The public can now eavesdrop on intimate phone conversations of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, recorded during one of the most volatile and pivotal years in U.S. history.
The recordings and transcripts from 1967, released Tuesday by the LBJ Library, include discussions about the Vietnam War, the "Hot Line" during the Six Day War and the appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"When you listen to the tapes, you see a policy and history being made," library archivist Claudia Anderson said. "LBJ didn't write down a lot of his thoughts, so it's a good primary source."
Johnson's taped conversations include famous figures such as presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald Ford, the Rev. Billy Graham and Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
In one conversation with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Johnson talked about the U.S. response to the Alexsei Kosygin-Harold Wilson peace initiative and discussed the bombing cessation when North Vietnam ceased infiltration.
"It has given a new life to the LBJ library," history professor Henry Brands said. "By the end of the '90s we thought all the info was out there, until now."
The library has about 30 conversations. However, some are publicly inaccessible because they are security classified or fall under an embarrassment policy used to prevent public access of conversations that would have embarrassed Johnson if he were alive, Anderson said. The telephone conversations have been released since the 1990s in chronological increments by year of Johnson's presidency. The last recordings were released in November, and the library has been working on compiling the 1967 tapes for almost a year, Anderson said.
Before the tapes were released, the public did not know the full extent of what Johnson was thinking during his presidency, Brands said.
"When the tapes were released, a big window was opened," Brands said. "It's a difference between night and day. All of a sudden, Johnson comes to life."
In a restricted conversation with former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Johnson asked if Israel or the now defunct United Arab Republic had initiated hostilities, and Rusk recommended a congressional leadership meeting. Rusk went on to read the draft message to the Soviet Union about reports of fighting in the Middle East and U.S. support for the U.N. security council action to stop the fighting.
The general public is very interested in the Johnson telephone conversations, Anderson said.
"A lot of students use them for research because they are very useful to document history," Anderson said.
Brands said he sends his students to the library to listen to the telephone tapes so that they can develop their own impression of Johnson.
"When I speak to prospective graduate students, I tell them, 'If you want to study American policy during the 1960s, this is the place to be,'" Brands said.
The telephone conversations are located in the reading room on the 10th floor of the LBJ library.
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