BOSTON — Final recordings that President John F. Kennedy secretly made in the Oval Office include an eerie conversation about what would become the day of his funeral.
In talking to staffers while trying to arrange his schedule, Kennedy remarked that Nov. 25 was shaping up to be a “tough day” after his return from Texas and time at Cape Cod.
“It’s a hell of a day, Mr. President,” a staffer agreed.
The exchange was among the last 45 hours of private recordings Kennedy made, tapes the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum released Tuesday. They provide a window into the final months of the 35th president’s life.
They 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.
The tapes are the last of more than 260 hours of recordings of meetings and conversations Kennedy privately made before his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
David Coleman, the professor who leads the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia, on Tuesday called the final recordings significant because while JFK didn’t tape himself regularly, he chose to preserve important moments.
Kennedy kept the recordings a secret from his top aides. He made the last one two days before his death.
Kennedy library archivist Maura Porter said Monday that JFK may have been saving them for a memoir or possibly started them because he was bothered when the military later gave a different overview of a discussion with him about the Bay of Pigs.
The sound of the president’s children, Caroline and John Jr., playing outside the Oval Office is part of a recording on which he introduces them to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.
“Hello, hello,” Gromyko says as the children come in, telling their father, “They are very popular in our country.”
JFK tells the children, mentioning a dog Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gifted the family: “His chief is the one who sent you Pushinka. You know that? You have the puppies.”
JFK library spokeswoman Rachel Flor said the daughter of the late president has heard many of the recordings, but she wasn’t sure whether she had heard this batch.
“He’d go from being a president to being a father,” Porter said of the recordings. “… And that was really cute.”
