What goes on during a day in the life of the President?
The declassification of more and more audiotapes of presidential meetings increasingly allows the public to understand the inner-workings of past presidencies.
On Oct. 15, the Miller Center of Public Affairs and W.W. Norton & Co. will publish the first volumes of the complete transcriptions of President Kennedy's declassified secret recordings. The Miller Center is a University-based research center focuses on studying U.S. Policy.
Although many of the tapes were declassified beginning in the 1970s, they are "not really accessible unless you can identify the voices" and understand many of the references, said Margaret Edwards, director of external affairs for the Miller Center.
These first three volumes, "The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, The Great Crises," represent two years of work by a team of twelve Miller Center historians and scholars.
Some of the highlights in these volumes are Kennedy's management of a leak of highly classified intelligence information to The New York Times, of the Mississippi Civil Rights crisis and ofthe Cuban missile crisis.
The volumes include not only the transcriptions, but also annotations and footnotes to explain references to the reading audience, Assistant Professor Marc Selverstone said. Selverstone did not contribute to the first three volumes but currently is working on the fourth.
The publication covers the first three months after Kennedy installed the recording system from July to October 1962.
It also includes a multimedia CD with the actual tape recordings and other information and has a list price of $165, Edwards said.
"Some voices are not too hard to identify - we've all heard Kennedy countless times," Selverstone said.
But for more obscure actors, the research team uses computer technology to compare voice samples.
The researchers can view the conversations as digital images and can control the speed, amplification and pitch of the voices, Selverstone said.
The transcription of the tapes has direct historical significance from the policy perspective, said Assistant Professor David Coleman, who worked on the team that produced the first three volumes.
These volumes also offer insight into the personalities of the president and many of his top advisers, how the president interacted with his advisers and what a president's day looked like, he said.
The researchers are not certain why Kennedy began recording some of his meetings, conversations and telephone calls, Coleman said.
It might have been because "by mid-1962, Kennedy expected a conflict with the Soviet Union" or he may have wanted the recording for writing his memoirs at a later date, he said.
Coleman estimated that the center will publish a total of 10 volumes on the Kennedy tapes over the next several years. The timing of publication will depend on funding, Edwards said.
"It is a long and painstaking process," Selverstone said. "We could be doing this for the rest of our lives and still never finish" so it is important to choose which recordings have the most historical significance, he said.
The Center's Presidential Recordings Project, directed by Timothy Naftali, eventually also plans to transcribe, analyze and publish hundreds of hours of recordings made by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
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