President John F. Kennedy’s library is releasing 45 hours of privately recorded meetings and phone calls, providing a window into the final months of his life.
The tapes 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.
On one recording, made days before Kennedy’s assassination, he asks staffers to schedule a meeting in a week. He tells them he’s booked for the weekend, with no time to meet with an Indonesian general then, either.
The tapes, being released Tuesday by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, are the last of more than 260 hours of recordings of meetings and conversations JFK privately made before his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
In the scheduling discussion three days before his killing, JFK also eerily comments on what would become the day of his funeral.
“Monday?” he asks. “Well that’s a tough day.”
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One Response
In other words, Kennedy’s administration is now defined as sufficiently ancient history that all can be released?
Okay, it was 50 years ago. And the Brits still have declassified stuff form the start of World War I.
This could be part of a conspiracy to make people like me seem old. I remember John Kennedy.