Kennedy's classified White House tapes

      In the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy called national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to ask who owned his brother's presidential papers. After checking with the State Department, Bundy told Kennedy that they were the personal property of the slain president. The attorney general then had the locks changed on the White House safes so that only he would have access.  He told the president's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln to secure all the audio tapes that had been made of the president's meetings and take them to her apartment.  She did this and later turned the tapes over to Robert Kennedy.

      I didn't bother to find out what happened to the documents in the safes, but I presume they went to the Kennedy Library in Boston. I did look into the tapes. Some, but perhaps not all, are at the Kennedy Library. According to the library's explanation, Robert Kennedy donated a collection to the library, but the library doesn't know if he gave it everything that he acquired from Evelyn Lincoln.  

       Although the tapes obviously contained highly sensitive information, since they included the president's meetings with CIA officials, they bore no security classifications.  Nonetheless, after the library acquired them, intelligence officials reviewed and classified them.  Of particular interest to me is the tape of August 15, 1963.  The president and Bundy met with CIA Director McCone, Deputy Director Helms, Southeast Asia desk chief William Colby, and Bruce Cheever of the CIA.  The library's listing for this tape says "Eighteen minutes are deleted as secret."  Apparently the CIA or someone else went to the library, listened to the tape, and classified it. (See page 91 in Murder, Inc.) The library's listing says the meeting dealt with British Guinea among other things, but this doesn't make sense. The United States' interests in British Guinea were not particularly sensitive in 1963, and most of the CIA men at the meeting had nothing to do with the country.

      The Presidential Records Act, which was passed later, would not have allowed Robert Kennedy to take possession of the tapes.   But this is an instance where the government classified a presidential record after the president died and was succeeded.

       The final oddity of the Kennedy tapes is that they were not identified for the Assassination Records Review Board and never reviewed by it.  So the mysterious August 15, 1963 tape has not been subject to the periodic reviews for declassification of the JFK Records Act, and we may never know what is on it.