Did JFK Say It?

Early in 2003, as I began the final editing of the manuscript for my book on the Cuban missile crisis ExComm meetings, I turned to the dreaded but unavoidable task of checking the accuracy of hundreds of footnotes. 1 I had already decided to include a JFK remark apparently made late on September 30, 1962 when federal troops failed to arrive in time to prevent a riot over the enrollment of James Meredith at the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi. Kennedy was fuming over the troop delay since two people had already been killed and many, including federal marshals, had been injured: “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and their split-second timing,” JFK exploded, “but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” The remark seemed entirely consistent with Kennedy’s well-documented skepticism about the competence and reliability of the military.

I first saw these words in Richard Reeves’s 1993 book on JFK—where they appeared to be taken from a tape-recorded White House meeting during the Meredith crisis. 2 I had heard those recordings years earlier when researching oral history interviews on civil rights during the Kennedy administration, but I could not recall that specific remark. Therefore, I listened again—several times—to these tapes and to my surprise could not find the alleged JFK statement cited by Reeves. I then checked the September 30, 1962 Meredith meeting transcripts in the 2001 Miller Center-Norton edition of JFK tape-recordings; the quote cited by Reeves was not in the transcripts. As a result, I reluctantly deleted the remark in question from my manuscript and subsequently forgot about it.

Then, early in 2007, I reviewed Nick Bryant’s book on JFK and civil rights.3 To my surprise, the baffling JFK quote resurfaced (p. 350)—with a footnote to the same September 1962 tape in which neither the Miller Center transcribers nor I had been able to locate it. As a result, I checked to see if other historians had used that mysterious quote. The 1997 Harvard Press edition of JFK Cuban missile crisis transcripts, for example, had cited the remark to illustrate JFK’s attitude toward the military (as I had planned to use it) and, routinely and legitimately, had cited the Reeves book rather than the tape itself as the source. 4

Four years later, as discussed above, the Miller Center transcribers and editors evidently did not hear those words on the Meredith crisis meeting tapes. However, the editors nonetheless used JFK’s alleged words as historical background, claiming instead that President Kennedy had indeed made this statement “to an aide (with the tape recorder running)” during the Meredith desegregation crisis on September 30th. Unfortunately, they did not footnote this intriguing assertion to a specific tape recording or to any other source.5  

Even more puzzling, the elusive JFK quote has just resurfaced in Michael Beschloss’s new best seller about presidential courage.6  Beschloss’s endnote cites two sources for the quote: a September 20, 1962 JFK Library tape recording and a book by Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell about civil rights recordings during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. 7 In fact, JFK was on vacation from September 14-24; he did briefly return to the White House on September 19-20, but no tapes were recorded on those days. Presumably, this is a typo—and was supposed to refer instead to the September 30th tape. But, as we have already seen, the quote is not on that tape. Similarly, the quote does not appear in the Rosenberg-Karabell account of the tapes made during the Meredith crisis meetings. “Curiouser and curiouser!”—as Alice cried out in Wonderland.

This much we know: the Meredith tapes from which the JFK remark allegedly came were declassified in 1983; ten years later the quote in question appeared in the Reeves JFK volume. Perhaps Reeves got these words from another JFK tape, a Kennedy Library oral history interview, or an interview he conducted for his book—and inadvertently attributed them to the September 30, 1962 Meredith crisis tape. The subsequent citations discussed above then grew out of the original error. (It is, of course, naive to expect   historians to check and verify every secondary background source—especially, in this case, by listening to a nearly two and a half hour tape recording that is often extremely difficult to decipher.)

The basic question remains: did JFK really say it? Is there a credible and unequivocal source for this remark? Hopefully, someone will come forward on the History News Network to resolve this historical enigma.

1 Sheldon M. Stern, Averting the “Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings, Stanford, 2003.

2Richard Reeves, PresidentKennedy: Profile of Power, Simon and Schuster, 1993, p. 363.

3 Sheldon M. Stern, review of Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality, Basic Books, 2006, Reviews in American History, March 2007, pp. 118-125.

4 Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Harvard, 1997, p. 174.

5 Timothy Naftali and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises, Volume II, Norton, 2001, p. 579. The Meredith crisis meeting in question, which began late on the evening of September 30 and ended about an hour after midnight, was recorded on Tapes 26 and 26A in the Kennedy Library presidential recordings collection—available on the website of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia (www.millercenter.virginia.edu).

6 Michael Beschloss, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America,1789-1989, Simon and Schuster, 2007, p. 256.

7 Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: the Civil
Rights Tapes, Norton, 2003, pp. 27-84.