Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy, the only living child of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy, wrote the foreword to Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy.

From her Q & A with Irene Lacher at the Los Angeles Times:

Why did your father start taping? He wasn't making tapes at the beginning of his administration.

Right. They don't really start until almost halfway through — July '62. So no one's quite sure, and there isn't a really accurate explanation. I was always told it was a combination of things, one, that especially after the Bay of Pigs he had gotten what he considered poor advice from the military and then there was a lot of debate about who had said what. And I think he wanted an accurate record of things going forward, but they weren't installed until quite a while after that. So it rings true to me that he was interested in history, he wrote a historical bestseller, he loved reading history, he loved reading diaries. So he was probably thinking that he wanted a historical record; he would write his own book one day, his memoir. He was interested in new technology; he was interested in innovative uses for technology, so this was technology that was just becoming available at the time.

Speaking of the Cuban missile crisis, it was interesting to hear how much bad advice he was given.

I know.

And his strength to resist it. Was it known that he thought he could have been impeached for resisting the military's calls to invade Cuba?

He certainly was walking a tightrope. It's incredible when you listen to the generals. It gives you such a vivid, visceral sense of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue