Tapes JFK made during last days released

BOSTON -- Final recordings President John F. Kennedy secretly made in the Oval Office include an eerie conversation about what would become the day of his funeral.

In talking to staffers while trying to arrange his schedule, Kennedy remarked that Nov. 25 was shaping up to be a "tough day" after his return from Texas and time at Cape Cod.

"It's a hell of a day, Mr. President," a staffer agreed.

The exchange was among the last 45 hours of private recordings Kennedy made, tapes The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum released yesterday. They provide a window into the final months of the 35th president's life.

They include discussions of conflict in Vietnam, Soviet relations and the race to space, plans for the 1964 Democratic Convention, and re-election strategy. There also are moments with his children.

The tapes are the last of more than 260 hours of recordings of meetings and conversations Kennedy privately made before his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

David Coleman, the professor who leads the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia, called the final recordings significant because while JFK didn't tape himself regularly, he chose to preserve important moments.

"Kennedy did not tape as systematically as Johnson or Nixon. But what he did tape was often very important discussions," he said. "What you have is an unusually rich collection of decisions being made in real time."

The recordings also are valuable because they're a raw look inside the Kennedy White House, Coleman said.

Historians may gravitate most to Kennedy's recordings about Vietnam to see where his policy was heading when his presidency ended, Coleman said.

The latest batch of recordings captured meetings from the last three months of Kennedy's administration. In a conversation with political advisers about young voters, Kennedy asks, "What is it we have to sell them?"

"We hope we have to sell them prosperity, but for the average guy the prosperity is nil," he says. "He's not unprosperous, but he's not very prosperous . . . And the people who really are well off hate our guts."