Not the words of a man certain of coasting into another term, said Maura Porter, an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
“JFK clearly wasn’t as confident as we are, looking back, that he would get a second term,’’ Porter said yesterday. “He clearly had issues with how he was going to succeed, and that surprised me.’’
Yesterday, the library released the final 45 hours of secret recordings the president made during his time in office, leading up to Nov. 20, 1963, the day before he left Washington on a trip to Dallas, where he was assassinated.
The tapes provide a snapshot of Kennedy in the last months of his presidency, including his growing concerns about the Vietnam War and the upcoming election.
In total, Kennedy recorded more than 248 hours of secret tapes throughout his presidency, without the knowledge of nearly all his advisers. The president and his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, had a desk switch that could control the recording devices. The microphones were hidden in an inkwell and underneath a table in the Oval Office. In the Cabinet Room, they were concealed in a light fixture and beneath a desk. Wires snaked through the floor to a recording station below, staffed by the Secret Service.
Porter, along with Paul Lydon, an archive specialist at the library, worked together to review the tapes, cutting out snippets of audio that posed national security risks. The audio is often grainy and muddled, with top officials often talking, shouting, or chortling over one another. For that reason, Porter estimated that every hour of audio required about 20 hours of review.
The pair often overheard mundane and intimate moments: half an hour of the Oval Office being vacuumed, the scratchy sound of the president writing on his desk, or the president’s children, Caroline and John Jr., playing in the hallway outside their father’s office, braying “Daddy, daddy, daddy!’’ as an increasingly exasperated president answered over and over, “What?!’’
