After years of speculation, the final installment of secret White House recordings from the Kennedy administration has been declassified, providing new insight into the president's last three months in office.
According to Reuters, the tapes were meant to record Oval Office and Cabinet Room conversations, although even the president's top staffers were not aware of them until years later. The newly declassified audio is now part of more than 260 hours of taped conversations that have been reviewed and distributed by curators of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in the past two decades.
Many of the more intriguing excerpts included presidential briefings involving conflicting reports from top advisors tasked with completing fact-finding missions in Vietnam. As declassification archivist Maura Potter told the news source, it was fascinating to trace the decision-making process that lead to the initial intervention.
But perhaps the curators' most significant task was the preservation of conversations in the lead up to Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963. According to the Associated Press, the tapes captured what has turned out to be an eerie conversation among staffers surrounding the hectic travel arrangements and political agenda that would follow the president's visit to Texas.
