October 27, 1962: Transcripts of the Meetings of the ExComm

Transcriber's Note
October 27, 1962: McGeorge Bundy,
nscnpts of the ~~transcriber
TranIscrpsof the James G. Blight,
Meetings of the editor
ExComm
Ln the summer of 1985 I
went to the Kennedy Library and listened to the Presidential Recordings of meetings
that I had attended during the Cuban missile crisis. These tapes were still highly
classified, except for the tapes of October 16, 1962, which had been transcribed,
"sanitized" and published in 1985. I was allowed to listen to the still-classified tapes
because the appropriate authorities in Washington and at the Kennedy Library held
that, since I had been present at these meetings as Special Assistant for National
Security to President Kennedy, listening to the tapes was only a renewed access to
their contents, parallel to the renewed access to classified documents that is often
extended to those who worked with those documents while in office.
As I listened to these tapes I was rapidly persuaded that whatever one might think
of President Kennedy's decision to engage in such secret taping-and I think I would
have opposed it if I had been asked-the resulting record has important historical
value. I therefore undertook the task of transcribing the tapes of the most important
day, October 27, and presently the necessary Washington process of "sanitization"
and declassification was completed. None of the still-classified material excised affects
the substance of the transcript, and what was cut was, in the main, already known
to close students of the crisis.
I am making use of this new evidence myself, in a book about political decisions
related to nuclear weapons, but it seems important that new evidence of this sort
should be promptly and fully shared with other students of these matters and with
the public. The full text of my transcription is available from the Kennedy Library,
Tapes of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the "Ex-
Comm") of October 27, 1962, just before the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, were
transcribed by McGeorge Bundy and were edited and annotated by James G. Blight, who
gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Marc Trachtenberg. The full transcript is available
from the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Mass.
McGeorge Bundy was Special Assistant for National Security to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, 1961-
1966. He is presently working on a book about political decisions related to nuclear weapons. James G.
Blight is Executive Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
International Security, Winter 1987/88 (Vol. 12, No. 3)
C 1987 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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