Max Holland - The Kennedy Assassination Tapes

ALSO BY MAX HOLLAND

The CEO Goes to Washington:
Negotiating the Halls of Power

When the Machine Stopped:
A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2004 by Max Holland

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. This work is comprised of annotated transcripts of President Lyndon B. Johnsons conversations, 19631967. A portion previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 19081973.
The Kennedy assassination tapes / [compiled by] Max Holland.1st ed.
p. cm.
Annotated compilation of Lyndon Johnsons recorded conversations on the subject during his two administrations.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-1-4000-4378-1
1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 19171963AssassinationSources. 2. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 19081973Archives. 3. United StatesPolitics and government19611963Sources. 4. United StatesPolitics and government19631969Sources. I. Holland, Max. II. Title.

E842.9.J6425 2004
364.1524097309046dc22 2004048344

v3.1_r1

For Dora Holland,
who taught me the past always has a pattern

This book emerged in part from work done by the author between 1999 and 2003 as a fellow of the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. The Miller Center is home to the Presidential Recordings Program (PRP), where the greatest concentration of scholars and resources has been marshaled to convey the rich history contained in the formerly secret recordings of twentieth-century Presidents, primarily Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. I benefited greatly from my affiliation with the PRP scholars, including Timothy Naftali, the Programs director, and Kent Germany, the coordinator of the Johnson project, who help insure high standards of accuracy and scholarship. David Shreve was always willing to share his unrivaled knowledge of the Johnson presidency, and much was learned from Pat Dunn about how to present presidential transcripts. David Coleman was a patient guide to knotty technological problems, and I also worked closely and fruitfully with Ashley High, especially on the difficult conversations of November 1963.

In addition to those individuals, the author would like to acknowledge the following for enhancing his understanding of the Johnson presidency and otherwise facilitating his work: Beppie Braswell; Margaret Edwards; George Eliades; Frank Gavin; Michael Greco; Ken Hughes; Rachel Kelly; Shirley Kohut; Christina Kopp; Robin Kuzen; Ted Kuzen; Fredrik Logevall; Erin Mahan; Tarek Masoud; Allen Matusow; William Miller; Jonathan Rosenberg; Patricia Schaub; Robert Schulzinger; Lorraine Settimo; Dan Stahl; Kenneth Thompson, director emeritus of the Miller Center; Garth Wermter; Matt Wood; and Don Zinman. The staff at the University of Virginias Alderman Library, especially Lew Purifoy, and the archivists at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library also deserve thanks for their superb service. Without the help of these people and the resources of the Miller Center, this book would have been difficult to accomplish.

Finally, the author wishes to express his gratitude to Philip Zelikow, the director of the Miller Center and a general editor of the Presidential Recordings Series, whose own important work on the Kennedy tape recordings with Ernest May, also a general editor, inspired the creation of the Presidential Recordings Program. Philip welcomed me to the Center and championed my scholarship.

Anyone interested in presidential recordings, from scholars to lay readers, can find no better place to consult than the two websites maintained by the Miller Center: www.millercenter.virginia.edu/programs/prp/index.html and www.whitehousetapes.org. Digital audio files of all of the conversations included in this book can be found at www.whitehousetapes.org, which is an online distribution point for presidential recordings and associated materials.

This volume takes a somewhat different approach to the presentation of transcripts. All the conversations from November 1963, however, will be presented verbatim and in their entirety in the first volume of the Presidential Recordings Programs chronological series of Johnson tape recordings, to be published by the Miller Center and W. W. Norton in 2005.

On the surface, a book based upon transcripts of Lyndon Johnsons presidential recordings seems a straightforward proposition. As of this writing, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library has processed tape recordings from November 1963 to March 1967, and they are available to anyone at a nominal cost. The Library has identified nearly all the participants in the conversations, as well as the dates and times of the recordings, and they are indexed by subject as well.

The processing of the recordings is a formidable task and often taken for granted. Yet, and as anyone who has produced a book based on the Johnson tapes (or for that matter, the Kennedy or Nixon recordings) will readily admit, the genuinely difficult part consists of the decisions that have to be made afterward: the criteria for selecting conversations to be transcribed, the nature of the transcripts, and to what extent the transcripts are annotated.

Selection

The President John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992 required every entity in the federal government, including federal/private partnerships like the presidential libraries, to search their holdings for any written, aural, or visual records pertaining to the November 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. In compliance with this act, the Johnson Library began processing assassination-related recordings and completed its initial release of the Kennedy or K series in April 1994. The Library employed a broad but defensible definition of assassination-related. It determined, for example, that all conversations from November 22 to December 31, 1963, fell under this heading because nearly every recording in that period had some bearing on the transition between the two administrations. In addition, the Librarys definition included certain conversations from:

January and February 1964, while the transition between the two administrations continued;

September 1964, the month the Warren Commissions Report was published;

December 1966, when the controversy over William Manchesters book The Death of a President was at its height; and

January to March 1967, months in which the Warren Report became subject to renewed scrutiny and the period when Jim Garrison instigated a new investigation of the assassination.

This books definition of assassination-related is both very similar and different.

It does not include every recording from the first five weeks, and not only because the sheer number and length of these conversations make it prohibitive to do so. The focus here is on only one of the decisions facing President Johnson during his first days in office, namely, how to mount an investigation of the assassination that would both satisfy responsible opinion and keep the matter from being exploited for political or personal gain. November and December 1963 are thus reduced, more or less, to the decision to appoint what became known as the Warren Commission. Indeed, the Commissions formation and final report, and the subsequent controversies, constitute the backbone of this volume. As seen from the vantage point of Lyndon Johnson, it is a story that has never been told quite this way before.