“Christ,” the president complained. “Who are we sending over there? Girls?”

Like Richard M. Nixon after him and several presidents before him, Kennedy installed hidden recording devices in the Oval Office. Almost no one knew about the practice until the existence of the Nixon tapes was revealed in 1973 during the Watergate hearings. This lifted the curtain on stealth self-bugging in the White House that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Kennedy’s recording system was dismantled immediately after his assassination. The family kept the tapes until 1976 and then gave them to the National Archives. The Kennedy Library later acquired them and began to make them available to historians in 1983. Their release was a slow and laborious process because the sound quality was uneven and they had to be transcribed and declassified. The last 45 hours of tapes were released only this year.

Historians have turned to the tapes for insight into major events of the Kennedy presidency like the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The value of this book, Mr. Putnam said, is that “it is the first time the material has been published in one collection with annotations and a serious historian providing context for each conversation.”

The book was published by Hyperion, which released a book last year of interviews conducted with Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband’s death.

The tapes reveal that Kennedy talked several times with his predecessors about pressing issues of the day, including with Dwight D. Eisenhower about the Cuban missile crisis. But one conversation with Harry S. Truman veered in a surprisingly personal direction as they wrapped up a call in July 1963.

“Well, you sound in good shape,” Kennedy said.

“All right,” Truman replied. “The only trouble with me is that, the main difficulty I have, is keeping the wife satisfied.” Both men laughed.

“Well, that’s all right,” Kennedy said.

“Well, you know how that is,” Truman went on. “She’s very much afraid I’m going to hurt myself. Even though I’m not. She’s a tough bird.”