By Sheldon M. Stern and Max
Holland
Though it has been
slow to develop and achieve recognition, it is now becoming apparent that
scholarly works based on the extraordinary cache of presidential recordings
from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations actually constitute a new
and distinct genre of historical investigation.
The history profession
is familiar with books that exploit new primary sources, or interpret old
primary sources in a fresh way, along with works that are syntheses of primary
and secondary sources. There is also an honored place in the canon for books
that annotate the private papers of such prominent figures as Woodrow Wilson.
Books based on audio recordings, however, are arguably distinct from these
traditional categories. The main reason is that the historian shoulders an even
larger burden in this new genre. He or she is obviously selecting, deciphering,
and making judgments about a primary source, much like the editor of a
documentary collection. But, in the process of transcribing a tape recording,
the historian is also creating a facsimile—while still endeavoring to produce a
reliable, “original” source. In essence, the historian/editor unavoidably
becomes the author of a “new” source because even a transcript alleged to be
“verbatim” is irreducibly subjective at some level. As a result, the
historian’s responsibility in this genre is a very unusual one, and requires
the most careful scholarship imaginable. No other task of discovery and/or
interpretation in the historical canon is quite comparable.
As the audio
recordings from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies have become
available, historians have eagerly taken up this unprecedented challenge—and
understandably so. The attraction of being able to convey even a fraction of
what actually transpired in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room from 1962 to 1969,
and 1971 to 1973, is irresistible, the ultimate fantasy for many historians.
The recordings offer the tantalizing prospect of history “wie es
eigentlich gewesen ist”—as it really was—in the famous formulation of the
19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke.[1] Or as Columbia University professor Alan
Brinkley put it in 1997, “No collection of manuscripts, no after-the-fact oral
history, no contemporary account by a journalist will ever have the immediacy
or the revelatory power of these conversations.”[2] Almost a dozen “tapes-based” books have
been published since 1997, more are in the offing, and this does not count the
growing number of conventional histories and/or biographies and articles in
newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals that selectively but increasingly
rely on the presidential recordings for substantive insights, anecdotal asides,
or simply colorful quotes.[3]
One issue must be
acknowledged before leveling any criticism: transcribing these tapes is far
more difficult than it appears on the surface for subjective and objective
reasons. There are knotty stylistic issues, for example, that have substantive
consequences. When is a hesitation or “uh-huh” significant?[4] Something as seemingly minor as
eliminating a pause, or “ironing out a cadence,” as one historian put it, can
shift emphasis and even change meaning.[5] Not being able to fully render tone or
intonation runs the same risk. If LBJ lapses into his most Southern dialect,
and that is reflected in the transcript, does he risk being portrayed as some
character out of a Mark Twain novel?
Alternately, does it misrepresent LBJ to
render him speaking the King’s English when he demonstrably does not? Reading
even the most faithful transcript will never substitute for actually
listening to the recordings themselves; as one historian put it, “transcripts
are not interchangeable with the original tapes.”[6] A transcript, or a narrative that
attempts to capture both the verbal and affectual dimensions of the tapes, can
further refine our understanding. But only the tapes can be legitimately cited
as the genuine primary source.
These questions aside,
the most daunting issue is the frequently poor audio quality of the tape
recordings. It can be exasperating to try to decipher something as fundamental
as who is speaking, particularly on the tapes from the Kennedy and Nixon
administrations, which include many recordings of meetings. Even the most
painstaking effort to transcribe the recordings is bound to result in some
errors, the present authors’ own attempts included. Accordingly, all three presidential
libraries have desisted from producing official transcripts—although without
transcriptions the recordings are not user-friendly, despite the libraries’
best efforts to index and catalog them. The libraries have decided (wisely, in
our view) to regard the recordings as the original document and everything
after that as a facsimile or interpretation, almost a translation, so to speak,
and one that must be vouched for by the scholar(s) who produced it.[7]
Another factor, of
course, is the enormous commitment of time and resources it would take for the
presidential libraries to produce high-quality transcripts. When the Kennedy
Library estimated, nearly 20 years ago, that it would take about one hundred
hours of listening to produce an accurate transcript of a one-hour recording,
it was widely suspected of manufacturing an excuse to avoid the work. But time
and experience have proven that ratio to be right on target.[8] Producing books based on the tape
recordings is (or ought to be) an extremely labor-intensive endeavor. It is
microhistory, and presenting it accurately demands that the scholar be steeped
in the subject matter. Often he or she must know the events of a given day, and
sometimes a given hour. There is, in other words, a direct correlation between
the time one invests in listening to the tapes, and in researching their
context, and the sense one is able to make of them. Regardless of the
difficulty in rendering accurate transcripts, the onus remains on those
scholars of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies who willingly assume
the burden and claim in print to have carried it off.
The remainder of this
essay will examine several of the most acclaimed works in this evolving
historical genre, namely, the volumes based on the Kennedy recordings by Ernest
May, Philip
Zelikow, and now the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of
Virginia, and the books on the Johnson recordings produced by Michael
Beschloss.
Stanley
Kutler’s 1997 book, Abuse of Power, was published in the same year as
Ernest May and Philip Zelikow’s first effort, The Kennedy Tapes, and
Michael Beschloss’sTaking Charge, and on that basis alone Kutler’s work
would seem to merit inclusion.[9]Kutler’s book, moreover, has been criticized
along some of the lines that will be enumerated below. In 1998, John Taylor,
director of the Richard M. Nixon Library, charged that Kutler had intentionally
truncated some transcripts to create the misleading impression that Nixon had
foreknowledge of the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.[10] And historian Joan Hoff, who also culled
the recordings carefully for her book on Richard Nixon, has seconded Taylor’s
criticism.[11]Kutler recently declared, “Did I make
mistakes? I’m sure I did. But I never knowingly changed an affirmative to a
negative or vice-versa. I never added or subtracted words to alter the meaning.
But the tapes are difficult . . . and the human ear is not perfect. Besides, I
would rather be remembered as the guy who made sure that everyone could get
their hands on the Nixon Tapes [by suing to secure their release].”[12] In any case, because the authors of this
article are not experts on the Nixon recordings and presidency, we are not in a
position to write about Kutler’s transcriptions, editing, and annotations.
The Kennedy Tapes
In 1981, the John F.
Kennedy Library (JFKL) began processing the recordings of the ExComm meetings
during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and in 1983 started releasing them to the
public. It took years to review and declassify all 22+ hours of recordings
largely because the audio quality was frequently very poor. Consequently, more
than 17 hours (77 percent) of the ExComm recordings were not released until 24
October 1996 (15+ hours) and 17 February 1997 (2 hours). Some of these last
releases were among the hardest to transcribe.
Notwithstanding the
JFKL’s difficulties and its imposing estimates of the time required to do this
work carefully, in October 1997, Harvard University Press (HUP) published
Ernest May and Philip Zelikow’s The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House
During the Cuban Missile Crisis.[13] Given that the physical process of
copy-editing and manufacturing a book normally takes seven or eight months,
this would, to say the least, have been a notable feat even if the recordings
had been crystal clear. Nonetheless, HUP declared that “These are the full and
authenticated transcripts of those audio recordings.” The stunning achievement
was explained by stressing the editors’ “monumental efforts over the past months”
to transform “these crackling, rumbling, and hissing tapes . . . into readable
transcriptions.”[14] The editors themselves supplied specific
details:
we commissioned a team of court
reporters . . . [to prepare] draft transcripts from the recordings released by
the JFK Library. We then asked an expert in audio forensics to improve the
sound quality of most of the tapes. . . . The two of us then worked with the tapes
and the court reporters’ drafts to produce the transcripts. . . . The
laboriousness of this process would be hard to exaggerate. Each of us listened
over and over to every sentence in the recordings. Even after a dozen replays
at varying speeds, significant passages remained only partly comprehensible. .
. . Notwithstanding the high professionalism of the court reporters, we had to
amend and rewrite almost all their texts. For several especially difficult
sessions, we prepared transcriptions ourselves from scratch. In a final stage,
we asked some veterans of the Kennedy administration to review the tapes and
our transcripts in order to clear up as many as possible of the remaining
puzzles. The reader has here the best text that we can produce, but it is certainly
not perfect.[15]
Reviewers of The
Kennedy Tapes took the assurances of these recognized Harvard scholars at
face value. The “effort was herculean,” wrote the critic for The New York
Times Book Review.”[16] The Economist reviewer
declared that the editors had produced “the most accurate, lucid transcript that
is at present possible ” [emphasis added].[17]The Wall Street Journal review
enthused that the “verbatim” transcripts are not fictionalized or reconstructed
dialogue: “this is the real thing.”[18] A reviewer in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch concluded, “With the aid of court reporters and some alert
ears, remarkable texts emerged. . . .”[19] “Painstakingly recovered from poor
recordings,” wrote Henry Graff in the New Leader.[20] Alexander George summed up the scholarly
consensus when he wrote, “Professors May and Zelikow’s meticulous work in
transcribing the imperfect recording of President Kennedy’s secret tapes is a
remarkable achievement.”[21] Another scholar called the transcripts
the “jewel in the documentary crown” of material that had become available
about the missile crisis.[22]
Apparently, not a
single reviewer of The Kennedy Tapes thought it necessary to listen to
any of these tapes to confirm that the transcriptions were, in fact, reliable,
and/or the best that could reasonably be expected. This was not surprising with
regard to mass-circulation reviews, of course, but it extended to reviews in
scholarly publications as well, despite the often nonsensical, fractured syntax
of the transcribed conversations.[23] The authority and status of the editors,
the reputation of their publisher, and the massive scope and detail of the work
seemed proof enough.
In 1998, Zelikow left
Harvard’s Kennedy School to become director of the Miller Center of Public
Affairs at the University of Virginia. Zelikow soon announced that he intended
to dedicate a substantial portion of the Miller Center’s resources to the presidential
recordings from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.[24] “These audiotapes will do for the study
of government what the discovery of Pompeii did for the study of Rome,” Zelikow
declared in announcing the Miller Center’s new project. “The books and studies
that emerge from this project will help replace the Hollywood image of White
House decision-making with a real world understanding of how government
actually works.”[25] In every respect, including their
ambitious publication schedule, the model for this impressive enterprise was,
of course, the universally-praised volume that Zelikow and May had edited with
conspicuous speed.
In fact, utilizing
court reporters unfamiliar with the history and the cast of characters had
resulted in transcripts riddled with errors, many of which went uncorrected in
the final editing.[26] Speakers were repeatedly misidentified
or not identified at all, and scores of passages that had been labeled
“[unclear]” were, in fact, audible and discernable. These mistranscriptions,
large and small, help explain why the transcripts often seemed nonsensical or
studded with remarks that were nonsequiturs.[27] This was not a matter of inevitable and
incidental mistakes sprinkled throughout the transcripts, but pervasive errors
that significantly distorted the reliability of a unique source and undermined
the very purpose behind publishing these transcripts.
The planned
chronological series of Miller Center volumes on the Kennedy recordings
provided an opportunity to correct these problems but, unexpectedly, one of the
authors of this article, Sheldon Stern, first publicly exposed the inadequacies
of The Kennedy Tapes in The Atlantic Monthly.[28] In their response to the Atlantic article,
May and Zelikow wrote, “We were bemused (though also wryly gratified)” to read
about alleged errors in the transcriptions. “None of these amendments is very
important. None of it changes what a reader of the transcripts takes away
concerning the essence or even the minute details of the deliberations that
took place in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room.”[29] Besides being plainly incorrect, this
was an odd and contradictory argument, given their earlier claim that The
Kennedy Tapes had forced a drastic revision of prior accounts precisely
because of the new and telling detail it contained.[30] Indeed, in presidential recordings, one
might easily claim (as May and Zelikow sometimes explicitly did) that nuance is everything.[31] If it is not important, the tapes lose
much of their historical power.
Before Stern’s article,
the Miller Center could have published substantially revised transcripts while
simultaneously asserting that new technological wizardry was primarily
responsible for the dramatically different transcripts. But Stern’s corrections
were based on what can be described as technically pedestrian methods and the
aural equivalent of elbow grease.[32] Consequently, Stern’s articles (he
published a second, scholarly version in Presidential Studies Quarterly in
September 2000) had the effect of causing the Miller Center to circle the
wagons rather than embrace open and constructive criticism.[33] The response was to dispute as many
errors as possible, to publicly deny the significance of errors that were
undeniable, and in general, to pretend that nothing untoward had happened—and
besides, these problems would all be corrected in what the editors said would
become the deserved “focal point for scholarly attention,” i.e., the
“authoritative reference works” to be published by W.W. Norton.[34] Indeed, the Miller Center would soon
claim that 120 minutes of listening were necessary to render a single minute of
transcript in these new volumes, a ratio that exceeded even the Kennedy
Library's initial estimate.[35]
When the Miller
Center’s reference volumes were published by Norton in October 2001, academic
reviewers again found it difficult to critique the new edition.[36] The claim that a team of expert
scholars, using state-of-the-art technology, were responsible for these revised
transcripts (about 35% of the 1,800 pages in these three volumes covered the
missile crisis) continued to insulate the work from peer criticism. Historians
were predictably reluctant to listen to the tapes themselves and, given the
cutting-edge methods allegedly required for transcribing, assumed for a second
time that the transcripts must be the best that could be done.
A good part of the new
missile crisis transcripts were, in fact, significantly more accurate—indeed,
sometimes unrecognizable—when compared to the HUP edition.[37] As such, it was certainly a step in the
right direction. Nonetheless, upon closer review, Stern discovered that the
ExComm retranscriptions still contained many significant errors, some of which
modified or changed the intent and meaning of speakers’ remarks.[38] And while the number of “[unclear]s” was
drastically diminished, there were still many passages so marked that were, in
fact, discernable to other listeners. In addition, words, phrases, sentences,
or speakers were sometimes still missing altogether in these new transcripts.
Some errors were particularly perplexing because they made no sense in the
historical context of the conversations, and for that reason alone should have
been flagged during the elaborate Miller Center editing process overseen by Tim
Naftali, the director of the Presidential Recordings Program.[39]
Another problem common
to the HUP and Norton versions pertained to what May and Zelikow once called
“verbal debris.”[40] “What we omit are the noncommunicative
fragments that we believe those present would have filtered out for
themselves,” the editors wrote in the preface to the HUP edition. “We believe
that this gives the reader a truer sense of the actual dialogue as the
participants themselves understood it.”[41] But this kind of editing is not as
neutral as it sounds.[42] And while it may be appropriate in a
commercial book intended for a wide audience, it becomes very problematic in
what purport to be scholarly reference works meant to be consulted for decades.[43] As Joan Hoff pointed out in her 2003 AHA
commentary on the presidential recordings,
How does [excising ‘debris’] serve
or preserve history when it is actually distorting history? . . . Presidential
tapes constitute the raw and unpleasant way people communicate or, as often
happens in conversations with presidents, do not communicate very well. By
eliminating ‘verbal debris’ or ‘noncommunicative fragments’ the participants
sound smarter and more rational than they usually are in reaching decisions.
Future generations of historians need such untidy, unsanitized material, not
neat transcripts which happen to fit mainstream historical interpretations at a
certain point in time.[44]
Although sustained
criticism of an admittedly difficult task might seem niggling, it must be
remembered that the Miller Center set the bar high for itself. Shortly after
deciding to undertake the formidable task of making available the recordings
from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies, the Miller Center sought
funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission
(NHPRC), the grant-making division of the National Archives. The NHPRC,
established in 1934, underwrites projects that preserve and disseminate
archival-quality historical records. Its subsidies are the gold standard; it
has underwritten the publication of superbly edited and annotated volumes of
the Founding Fathers and other leading political figures. And from 2000 to
2004, the Miller Center received $505,000 in NHPRC funds to support a program
that is supposed to reflect only the highest excellence and scholarship. When
the three Norton volumes, described by the Miller Center as “perhaps the most
reliable record of the Kennedy presidency ever published” were released in
2001, the Center acknowledged that their work “was made possible in part by a
generous grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission
(NHPRC).[45]
The Johnson Tapes
In response to the
President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the
Lyndon B. Johnson Library (LBJL) began releasing recordings in April 1994
related to President Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath. Soon Harry
Middleton, then the LBJL director, prevailed upon Lady Bird Johnson to have all
of Lyndon Johnson’s tape recordings processed and released in chronological
order.[46] The result has been a justifiable
upsurge of interest in this controversial president, and a new round of
scholarship as historians have sought to integrate information from the tapes
with the standard wisdom.
In comparison to the
Kennedy and Nixon tapes, the Johnson recordings are relatively easy to
transcribe, despite Beschloss’s assertion that “none of the tapes are easy to
decipher.”[47] About ninety percent of the time there
is no question as to whose voice was being recorded, since the vast majority of
the recordings are of bilateral telephone conversations. There is a problem
with overlapping voices, and to be sure, not all of the recordings’ audio
quality is good, largely owing to the technological state-of-the-art at the
time. Many recordings are only fair, and several are poor. Some key Johnson
aides and advisers, such as Walter Jenkins and Abe Fortas, had an unfortunate
inclination to mumble and speak in barely audible voices. Still, compared to
the tapes made by LBJ’s predecessor and successor, it is a relatively easier
task to produce reasonably accurate transcripts of the Johnson recordings,
though as noted before, any rendering is at best a facsimile of the bona fide
source and never a substitute for it.
In 1997, Michael Beschloss
brought out the first volume of what he eventually announced would be a trilogy
on the Johnson recordings. Beschloss’s first LBJ book appears to have been
completed as rapidly as the May and Zelikow HUP volume of the same year. The
Johnson tape recordings for April through June 1964 were not released until 14
February 1997, and the July and August 1964 tapes were not released until 18
July 1997. That means, in short, that 54 percent of the tapes used by Beschloss
in Taking Charge were not released until the year of publication—23
percent in February and 31 percent in July (the latter just three months before
publication of the book on 17 October 1997). In Beschloss’s second volume, Reaching
for Glory, 40 percent of the tapes were not released until 2001 (28 percent on
January 12 and 12 percent on June 8). The book was published on 1 November
2001.
Beschloss’s project
differed from the initial May and Zelikow volume, and Kutler’s book as well, in
that he did not restrict his selection to a particular subject. Rather,
Beschloss presented a cross-section of select conversations from a defined
chronological period, November 1963 to August 1964 in his first volume, Taking
Charge, and September 1964 to August 1965 in his second volume, Reaching
for Glory.[48] Although the publisher of both volumes,
Simon & Schuster, is a commercial trade press, Beschloss cast his project
in scholarly terms:
I have conceived this trilogy in the
style of an edited and annotated anthology of private letters written by a
public figure in the days when leaders did business on paper, revealing their
private purposes, methods and obsessions. . . . My chief standard in deciding
which conversations to include in the book is whether they add something of
historical importance . . . .
The editor of a volume of new
primary source material, like this one, has a different responsibility [than a
historian writing a book of his own]—not to drown out the subject’s voice. . .
. His task instead is preeminently to explain what the new material means and
what it tells us beyond what we know already.[49]
Beschloss also
explained, in language reminiscent of May and Zelikow, that his transcripts
were the product of a scholar’s meticulousness and attention to detail. To a
degree, he had the benefit of earlier transcriptions rendered by Johnson’s
secretarial pool. But these, Beschloss correctly noted, were “fragmentary,
inaccurate, and unreliable for the historian.”[50] He described his own methodology and
editorial conventions this way:
In creating this book, I have
listened to virtually every Johnson White House tape . . . often many times—and
have personally transcribed most of the conversations that appear here.[51] The main reason for this is accuracy. .
. .
[The] only way to make these tapes a
reliable source is for a historian to be steeped in the daily history of LBJ’s
presidency, armed with names, issues, and context, and to listen hard to every
syllable—sometimes over and over again . . . .
I have edited each conversation to
exclude extraneous material and repetition, but not where that might change the
meaning. Ellipses appear where shorter parts of conversations have been pared;
a larger break is used for longer deletions. The only words to be
eliminated [emphasis added] without some kind of indication are “uhs,”
“wells,” and similar interjections, but only in cases where they do not add
meaning.[52]
These statements
resulted in the same presumption accorded the May and Zelikow volumes.
Beschloss’s transcriptions of the LBJ recordings were greeted with uncritical
enthusiasm, although again, no one apparently bothered to listen. Taking
Charge was reviewed in both the Sunday and the daily New York Times.[53] Indeed, the newspaper thought so highly
of the book that it ran an editorial, declaring the “publication of Lyndon
Johnson’s secretly recorded tapes is an important event [emphasis
added].”[54] Reviews in scholarly publications also
took for granted the accuracy and fidelity of the “brilliantly edited” or
“superbly edited” transcripts.[55] Beschloss “had to decipher impenetrable
accents and ignore the background blare of chattering aides, TV commercials,
and shuffling papers,” wrote one reviewer.[56]
A closer, more learned
look, however, would have uncovered numerous shortcomings in the transcripts,
and frequent misrepresentations of the conversations in Beschloss’s annotations
and footnotes.[57] In addition, explanations were
frequently lacking when they were sorely needed, which can be just as
misleading as the wrong contextual information. In Taking Charge, both
the prologue (where Beschloss actually melds and expurgates five separate LBJ
conversations about William Manchester’s book on the JFK assassination into
one), and the appendix are conspicuous examples in which the context is minimal
or not provided at all.[58] With respect to the Manchester-related
conversations, for example, Johnson’s remarks about The Death of a
President appear to be petulant—which they most certainly were not.
The sole published
criticism of the transcripts from Beschloss’s first volume was a 1999critique in
the Los Angeles Times by one of the authors of this article, Max
Holland.[59] It pointed out what was easily the most
egregious mistake in the transcripts (Beschloss’s rendering the phrase “thread
of it” as the word “threat”), which resulted in a significant interpretive
error about the work of the Warren Commission.[60] Putting aside mistakes in transcription,
misinterpretations in the annotations because of these mistakes, and other
errors in Beschloss’s microhistory, the nub of the problem with his volumes is
very similar to the one that has cast a shadow over the May/Zelikow and now the
Miller Center effort. The critical element, indeed the raison d’etre of
the project—reliable, accurate transcripts—is lacking.
In Beschloss’s case,
however, the problem is exacerbated by the editorial conventions he adopted to
produce his “trilogy of snippets”—as Zelikow once described Beschloss’s project
in a brief review.[61] Despite Beschloss’s pledge not to
eliminate anything meaningful without leaving an indication, his marked and
unmarked deletions are so liberal as to seem indiscriminate.[62] Readers simply have no way of knowing
(unless they listen to the conversations themselves) whether a word, phrase,
sentence, paragraph, or much longer portion of the conversation has been
omitted. If a reader were to prepare a full transcript of any redacted
conversation that appears in the Beschloss volumes, he or she would immediately
discern major differences in wording, sequence, organization, completeness,
interpretation, and impact.[63] Put another way, even when Beschloss
gets right all the words he chooses to put down, his conventions frequently
produce transcripts that beggar any definition of the word. These transcripts
simply cannot be cited or quoted with reasonable confidence by scholars—any
more than scholars would rely on the selected and redacted documents in a
college reader.
Conclusion
If the presidential
recordings, as May and Zelikow once wrote, are “historical treasures in a class
with the papers of the Founding Fathers,” they ought to be treated as such by
historians producing books that they claim are scholarly and authoritative.
These recordings are public records held in trust by the National Archives for
the American people, not a private trove to be cornered and exploited without
public accountability.[64]
“We obviously are
devoted,” May and Zelikow have written, “to producing the best possible
transcripts.” Scholarly critiques, they claimed, “spur on such work, letting us
know that peers are reviewing it with care and offering constructive
criticism.”[65] We agree completely. And that is why the
Miller Center, which is an academic institution receiving NHPRC funds, has a
special responsibility to see that errors are corrected openly and for the
record—as historians have been assured they will be. In February 2003, Philip
Zelikow spoke at an major conference on presidential recordings at the Kennedy
Library. He announced that the Miller Center was establishing a new website
that would allow scholars to submit corrections to the Center’s printed transcripts,
with full attribution to the scholars making those corrections. Scholars, he
explained, “should invite further comments and criticism and…try to welcome
them. … I want to announce today that as of this morning, we have put out on
the Internet a new website. . . to enable scholars to download our publications
of corrected transcripts . . . [thus] providing a multi-media errata sheet. . .
. That’s the way that scholars work.”[66]
Two years later, the
website exists (www.whitehousetapes.org)
but there are still no corrections and no process for submitting them. Indeed,
the Miller Center website currently describes whitehousetapes.org as the
Presidential Recordings Program’s “signature website” and as “a clearinghouse
for research on the tapes.” However, it does not mention Zelikow’s 2003 public
commitment to establish an online errata system—which he reiterated in March
2004.[67] Scholars working independently on
presidential recordings deserve open and unambiguous information from the
Miller Center about ongoing corrections and revisions.
It is especially
incumbent upon Zelikow, Naftali, May, and the Miller Center to clarify the
record because four distinct versions of “authoritative” missile crisis
transcripts now exist (two published by HUP: hardcover in 1997 and paperback in
1998 and two published by Norton: hardcover in 2001 and paperback in 2002)—in
addition to amendments and corrections that were incorporated in various
printings without any notation or explanation. Scholars working with the
transcripts have to sort out this muddle in order to decide which
“authoritative” version to use. The 2002 Norton paperback, for example, uses
the identical title and identifies the same two editors, May and Zelikow, as
the HUP 1997 hardcover and 1998 paperback. In fact, it is actually a concise
version of the substantially different 2001 Norton hardcover edition in which
Naftali was an editor as well.
The need for an open
and public process for making corrections at the Miller Center is all the more
acute because of what business historians call “barriers to market entry.” As
Joan Hoff has pointed out, the first books derived from the tapes tend to be
regarded as “authoritative” or “the Bible” regardless of serious transcription
or editing mistakes. “Their very publication discourages others from
undertaking their own comprehensive, literal transcriptions of the presidential
tapes,” Hoff warned.[68]
For his part
Beschloss, whose work was not supported by taxpayers, has less of a public
obligation. He has no more or less a duty than any historian has to correct
errors in his work. But if he is going to continue his trilogy, some
adjustments are clearly in order, perhaps a change in his editorial conventions
so that readers can clearly understand the extent to which the conversations
are redacted. In fact, simply adhering to his declared editorial conventions
would be a marked improvement.
[Postscript: In
February 2006, the Miller Center finally erected a feature that permitted
scholars to submit suggested corrections to its published transcipts.]
Sheldon M. Stern served as historian
at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston from 1977 through 1999 and worked
extensively with the Kennedy tape recordings as they were being processed for
release from 1983 to 1997. Holland was a research fellow at the Miller Center
of Public Affairs from 1998 to 2003. A dispute between the Miller Center
and Holland ended in a mutually-agreeable settlement.
Notes
[1] It has been suggested repeatedly that
because the Nixon recordings were voice-activated, while Kennedy and Johnson
had to select which conversations were taped, the former are more likely than
the latter to be candid records of a president in action. Such an assertion
does not withstand close scrutiny. Even presidents have no idea beforehand what
direction a conversation or meeting will take, and hours of listening to the
Kennedy or Johnson recordings will persuade even the most hardened cynic that
the tapes are revealing of both men, warts and all. They were not posturing for
posterity. In addition, and perhaps more to the point, none of these presidents
made these tape recordings with the faintest thought that they would ever be
released to the public within their lifetimes, indeed, if ever at all. But for
the Watergate scandal, they might well have remained as secret as they were
fully intended to be.
[2] Alan Brinkley, “D.C. Confidential,” The
New York Times (hereafter NYT) Book Review, 19 October 1997. Not
all historians, to be sure, are so enamored of the tapes. Nelson Lichtenstein,
a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has warned
that “a relentless focus on the elite decision-making process tends to
fetishize and decontextualize it, stripping away its relationship to larger
cultural, ideological, and social currents.” Paul Mitchinson, "All
the Presidents' Tapes, Lingua Franca, February 2002, p. 58. Another
scholar also warned against a wholesale embrace of “unmediated” history,
maintaining that historians would find transcripts less valuable than their
authors’ claimed. The “new material merely buttresses prevailing
interpretations. . . . In no way does it alter historians’ fundamental
understanding of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies.” Bruce J.
Schulman, “Taping History,” The Journal of American History (hereafter JAH), September
1998, p. 576; other views on the recordings’ limitations have been expressed by
Philip Terzian, “Real History vs. Reel History,” Wall Street Journal, 20
November 1997; Robert A. Divine, “Tale of the Presidential Tapes: A Review
Essay,” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 1998); and Robert Dallek,
“Tales of the Tapes,” Reviews in American History (hereafter RAH), June
1998.
[3] “Tapes-based” books run the gamut from
surveys (e.g., Doyle) to annotated conversations of a defined chronological
period or subject (e.g., Beschloss) to narratives on a specific subject
constructed on the basis of the tapes (e.g., Stern). Since 1997, the following
books fall within this definition: Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge:
The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1997); Stanley Kutler, ed., Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New
York: Free Press, 1997); Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy
Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); William Doyle,Inside the Oval Office: The
White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (New York: Kodansha International,
1999); Michael Beschloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret
White House Tapes, 1964-1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001);
Philip Zelikow, Ernest May, and Tim Naftali, eds., The Presidential
Recordings: John F. Kennedy, The Great Crises, Volumes 1-3 (New York:
Norton, 2001); John Dean, The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the
Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court (New York: Free Press,
2001); John Prados, ed., The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on a
President (New York: New Press, 2003); Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary
Karabell, eds., Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil
Rights Tapes (New York: Norton, 20003); Sheldon M. Stern, Averting
the ‘Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis
Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Max Holland, The
Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson
Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and theAftermath (New
York: Knopf, 2004). Prominent historians who have used excerpts from the
presidential recordings include Robert Dallek, Joan Hoff, and Taylor Branch, as
references to recorded conversations are becoming increasingly prevalent (and
necessary) in new histories, biographies, and documentary series (likeForeign
Relations of the United States) that cover the period from 1962 to 1973. A
recent example of a book that draws from the tapes is Nick Kotz, Judgment
Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws That Changed
America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
[4] In a paper presented at the 2003
American Historical Association (AHA) meeting, Joan Hoff made the case for
transcripts that reflect “the good, the bad, and the ugly. This . . . means the
uhs, the uh-huhs, the hums, the yeahs, the pauses, the talk-overs, the grunts,
the expletives, the ethnic slurs, and the ungrammatical, unintelligible
exchanges. These cannot be glossed over as extraneous to the historical value
of the tapes. . . . When these guttural expressions are left out of any
presidential tape transcript a misleading impression is conveyed that these
presidents and their advisers were communicating with each other precisely, decisively,
and efficiently. Nothing could be further from the truth . . . ” Joan Hoff,
“Comments on the Presidential Tapes Session, 3 January 2003, AHA annual meeting
(hereafter AHA Comments), p. 6.
[5] Schulman, “Taping History,” JAH, September
1998, p. 577.
[6] Ibid.
[7] As Hoff has suggested, however,
archivists familiar with the voices on the tapes and thoroughly grounded in the
history and context of the conversations would probably produce reliable
transcripts. Hoff, AHA Comments, p. 17.
[8] Archivists at the National Archives
estimated the same ratio was necessary to render a reasonably accurate
transcript of one hour from the Nixon recordings. Hoff, AHA Comments, pp.
11-12.
[9] Kutler utilized 201 hours of Nixon tape
recordings that were released in 1996 for his 1997 book. Kutler, Abuse of
Power, xiv.
[10] John Taylor, “Cutting the Nixon Tapes,” The
American Spectator, March 1998, pp. 49-50. In the paperback edition of Abuse
of Power, Kutler changed his editorial commentary to correct this
misleading impression.
[11] Hoff examined 2,700 pages of
transcripts from the first 63 hours of the Watergate (a.k.a. “abuse of power”)
tapes for her book, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
She criticized Kutler for not correcting a single transcript after errors had
been pointed out to him, such as when he “cut and pasted two conversations
between Nixon and [John] Dean for the morning and evening of March 16, 1973 in
an egregiously arbitrary and misleading fashion.” Hoff, AHA Comments, p. 4.
[12] Kutler message to Stern, 1 January 2005
[13] Zelikow was already steeped in the
subject matter. While teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the mid 1990s, he
had begun revising Graham Allison’s book on the crisis, Essence of
Decision (1971), in collaboration with Allison. Zelikow’s research led him
to the tape recordings, and eventually a second collaboration with a Harvard
professor, Ernest May. Paul Mitchinson, Lingua Franca, February 2000,
p. 58.
[14] Press Release, Harvard University Press
Publicity Department, August 1997. The editors claimed that “our work
transcribing the missile-crisis tapes took the better part of a year.” May and
Zelikow, “White House Tapes: Extraordinary Treasures for Historical Research,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education (hereafter Chronicle), 28 November
1997, p. B5.
[15] May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes,
xiii.
[16] Barry Gewen, “Profile in Caution, NYT
Book Review, 19 October 1997.
[17] “The Kennedy Tapes,” The
Economist, 18 October 1997.
[18] Richard Tofel, “Inside the Missile
Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, 23 September 1997.
[19] Joseph Losos, “Tapes of a Superpower in
a Supercrisis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 16 November 1997.
[20] Henry Graff, “Fundamental Questions
Remain, New Leader, 29 December 1997.
[21] The Kennedy Tapes, HUP website, http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/MAYKEN.html
[22] Timothy McKeown, “The Cuban Missile
Crisis and Politics as Usual,” The Journal of Politics, February
2000, p. 70.
[23] Lawrence Freedman, “The Kennedy Tapes,” International
Affairs, April 1998 (an “enormous effort”); Dallek, “Tales of the Tapes,” RAH, June
1998 (“skillfully edited and annotated”); Gil Troy, “JFK: Celebrity-In-Chief or
Commander-In-Chief?” RAH, September 1998 (“transcripts are
sickeningly accurate”); Schulman, “Taping History,”JAH, September 1998
(“through herculean efforts); Mark White, “The Kennedy Tapes,” The History
Teacher, November 1998 (transcripts of “almost undecipherable tapes” are
“great contribution”); Philip Brenner, “The Kennedy Tapes,” The New
England Quarterly, December 1998 (editors have “painstakingly deciphered
the often jumbled discussions . . . . an enormous public service . . . ”); Mark
White, “Revisiting the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Diplomatic History, Summer
1999 (editors “have converted what were muffled recordings into lucid, readable
transcripts. . . . sterling work . . . .”) Freedman was the sole critic of the
transcripts, writing that the “tapes themselves read like a rather bad radio
script,” but he apparently thought they were a true rendering of the
conversations. On the fractured nature of the transcripts, see, for example,
Terry Sullivan, “Confronting the Kennedy Tapes: The May-Zelikow Transcripts and
the Stern Assessments,” Presidential Studies Quarterly (hereafter PSQ),
September 2000, pp. 595-596.
[24] Prior to becoming head of the Miller
Center, Zelikow, together with May, had argued that the federal government
should underwrite complete transcription of all the presidential tapes, an
effort they estimated would take a decade and cost $1 million annually. May and
Zelikow, “White House Tapes,” Chronicle, p. B5.
[25] Judith Miller, “A Trove of Telltale
Tapes,” NYT, 27 June 1998. This comment is terribly ironic. May and
Zelikow eventually sold the film rights to their 1997 book, and it became the
basis of the 2000 production, Thirteen Days. The movie turned out to be a
quintessentially misleading and fictionalized Hollywood treatment of the
missile crisis, in which, among other things, the existence of the taping
system, U.S. subversion of Castro’s regime, and Khrushchev’s complex motives
for deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba were never mentioned. Ernest May explained
his association with the movie in an article, “Thirteen Days in 145
Minutes,” The American Prospect, January 2001.
[26] A typical example of an uncorrected
error likely created by a court reporter occurred on pages 637-638 of The
Kennedy Tapes.
McCone: —the
Chinese passed this note to the Cuban ambassador, on page 8 [?], implying that
the U.S.S.R. was an untrustworthy ally . . . .
Unidentified:
Could you repeat that, John?
McCone: Yes,
sir. Peiping, the Chinese Communists, sent a note to the Cuban ambassador in
Peiping implying that the U.S.S.R. was an untrustworthy ally . . . .
The second rendering of McCone's
remarks is accurate. Since he was essentially repeating himself, however,
careful editing should have corrected “on page 8 [?]” to read as “in Peiping.”
[27] A typical example of an audible portion
that was transcribed nonsensically in The Kennedy Tapes, from page
133:
JFK: . . . I
would think you [the Soviets would] have to go on the defensive, are not going
to commit nuclear weapons to be used against the United States from Cuba . . .
.
Corrected rendering:
JFK: I would
think you have to go on the assumption that they’re not going to permit nuclear
weapons to be used against the United States from Cuba.
[28] Stern, “What JFK Really Said,” Atlantic
Monthly, May 2000, pp. 122-128.
[29] May and Zelikow, "Letter to the
Editor: What JFK Really Said," Atlantic Monthly, August 2000, p. 13.
[30] “Details drive debate,” wrote May and
Zelikow on page 698 of their conclusion to The Kennedy Tapes. That
perceptive insight would seem to underscore the desirability of getting details
right in transcribing the recordings.
[31] While describing the historical
importance of recordings versus recorded minutes, the editors wrote, the
“Kennedy and Johnson tape recordings catch people’s verbal emphases,
hesitations, and shifts in voice that written minutes do not reflect.” May and
Zelikow, “White House Tapes,” Chronicle, p. B5.
[32] Stern used a home tape player and
low-tech, analog audio cassettes from the JFKL.
[33] Stern, “Source Material: The 1997
Published Transcripts of the JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes: Too Good to Be
True?” PSQ, September 2000.
[34] Zelikow and May, “Source Material,” PSQ, December
2000, pp. 794, 796.
[35] “JFK’s ‘Great Crises’ in Bookstores
This Month,” Spectrum, a publication of the Miller Center of Public
Affairs, Fall 2001.
[36] A review in Diplomatic History took
note of Stern’s criticisms of the HUP edition, but then presumed that the new,
revised transcripts were bound to be the best possible. James Giglio, “Kennedy
on Tape,” Diplomatic History, November 2003, p. 748.
[37] May and Zelikow, in their response to
Stern’s PSQ article, had assured users of The Kennedy Tapes that
the reference volumes would not render the HUP edition unusable. “We think few
will find the many amendments in our retranscriptions to be very important,”
they asserted in December 2000. According to the editors, they nonetheless did
urge HUP to issue a more fully revised work after the Miller Center volumes
were published. “But the press disappointed us by deciding that, in their
judgment, the amendments and the additions were not significant or interesting
enough to justify the cost.” Zelikow and May, “Source Material,” PSQ, December
2000, pp. 793, 794.
[38] On the first day of Excomm meetings,
for example, JFK observed, “If you go into Cuba in the way we’re talking about,
and taking out all the planes and all the rest, then you really haven’t got
much of an argument against invading.” The Norton version omitted (as did the
HUP edition) the single word “out.” Aside from muddling the president’s
observation, it could also leave the false impression that JFK was talking
about air cover for a U.S. ground invasion when he was actually referring to destroying Soviet
and Cuban aircraft on the island’s airfields. Naftali and Zelikow, Great
Crises, vol. 2, p. 449; May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, p.
98.
Another example of a flawed
retranscription that changed the speakers’ meaning can be found in the
rendition of an exchange from Saturday, October 27, easily the pivotal day of
the entire crisis. From pages 492 and 493 of Great Crises, volume
three, edited by Zelikow and May:
McNamara: I would
say only that we ought to keep some kind of pressure on tonight and tomorrow
night that indicates we’re firm. Now if we call off these air strikes tonight,
I think that settles that—
JFK: I [unclear] want
to do that, I think—
This rendition (similar to the one
on page 612 of the HUP edition) should have been recognized as making no sense
because there were no air strikes scheduled for Saturday night. McNamara was
actually recommending that the Pentagon call up 24 Air Force reserve squadrons.
McNamara: I would
say only that we ought to keep some kind of pressure on tonight and
tomorrow night that indicates we’re firm. Now if we call up these air squadrons
tonight, I think that settles that.
JFK: That’s right.
We’re gonna do that, aren’t we?
[39] For additional examples of errors, see
Stern, “The JFK Tapes: Round Two,” RAH, December 2002, pp. 680-688, and
“The Published Cuban Missile Crisis Transcripts: Rounds One, Two and Beyond,”
in Averting the ‘Final Failure,’ pp. 427-440.
The Miller Center’s process for
producing transcripts, as distinguished from the May-Zelikow methodology, was
described in detail in Zelikow and May, “Source Material,”PSQ, December
2000, pp. 795-796. “First, the work is done by trained professional historians
who have done deep research on the period covered by the tapes and on some of
the central themes of the meetings and conversations. . . . Second, each volume
uses the team method. . . . Usually one or two scholars painstakingly produces
a primary draft. . . .Two or more scholars then carefully go over that
transcript, individually or sometimes two listening at the same time. . . . In
the case of often-difficult meeting tapes, like the Kennedy recordings, every
transcript has benefited from at least four listeners. The volume editors
remain accountable for checking the quality and accuracy of all the work in
their volume, knitting together the whole. All of this work is then reviewed by
the general editors [Zelikow and May]. . . . Third, we use the best technology
that the project can afford.”
[40] May and Zelikow, Kennedy Tapes, p.
xiii.
[41] Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.
[42] See also footnote 4.
[43] The Miller Center volumes explicitly
state that its Presidential Recordings Program was undertaken “on the premise
that these recordings will remain important historical sources for centuries to
come.” Zelikow and May, Great Crises, p. xiii.
[44] Hoff, AHA Comments, p. 7.
[45] Spectrum, Fall 2001.
[46] Johnson’s original instructions were
that the tapes would be opened no sooner than 2023, fifty years after his
death.
[47] Beschloss, Taking Charge, p.
551. The fact that the Johnson recordings are played weekly on C-SPAN is good
evidence that the audibility of these tapes is often excellent—despite
lingering issues of punctuation.
[48] In addition, Taking Charge included
several assassination-related conversations from late 1966 and early 1967.
[49] Beschloss, Taking Charge, p.
551; Reaching for Glory, pp. 429-430. The description in Reaching for
Glory is only slightly different.
[50] Beschloss, Taking Charge, p.
551.
[51] Beschloss does not explain who else
transcribed the balance of the conversations, or what percentage was
represented by “most,” an issue also raised by Joan Hoff in her AHA Comments, p.
4. In Reaching for Glory, Beschloss described his methodology
slightly differently. “Some of the tapes I have transcribed from scratch. For
others I have started with rough transcripts created by LBJ’s secretaries or by
a professional transcriber and listened repeatedly to the tapes, making
substantial corrections, adding emphasis, punctuation, and transliteration of
words.” Beschloss, Reaching for Glory, p. 431.
[52] Beschloss, Taking Charge, pp.
551-552.
[53] Brinkley, “D.C. Confidential,” NYT
Book Review, 19 October 1997 (“superbly edited and annotated”); Michiko
Kakutani, “Overhearing History: Johnson’s Secret Tapes,”NYT, 10 October
1997 (“expertly selected, edited, and footnoted”).
[54] Editorial, “LBJ, From the Inside,” NYT, 11
October 1997. Newsweek also published excerpts of Beschloss’s
transcripts, and ABC News devoted several Nightline shows to readings
of the Johnson (and Nixon) tapes, with commentary by Beschloss and other
historians.
[55] Keith Kyle, “Taking Charge,” International
Affairs, April 1999, p. 421; Dallek, “Tales of the Tapes,” RAH, p.
335. In a review of Beschloss’s second volume for Diplomatic History, John
Prados chided the author for not telling the reader “much about his criteria
for inclusion or exclusion” of a conversation. But questions about the nature
of the transcripts themselves were not raised. Prados, “Looking for the Real
Lyndon,”Diplomatic History, November 2003, pp. 752, 755-756.
[56] Schulman, “Taping History,” JAH, p.
574.
[57] For some examples of meaningful
mistakes in Beschloss’s transcriptions and/or presentation of the
conversations, see Holland, Kennedy Assassination Tapes, pp. 60, 61, 95,
240, 248, 251.
[58] One British reviewer specifically
faulted Beschloss for the lack of context. Anthony Howard, “He Had It Taped,” Sunday
Times ( London), 5 April 1998.
[59] By contrast, there was some criticism
of Beschloss’s second volume for his interpretation of Johnson’s conversations
on Vietnam. Jack Valenti, “LBJ’s Unwinnable War,” Washington Post, 28
November 2001, and in a rejoinder, Beschloss, “LBJ’s Secret War,” Washington
Post, 1 December 2001. But again, the transcripts themselves were presumed
to be above reproach. Michiko Kakutani, “Johnson Tapes Show a Man Full of
Doubt, Even as Victor,” NYT, 13 November 2001 (“expertly edited and
annotated”).
[60] Holland, “Tapes:
Hearing a Wrong Leaning, er, Meaning,” Los Angeles Times, 1 August
1999. On 18 September 1964, the day the Warren Commission met to deliberate for
the last time, Senator Richard Russell had a conversation with President
Johnson. When the subject of the Commission arose, Russell said, “I tried my
best to get in a dis-sent, but they’d come ‘round and trade me out of it
by givin’ me a little old thread of it.” Russell was explaining that the other
commissioners massaged the language until Russell had no grounds for a
published dissent. In Beschloss’s rendition, Russell said, “I tried my best to
get in a dis-sent, but they’d come ‘round and trade me out of it by giving
me a little old threat.” The implication created is that pressure was exerted
on Russell and that he signed the unanimous report under duress, which was
quite untrue.
This error was striking for two
reasons. First, it led Beschloss to misrepresent Russell’s perspective on the
assassination, if not the Warren Report itself. And second, it was an
inexplicable error to make, if only because had Earl Warren (or anyone else on
the Commission) even vaguely threatened Russell, all hell would have broken
loose.
In the revised “Editor’s Note” in Reaching
for Glory, Beschloss pledged to correct errors in future printings of his
Johnson volumes. Although there have not been, to the authors’ knowledge,
subsequent printings of Taking Charge, Beschloss could have easily used
the publication of Reaching for Glory in 2001 to correct this
mistake.
[61] Zelikow, “Recent Books,” Foreign
Affairs, January/February 2002.
[62] The editorial conventions were also not
applied consistently, i.e., sometimes larger deletions were not marked off
and/or ellipses not employed where they should have been in theory.
[63] See the comparison between the Holland
and Beschloss treatments of a 22 November 1963 conversation between Johnson and
Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg in Stern,“Presidential
Tapes and Historical Interpretations,” RAH, December 2004, pp.
586-589.
[64] May and Zelikow, “White House Tapes,” Chronicle, p.
B5.
[65] Zelikow and May, “Source Material,” PSQ, December
2000, p. 793.
[66] Zelikow presentation at the
Presidential Tapes Conference, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, 16-17 February
2003.
[67] “Response of Philip Zelikow,” to Stern,
“Errors Still Afflict the Transcripts of the Kennedy Tape Recordings,” History
News Network, 15 March 2004.
[68] Hoff, AHA Comments, p. 9.
This essay first appeared on History
News Network, 21 February 2005
© 2007 by Sheldon M. Stern and Max Holland
© 2007 by Sheldon M. Stern and Max Holland
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