 "Photo: Photo illustration by Andrea Lai")
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum released 13 hours of President Johnson's recorded telephone conversations Thursday.
The tapes cover the first four months of the last year of Johnson's presidency, from Jan. 1 through April 30, 1968. They include conversations with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen.
"This release is a particularly exciting release, because the first four months of 1968 there was so much happening," said supervisory library archivist Claudia Anderson.
The events of the period include Robert F. Kennedy's presidential candidacy, the Tet Offensive, the North Korean attack on the USS Pueblo, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., riots in Chicago and Washington, D.C. and Johnson's decision not to seek re-election for president.
"The recordings present a dimension of the historical events that you just don't come close to in the printed record, in the memos," said library archivist Allen Fisher. "He wasn't a writer. But he talked all the time."
Fisher helped prepare the digital tapes for release. He said some of the challenges involved adjusting the speed and volume so the tapes would be audible and intelligible. He said the work began in the 1990s, when digital tapes were made from the original Dictabelt recordings. Dictabelt is an antiquated technology that recorded sound by carving grooves into a plastic belt.
Senior library archivist Regina Greenwell said another challenge was determining the date and time of the conversation, as well as who was present, since the notes on the original recordings were often incomplete or inaccurate.
One of the tapes contains a recording of Johnson's March 23, 1968 conversation with postmaster general Larry O'Brien, whom Johnson tries to persuade to take over his presidential campaign. Just a week later, on March 31, Johnson made a speech in which he announced he would not run for president.
"The thing that most surprised me was how late in March Johnson was still talking with people about his campaign strategy," Anderson said. "I didn't note a hint in his voice that he was thinking about not running. Sounds for the world like a man running."
In another recording, Daley asks for Johnson's help in sending federal troops to Chicago to calm the violent riots that followed King's assassination.
"I think nearly every day I read in the paper there's a 40th anniversary of something that happened in 1968," Greenwell said. "It was just such a tumultuous year."
When she transferred control of his files to the LBJ Library, Johnson's secretary Mildred Stegall said he wanted his telephone conversations closed to researchers until 50 years after his death. In the 1990s, the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act required the library to release recordings with relevance to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After those recordings were released, former library director Harry Middleton, with Lady Bird Johnson's approval, released more of the conversations.
"We hope to finish [releasing] all the presidential recordings this year, because it's the centennial of Johnson's birth," Greenwell said.
