In the White House, Kennedy installed a covert recording system

Presidents have recorded their private discussions in the White House before Richard Nixon. Kennedy built a covert recording device in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room in the summer of 1962. This system sent recordings to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the White House basement. The device was probably installed by the president to help him write his memoir later on, and it recorded numerous historical conversations between Kennedy and his aides, including those that took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During the final 16 months of his presidency, President John F. Kennedy reportedly filmed 600 of his White House meetings and phone calls in secret—apparently without the knowledge of those there. Kennedy taped certain meetings and phone calls while he was serving in the White House, but the amount of the recordings, the identities of the participants, and the topics covered have never been made public.

The recordings were produced between July 1962 and November 1963, the month Kennedy was slain, according to a 29-page log that The Washington Post obtained from the Kennedy Library in Boston. The recordings include numerous highly-classified National Security Council meetings on topics like the Cuban missile crisis, Berlin, and Vietnam, as well as high-level discussions of domestic controversies like the 1962 integration of the University of Mississippi. The recordings also contain a vast amount of previously unreleased information.