Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon tapes: what they reveal — and what they don
By Burt Peretsky and Brian Fitzgerald Historians always have the last word. Don’t they? Public response to the newly available audiotapes containing Oval Office conversations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon “has been astonishing,” says Bruce Schulman. However, he points out that historians aren’t as mesmerized with the recordings as the American people seem to be. In a recent Journal of American History review of three books on the tapes, the CAS associate professor of history and director of Boston University’s American Studies Program acknowledges the natural appeal of the transcripts. “Until recently, we’ve had little knowledge of either the extent of the presidential tapes or their specific contents,” he says. Consequently, major newspapers printed revelations from the transcripts on their front pages, Newsweek magazine published excerpts from the Johnson recordings, and ABC News devoted several episodes of Nightline to dramatic readings of both the Johnson and Nixon tape
