A few words on these tapes. JFK, wanting a reliable means of recording what happens in historically important meetings, secretly set up a tape-recording system in various parts of the White House in July 1962. Generally, the system was activated by a push of the button. Among officials present, only he and RFK knew the reels were spinning. The Kennedy Library began to declassify transcripts, then actual tapes, in the mid-1980s. (I would argue that Bundy, Sorensen, and McNamara decided to reveal the secret missile-trade deal in 1982 because they knew that the tapes from the ExComm meetings would soon be released. They decided to put a little spin on the truth ahead of time. For instance, they did not say in 1982 that they had all opposed the trade and that, in fact, with the exception of George Ball, JFK was the only person in the room who favored the idea.) In 1997, Harvard University Press published a book-length transcript of the Cuban Missile Crisis tapes called The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Philip Zelikow and Ernest May. It was a dreadful tome, full of inaccuracies and bereft of analysis. In 2001, Norton published The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, a three-volume collection of all the recordings, on a variety of topics, up to the end of '62. (Three more volumes covering 1963 are due out this year.) Zelikow was involved in editing these transcripts as well and did a much more careful job. Even so, Sheldon Stern, the retired historian of the JFK Library, is about to come out with his own tapes-based narrative of the crisis, which, he tells me, will include a 15-page appendix citing 100 substantive errors." Some of Zelikow's problems may have been caused by the noise-reduction processing that he used in making copies of the (often quite noisy) tapes. As most audio engineers know, noise reduction eliminates hiss, not random room noise. The frequency of hiss is very similar to the frequency of the tongue and lip-smacking sounds formed when people pronounce the letters "p," "t," "d," and so forth. Unless done very expertly, noise reduction can render the human voice less intelligible.

The citations from the tapes that appear here are based on my own listening and transcribing, as well as some consultations with Stern.

One more note: Some have wondered if Kennedy comes off so good on these tapes because he knew that the mikes were on and tape running. This is extremely unlikely. First, he would never have thought these tapes would be made public. Second, RFK also knew about the tapes, yet he and JFK disagreed on many matters. Third, and more to the point, it would have been impossible to know, in the middle of a crisis, what it means to "look good." Kennedy opposed attacking the Soviet missile sites. This looks smart today. But if Khrushchev hadn't offered the missile trade, hadn't backed down, and had proceeded to put nuclear warheads on the missiles, it would not have looked so smart.