader of the transcripts takes away concerning the essence or even the minute details" of these historic meetings. They also assured scholars that any mistakes would be corrected in the "authoritative" 2001 transcripts. I subsequently reviewed those transcripts as well and found they were substantially improved compared to the 1997 version, but still well short of what they could and should have been. Not until three years had passed...