Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy
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kiwis Romanus sum (civis Romanus sum/I am a Roman citizen),
Lust z nach Bearlin comen (Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen/Let them come to Berlin)
PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S SPEECH CARD FROM BERLIN, SPELLED PHONETICALLY TO IMPROVE HIS PRONUNCIATION OF GERMAN AND LATIN WORDS
EISENHOWER: Mr. President, I’ll tell you, here’s something. I can’t document everything. But Clay27 was there. Poor, poor old Smith28 is gone. We begged our governments not to go into Berlin. We … I asked that they build a cantonment capital, a cantonment capital at the junction of the British, American, and Russian zones. I said, “We just don’t, we can’t do this.” Well, it had been a political thing that had been done first in the advisory council, European Advisory Council, in London. And later confirmed and … but Mr. Roosevelt said to me this twice—I’m talking about my concern. And he said, “Ike,”—and he was always very, you know, informal—he said, “Ike,” he said, “quit worrying about Uncle Joe. I’ll take care of Uncle Joe.”29 That’s exactly what he told [me]. Once in Tunis and once when I came over here about the first or second or third of January of ’44. That’s the last time I ever saw him. Now he just wouldn’t believe that these guys were these tough and really ruthless so-and-sos they were.
MEETING WITH VICE ADMIRAL HYMAN RICKOVER, FEBRUARY 11, 1963
Hyman Rickover had one of the most storied military careers of the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1900, he emigrated with his family in 1905, at the time of anti-Jewish pogroms, and grew up in New York and Chicago, where he graduated from John Marshall High School and won admission to the United States Naval Academy. So began a remarkable naval career encompassing sixty-three years of active duty, marked by administrative ability, tireless work, and extremely independent judgment. Rickover served on submarines in particular and over the course of the 1940s and 1950s became the legendary “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” known for his technical expertise, his strategic wisdom, and his personal interest in interviewing thousands of officer candidates. One of them, Jimmy Carter, later claimed that Rickover was the greatest influence on him after his parents. Rickover gave President Kennedy a plaque that he displayed on his desk in the Oval Office, featuring the words of an old Breton fisherman’s prayer: “O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
Unusually, for a Cold Warrior on the front lines, Rickover was fascinated by education and the role it played in bettering society. In 1960, he published Education and Freedom, which announced that “education is the most important problem facing the United States today” and called for a “massive upgrading” of academic standards. Two years later, he published a detailed comparison of American and Swiss schools, arguing that the United States was inferior in nearly every respect. In this conversation with Kennedy, he took advantage of a presidential audience to press his point, dexterously comparing Kennedy’s privileged upbringing with his own as a first-generation immigrant.
MEETING WITH VICE ADMIRAL HYMAN RICKOVER, FEBRUARY 11, 1963
JFK: I was just reading this rather good article in the Baltimore Sun this morning about school dropouts, in Baltimore and some of these other cities, what percentage they are, and why. A rather large percentage is lack of interest and so on. Now, why is it that children seem, particularly on television, and having exposure to the affluent society, why is it that it isn’t drilled into them, a sufficient sort of competitive desire … [to this rather rich]?
RICKOVER: I’ll tell you, you can take two opposite extremes, you can take my case and you can take your case. In your case, you had parents who recognized that money can do you a great deal of harm. And they took care to see, dammit, that it did not. That’s because you had intelligent parents. In my case, I was brought up where, a lot times we didn’t have enough to eat; you had to go out and fight, and so one recognized the importance of school. I think it’s something like that. Now when you get in between, that’s where you have your problems.
JFK: What I think of, how drilled into my life was the necessity for participating actively and successfully in the struggle. And yet I was brought up in a luxurious atmosphere, where this was a rather hard lesson. And you, from your own life …
RICKOVER: Your parents were exceptional in this respect. The vast majority of parents who have children now [unclear] are just trying to do everything they can to make everything easy. In that way they are really defeating what they are trying to do.
JFK: If you think that it’s built into everybody, a survival instinct, which there is, …
RICKOVER: You know I do! You know it. You know it. Because everything is made easy for them. Some of them get to expect, your parents will take care of you. So you have youngsters going off and getting married. And fully expecting that the parents, you know, will come to their support. And they do. I can give you any number of cases like that, where the parents would have done much better for their children to throw ’em out. There comes a time in every animal life—and human being is a form of animal life—when you have to fend for yourself. This is where the trouble is. Today you can make these arguments today and society will support you. That never used to be the case before. This is the problem we have to face, and we have to try to get around it. Now excuse me if I’m taking up your time, you’re the busiest man in the world.
JFK: Well.
RICKOVER: I don’t want to get on all my ideas. But I have thought that if you really wanted to do something for this country, you will [hit on?] education. Because without education, you can’t do it.
SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY STOPS TO EAT IN A DINER IN NASHUA, NEW HAMPSHIRE, DURING THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY CAMPAIGN, MARCH 5, 1960
After losing the nomination for vice president at the 1956 Democratic Convention—the only loss of his career—Kennedy declared, “From now on I’m going to be the total politician.” He courted old-school political bosses and new-school television executives; he built relationships around the country and became a formidable presidential candidate in 1960. Despite his earlier claim, in his 1960 dinner-party tape, to be temperamentally challenged, he clearly relished politics, in defiance of a rising 1950s sensibility that disdained backroom deals as a regrettable price to pay for democracy. President Eisenhower once said, “The word ‘politics,’ I have no great liking for that.” Kennedy responded, “I do have a great liking for the word ‘politics.’ It’s the way a president gets things done.”
It was in pursuit of politics that Kennedy took to the phones with the zeal that he did. He conducted a great deal of business by telephone; congratulating governors, senators, and representatives when their fortunes were high; comforting them when they were low; and cajoling them for their help when he needed something done. This last he did often, as he drove forward the agenda of the New Frontier, often in the face of fierce headwinds. Even after winning the presidency and a Democratic majority in 1960, he had to deal with an obstructionist Congress that included Republicans and conservative Democrats, among them the “boll weevils” (Southern conservatives), who tied up most of the important committees. Many of these calls reveal democracy in action, as a president does what he can to nudge a bill forward, alternating between charm and political hardball. Despite the obstacles, the Kennedy administration proposed 653 pieces of legislation in its first two years, almost twice Eisenhower’s rate, and 304 became law.
If politics was changing because of Kennedy, it was also changing in spite of him; or more specifically, because the change that he represented encouraged many others to alter the status quo, in ways that did not always advance his political fortunes. An enormous number of voters would leave the Democratic Party because of its position on Civil Rights, or simply because they had moved out to the suburbs and had new priorities. But Kennedy’s adroit command of the issues, savvy use of television, frequent press conferences, and nimble outreach ensured that his popularity remained high.
CALL TO GOVERNOR EDMUND BROWN, NOVEMBER 7, 1962
The Democrats held their own in the
midterm election of 1962, picking up two seats in the Senate and losing four in the House. A notable loss for the Republicans occurred in California, where Richard Nixon, fresh from his presidential defeat in 1960, lost in the gubernatorial race to Edmund “Pat” Brown by nearly 300,000 votes, despite leading in the polls before election day. JFK called in his congratulations to Governor Brown, and midway through the conversation, spoke to the governor’s son, Edmund “Jerry” Brown. Jerry Brown succeeded his father as the governor of California, winning election in 1974 and again in 2010.
MEETING WITH GOVERNOR EDMUND “PAT” BROWN OF CALIFORNIA, APRIL 20, 1961
OPERATOR: Mr. President?
JFK: Yeah.
OPERATOR: He’s in a conference room down on the fifth floor. They’ll send for him.
JFK: OK. No hurry.
OPERATOR: Thank you.
JFK: [skips] to it in ’60. Hell, I’d gotten them all in shape, so that [skips] huh?
PAT BROWN: Well, let me just tell you this …
JFK: I’ll tell you this, you reduced him to the nuthouse.
PAT BROWN: Listen, but you gave me instructions and I follow your orders …
JFK: [chuckling] I understand. But God, that last farewell speech of his …1
PAT BROWN: Wasn’t that terrible?
JFK: Well, no, but it shows [skips] what’s going to happen [skips] out there?
PAT BROWN: I don’t see how he can ever recover. [skips] the leaders.
JFK: Yeah.
PAT BROWN: Knight2 walked out on him, [unclear] told me [skips]. This is a peculiar fellow. [skips] I really think he’s psychotic. He’s an able man, but he’s nuts.
JFK: Yeah.
PAT BROWN: Like a lot of these paranoiacs, they’re… But [skips] good job.
JFK: What did Kuchel3 win by?
PAT BROWN: Kuchel won by about [skips] thousand. The Cuban thing really helped him. [skips] flew back, why it really helped him. But we have a legislature [skips] out here now, fifty-three, two-thirds majority and we have two-thirds in the senate. So, California [unclear] [skips] I’ll tell you that. We have our responsibilities that I [skips] too.
JFK: Yeah, yeah.
PAT BROWN: But I’d like to make it kind of a model of your [skips] legislative program I’d like to move ahead. Why don’t you come out here and spend a couple of days during the—
JFK: Well, I was thinking of coming out in December. I’ve got to go out to Los Alamos [skips] in December, but I’ll give you a call. [skips]
PAT BROWN: [unclear] fine [unclear]. Would you just do one thing for me? Would you say hello to my son Jerry,4 who came back from Yale Law School and really put me over at San Francisco?
JFK: Oh, good. Fine.
PAT BROWN: [Say] hello to him. This is my son Jerry.
JERRY BROWN: Hello, Mr. President.
JFK: Jerry, how are you?
JERRY BROWN: Fine.
JFK: I was up there campaigning in November [skips] those fellow [unclear]. [laughs]
JERRY BROWN: [unclear] the undergraduates [skips].
JFK: [laughing] I see. Good.
JERRY BROWN: [skips] you sure did.
JFK: I told them that, God, [skips] I could only [skips] by less than the [skips].
JERRY BROWN: Well, you’ll take California by ten times as much as you did [skips] before.
JFK: Well, we’ll try. Well, listen, good luck [skips]. Take care. Bye, Jerry.
CALL TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT F. KENNEDY, MARCH 2, 1963
There are a great many tape-recorded conversations between President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on every imaginable topic. This conversation captures well the intimacy they shared. It is one of the few times anyone used the word “Jack” on the tapes, and it conveys their easy humor, laughing at the idea that their adversaries thought the Kennedys were springing a trap, when they had no idea of its existence. It also reveals an interesting distinction between the two brothers, JFK noting with alarm that his approval rating had declined from 76 to 70 percent, and RFK reminding him that it was still extraordinarily high. JFK’s greater caution supports the claim of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic; Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”
RFK: Hello, Jack?
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: The thing, of course, to remember on this, I don’t know how much you’re gonna get into it, but the thing to remember on this, is this, what you did on that day, Tuesday, for Wednesday, was something that was added to the plan.
JFK: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
RFK: And not something that was taken away or was in a plan that was made inadequate by some deficiency in withdrawal of something …
JFK: Yeah, that’s right.
RFK: That you added that on Tuesday.
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: Never been planned before and this plan specifically said this wouldn’t be done.
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: It was something that you added in order to help.
JFK: You heard about …
RFK: But I, you know, if somebody’s gonna say something in the Senate about it …
JFK: Yeah. Well, you know how they make everything look lousy these days. You know, Rowland Evans5 said that he talked to Dirksen.6 Dirksen said, “I don’t quite get this.” He said, “What, you know, just say I don’t know, they, I think the Kennedys are planning something to trap us into this [laughter] ’cause they’re pretty smart down there.”
RFK: Well, that’s what we have. We haven’t figured how to close the trap yet.
JFK: Yeah. That’s right. We haven’t quite figured out.
RFK: But we’ll learn it.
JFK: It just shows you, boy, what that press is, doesn’t it?
RFK: But God. Still, the poll.
JFK: What?
RFK: What, you’re down to 70 percent?
JFK: When?
RFK: Huh?
JFK: When was this?
RFK: The Gallup Poll.
JFK: When was that?
RFK: Oh, about two days ago?
JFK: No. I didn’t see it.
RFK: Yeah. It went 76 percent to 70.
JFK: Yeah?
RFK: But with your popularity 70 percent now …
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: You’d break fifty-fifty with a Republican.
JFK: What?
RFK: Jesus. 70 percent, 18 percent are against you.
JFK: Yeah?
RFK: Well, I mean, I don’t get what the, the press must be doing you some good.
JFK: Then what, you’d break fifty-fifty?
RFK: Do fifty-fifty with a Republican.
JFK: Oh, you mean on approval and disapproval?
RFK: Yeah. And then the independents.
JFK: I didn’t see that poll. Was this in the Post?
RFK: I don’t know what paper. I read it going up in the plane Wednesday or Thursday.
JFK: I see.
RFK: You think you got troubles, you ought to see what’s happening to Nelson Rockefeller.7
JFK: Why? What?
RFK: Well, you know, all the bars, they call every drink a Nelson Cocktail, a Rockefeller Cocktail. Everything’s the same except it’s 15 percent more. [laughter]
JFK: Do they really?
RFK: Oh, and all, you walk along the streets, and out in the front …
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: It says, “Come in and buy a Nelson, a Rockefeller Cocktail.” Everything costs 15 percent more. In every bar! How would you like that following you around?
JFK: Yeah, but he’s lucky those papers aren’t publishing …
RFK: Well, then, did you see the story about him in …
JFK: Wall Street Journal?
RFK: Wall Street Journal. That’s not a complete plus.
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: I think he’s really having his problems. Troubles.
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: You’re not. I’ve seen
you on television.
JFK: We’ve dropped 6 percent in a month, have we?
RFK: Since January.
JFK: Oh, since that Congress has been back.
RFK: Yeah, and it gets a little bit more partisan, but imagine 70 percent?
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: Better than you were in ’60.
JFK: OK.
RFK: Righto.
CALL TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT F. KENNEDY, MARCH 4, 1963
In this typical conversation, RFK and JFK exchange political gossip about friends as well as enemies; they understand each other so well they nearly finish each other’s sentences.
JFK: Hello?
RFK: Jack?
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: Oh, Ed Guthman8 went to a party the other night …
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: … and was talking to Doris Fleeson9 …
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: … who’s evidently very bitter.
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: You know as she always, usually is. But I don’t know whether there might be some attention paid to her or somebody look at her or something.
JFK: Yeah. What’s she bitter about?
RFK: She’s just mad, generally.
JFK: Yeah.
RFK: You know the way she gets. [skips]
JFK: Yeah … [skips] … be Republicans there, and she doesn’t like McCone,10 and she’s … What is it particularly?
RFK: Well, he didn’t … she just seemed mad, generally, but I don’t know whether … she seems always somebody that if somebody gave her a little attention occasionally then maybe she’d come around a bit.
JFK: Well, it’s pretty difficult.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY CONFERS WITH ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT F. KENNEDY OUTSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE, OCTOBER 3, 1962
RFK: Is it?
JFK: Well, she, you know, is just a waspish woman and she’s always mad at something. She’s mad at the, because we have the Republicans or we’re not fighting hard enough for, I dunno, Civil Rights or some goddamn thing, whatever it may be. She’s always sore. I don’t have any contact with her.