home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- GRAPEVINE, Page 17Secrets from the J.F.K. Years
-
-
- By DAVID ELLIS/Reported by Georgia Harbison
-
-
- Despite their cliffhanging confrontations, John F. Kennedy
- and Nikita Khrushchev were faithful pen pals. The Crisis Years
- (HarperCollins), a new book on the Kennedy Administration by
- historian Michael Beschloss, discloses the contents of 80 secret
- messages between the U.S. and Soviet leaders on subjects ranging
- from the Berlin Wall to Vietnam. In his research, Beschloss
- discovered why the correspondence came to an abrupt end six
- weeks before Kennedy's death: because of a bureaucratic
- misunderstanding, the State Department failed to send a crucial
- Kennedy response to Khrushchev's peace proposals.
-
- The book, due in June, describes Kennedy's elaborate White
- House taping system. Secret Service agents put microphones in
- the mansion's library, presidential bedroom telephone, Oval
- Office and Cabinet Room. The author provides excerpts from now
- public transcripts of meetings during the Cuban missile crisis.
- Kennedy's tentative behavior on the tapes of initial meetings,
- writes Beschloss, does "not quite bear out later claims . . .
- that this was a President superbly in command of the crisis
- from the start."
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-