Celebrating the LBJ Telephone Tapes: with Melody Barnes, Michael Beschloss & Brian Williams

[Music] good evening i'm mark silverstone associate professor in presidential studies and chair of the presidential recordings program at the university of virginia's miller center of public affairs on behalf of the miller center the lbj library and the lbj foundation i'd like to welcome you to a roundtable discussion about president lyndon johnson and his white house telephone tapes the crown jewels in the lbj library archives when president johnson opened his library 50 years ago this week he declared it's all here the story of our time with the bark off there's no better example of that unvarnished history than the 650 hours of telephone conversation that lbj taped during his time in office covering the key issues of the day these recordings open an extraordinary window onto johnson building the great society fighting a war on poverty legislating for civil rights and struggling with policy toward vietnam they also shed light on johnson's approach to the presidency to the press and to many other issues of the day over the past 20 years my colleagues and i at the miller center with support from the national historical publications and records commission have been transcribing and analyzing the lbj white house tapes and as of tonight we are pleased to launch in collaboration with the lbj librarian foundation a new website that provides greater access to their contents lbjtapes.org visitors will be able to hear some of the most significant and revealing conversations from the collection and to read along with specially curated transcripts each of which is embedded in a rich variety of historical resources we think this will be of great value to students teachers scholars the interested public anyone who wants to know more about president johnson the administration he led and the america he served to celebrate the launch of the site and to commemorate the golden anniversary of the lbj presidential library we are thrilled to host this evening's special conversation about the lbj tapes please join me in welcoming melody barnes michael beschloss brian williams and the director of the lbj library mark lawrence thank you mark and thanks so much to the miller center for this wonderful partnership that's resulted in this terrific new website that makes available more widely in with more context than ever before these remarkable telephone recordings from the johnson presidency i now have the huge privilege of welcoming three extraordinary individuals who are going to help us think about these conversations and think about the 36th president of the united states in the times in which he lived it is truly a dream team of commentators to help us with this task i want first of all to welcome melody barnes who is the dorothy danforth compton professor and co-director of the democracy initiative at the university of virginia melody served as a senior domestic policy advisor to president obama and in 2020 hosted the award-winning podcast lbj in the great society a project that made very extensive use of the lbj recordings next i'd like to welcome michael beschloss an emmy-winning contributor to nbc news and the pbs newshour his 10 highly regarded books on presidential history include two that dive very deeply into the lbj recordings and finally i'd like to welcome brian williams the anchor of the 11th hour with brian williams which airs weeknights on msnbc brian served as anchor and managing editor of the nbc nightly news for a decade during which he earned just about every award that a broadcast journalist can earn brian michael melody welcome and thanks so much for being here now i want of course to play some of these tapes and get your reactions to them but let's talk for just a moment about what these tapes are why they were made and how they have come to light over the years michael i think your experience with the tapes goes back at least to the 1990s if not further back can you talk a little bit about how you first discovered the tapes and a little bit about how they came to light over the years that followed uh yeah i was having dinner with all of our friend harry middleton you know the famous and i always say the joe dimaggio of presidential library directors i think marky would agree with that and this was about 1993 or 1994 and i was having dinner with him in the jockey club in washington with uh harry macpherson the honored longtime lbj aide and public servant in other ways and harry began talking to me about these tapes and he said did you know they existed and i i said you know i had heard that he taped some of his conversations but how many could he have actually taped terry and harry said well over 700 hours and they go from the beginning of the presidency to the end and i said well if these are real tapes in other words not just lbj saying you know i'm earnest for peace and i'm doing this and doing in other words as long as they were not tapes made for the ear of a later historian this is going to be an amazing contribution to johnson scholarship to understanding him because number one you know it's what every historian dreams of which is you suddenly run into a cache of an original source that is so immense and all-encompassing that it could change the way that we see a president and everything that he did and the other thing is that i would say i said this to harry that evening and i would say it now if you wanted a source on lbj if you could only choose one i probably would choose tapes of his private conversations i sure wouldn't choose letters as we all know he wrote these lovely letters many of them were not written by him some of the most heartfelt give you a real window onto the heart but it's the heart of jack valenti or someone else you know lbj did was not in the habit of pouring his innermost feelings into a letter and you know some of the reminiscences by aides who admired him are somewhat restrained and his memoirs uh was a noble effort but i don't think anyone would say that the vantage point as helpful as it is in certain ways gives you a sense of lbj really talking and telling you what was really on his mind but to have these tapes this is what you really want as opposed to let's say dwight eisenhower you wouldn't particularly want tapes because eisenhower was quite reserved in private as he was in public same with calvin coolidge so the point is i said to harry i'm glad you've decided to open these things because this could be a revolution why did you do it and he said well we're doing it for two reasons number one the oliver stone law there was a an effort after oliver stone was making his film jfk to get files related to the kennedy assassination open and he said i was advised by our legal people that we might not only have a lawsuit of that kind for any of the tapes that deal with the assassination but also more generally for all the tapes so i talked to mrs johnson i said you know you've got a recommendation for us which is should we keep these closed or they should be should they be opened and she said you know go ahead and open them you know essentially i'm proud of what my husband did i know that there will be things on them that i don't like because i haven't heard them but i am confident enough in what linden did that the more people find out about what he did both the strengths and the flaws the better which uh is just the kind of presidential relative you'd want i mean she she showed amazing insight and not only changed history but i think really changed the way that her husband is seen now by historians and other later americans one of the questions that hangs around the tapes is why lbj made them in the first place why would lbj have made these and for that matter why did american presidents from roosevelt to nixon make similar kinds of recordings lbj when he was a senator used to make tapes are used to make records of his private conversations which was basically his close aid walter jenkins uh listening in on a dead key extension and making notes of very exact notes of lbj for instance getting a commitment from a senator and there was one wagon the johnson entourage who referred to these notes as the the dead key scrolls but the reason why johnson did this was if a senator double-crossed him and believe it or not in the 1950s occasionally that would happen he could go back to the senator and say you know you told me yesterday and i quote and then have the exact commitment that had been made and the senate senator would wonder why johnson had such perfect recall so the technology had improved so that by the time he became president in november of 1963 uh he thought that not only would this be a historic period but it would also help him as a manager in the same way it had in the senate uh and so as a result from almost the moment he came to the white house from dallas these these tape machines began rolling i would just remind everybody we have lbj to thank for huge portions of watergate it was johnson who even at once at one time on his hands and knees walked incoming president dick nixon through the amazing recording system he was about to inherit and johnson put brackets around it at that time saying you'll want these as a record of your conversations um what an incredible gift to historians like michael that we have these as michael uh correctly says in the introduction the forward to his first of the two books on the tapes the only thing worse than anything bad that comes out of these tapes anything bad we hear in johnson's comments would have been in johnson's view to have been forgotten uh this has kept him so relevant it's so intimate the experience of listening to these conversations melody in your work on this wonderful podcast that debuted last year you used the conversations extensively in your project what was it that made these such a valuable tool well a couple of things one i'll step back for a second and answer that question through the lens of my experience as a staff person so having been ted kennedy's chief counsel having been president obama's domestic policy advisor so much happens in the room and so much happens on the phone and written material can't capture that what a memo looks like by the time it gets to a senator or a president has often been edited and re-edited and lots of people put their opinions in and they send things back and scribbles and notes it will tell you something but when you have those conversations you get the nuance you get the tone of voice you get the humor you get the anger things that you can't necessarily interpret from the written word all of a sudden are very visible or certainly uh the the the oratory is available to you and it gives you a sense of the moment in a way that nothing else really can and for the purpose of the podcast i know those who listened to it and came back to me said oh my gosh i knew that lyndon johnson was a character but i never knew that i never had a sense of that and i also know from some other experiences i've had working with other media companies as they've interviewed civil rights leaders from the period people who were negotiating with him that after listening to the tapes they said i wish i had known that i had no idea he thought that so it gives you a real window into what he was thinking and feeling and the strategic mind and for us it takes us it puts us in the room where it happened in a way that nothing else can let's listen to some tapes uh melody i know that one of your favorites is lbj's conversation with with sergeant shriver the head of the peace corps this one comes from february 1st of 1964. and in this conversation we hear lbj informing shriver in using all of his legendary persuasive powers that shriver is about to be named the new head of the war on poverty let's roll the tape and then come back to you all for some thoughts marge good morning mr president how are you i'm going to announce your appointment at press conference what's that conference sir no well i think it's uh it would be uh advisable if you don't mind if i could have uh this weekend i wanted to sit down with a couple of people and see what we could get in the way of some sort of a plan because what happens at least my story is that what happens is that you you're not somebody when you hear somebody else and they don't know what the hell they're doing or what the program is going to be specifically and who's going to tie it then you're you're in a hell of a hole calling you up and saying well now what are you gonna do well just don't talk to him just go away and go to camp david figure it out we need something to save the prayers we've got to say to them and i've got to tell them what to talk to you about yesterday and you can just take off work out your peace corps any way you want to you'd be head of the committee and have some acting operator if you want bill to help you i'll let him do that i'll do anything but i want to announce this and get it behind me so i keep quit getting all these other pressures and uh i i think you're gonna you've got to do it you just can't let me down so the quicker we get behind us better you can talk to them as special assistant to the president a hell of a lot easier and you can talk to them just as peace administrator and if they if they want to talk to you tell them speak for me melody thoughts what is it that makes this one of your favorite conversations i love this conversation for so many reasons and and some of them may not be apparent i mean as the conversation goes on there are these humorous moments uh but johnson is imploring every tool that he has and that he so famously uses he's goading he's bullying he's charming he's relentless and he's doing this in furtherance of an objective a big objective that he has so he has this idea with regard to the war on poverty and he wants to move very quickly he understands from his experience uh in congress that he's got to be able to feed the beast that is the press of no offense brian um and assure them and the nation that he knows what he's doing and that he's moving forward so he knows what he wants to accomplish and he rightly understands that sergeant shriver is the right person to do this he doesn't care that sergeant shriver is grieving quite frankly i mean he cares but for his objective he doesn't care he's just lost someone a family member president kennedy he doesn't care that he already has a full-time job running the peace corps he doesn't care that he has a family he's just returned home from being overseas from a period of time he is focused on what he wants to get done and the reason that i appreciate this tape is because it tells you what kind of leader he is uh the good and the bad and the ugly if you're sergeant shriver um and it tells you that he is relentless relentless in pursuit of his large objective and that he understands that personnel is policy that he's got to get the right people in those jobs and moving and you see that throughout his administration and even as early as that first night when he tells jack valenti you know just get on the plane if jeff valente is in texas it's like why am i getting on the plane just get on the plane he's got to get the right people in the right places in order to execute on this agenda that he has that he wants to bring to fruition knowing that the window is going to be narrow as it is for as every president and he's going to execute so that's that's why i appreciate this moment brian williams i suppose even before we had the tapes we we knew that lbj was incredibly persuasive we knew about the johnson treatment but the tape seemed to provide so much more evidence of those persuasive skills what was it do you think that made lbj legendarily persuasive oh i think it's so many contributing factors a big one is the state of texas and his upbringing there he was the personification of everything's bigger in texas he would use all of his physicality and uh michael knows this in barnyard ways we can't talk about employment society but as a as a huge uh physical presence he had an enormous wingspan he knew exactly what he was doing he had a a command of the language and could meld this marvelous mixture of washington talk and texas talk and you wouldn't want to go up against him we know that for all the kind-hearted souls who tried and lost over the course of these days and he's even able to do it over the telephone without the virtue of his physical presence that's right it's certainly fair to say that many of the conversations show different dimensions of of these persuasive skills the johnson treatment but there are a few small number perhaps of the conversations that reveal a different even submissive side to lbj's personality and what i'd like to do now is to play a very different kind of conversation this one between lbj and the first lady lady bird johnson this one comes from march 7th 1964 and it comes just after the president has given a press conference and shortly thereafter uh mrs johnson calls up her husband and offers a critique of his performance during the press conference um i thought that you look strong firm and like a reliable guy your looks were splendid the close-ups were much better than the distance ones well you can't get them to do it well i would say this they were more close-ups than they were distance uh during the statement you were a little breathless and it was too much looking down and i think it was a little too fast not enough change of pace uh dropping voice at the end of silence there was a considerable pickup and drama and interest when the questioning began uh your voice was noticeably better and your facial expressions noticeably better um the mechanics of the room were not too good because although i heard you well throughout every bit of it i did not hear your questioners clearly uh well the questions won't talk some of them you could hear and and and but in general you could not hear them very well um every now and then you need a good crisp answer for change of pace and therefore i was very glad when you answered one man uh the answer to is no to both of your questions um you i thought your answer on lodge was good i thought your answer on vietnam was good i really didn't like the answer on the go because i think i've heard you saying but i believe you actually have said out loud but you don't leave y'all out of the country this year so i don't think you can very well say that you meet him anytime that's convenient to both people well one weekend can be arranged i'm not going out of this country i didn't say where well then i just didn't didn't didn't get the meaning of it that everybody else did i think the outstanding things with the close-ups were excellent uh you need to learn when you're going to have a prepared text you need to uh uh have the opportunity to study it a little bit more and to read it with a little more of conviction and interest and change of pace it's trouble is that they criticize you for taking so much time they want to use it all for questions michael schloss what do we learn from this conversation well what we learn is that it would have been impossible for lyndon johnson to be a great president if lady bird johnson had not been first lady and the problem here is true of almost every first lady i think both brian and melody would agree with this is they always say you know i really have very little influence on the president give the credit to him it was all his doing you know i would choose guests for state dinners or something like that and ladybird was no exception i remember the conversations that brian and i would have with her she said the same thing you know if you did not know any better you would just think that she was sort of this polite uh minor figure in the entourage but one of the great that well actually one of the revelations of these tapes is that lbj taped his wife without her knowledge i asked her did you know he was taping you and she said no but nothing would have surprised me and this is a case of that and the other thing is that he would talk to her maybe a little bit less on this phone call but elsewhere just beautifully and my wife heard this and she said you know you really should be writing books on these tapes you should talk to me much more the way that he talked to her but the point is that for anyone who fell for lady bird's extremely polite and self-restrained claim that she didn't have much to do with those five and a half years as president just listen to the call that we just heard you know he was very dependent on her opinion in a way that and very influenced by it in a way that he was not by anyone else in his world brian is is this one of those arenas in which the tapes have been really transformative perhaps enabling us to get that glimpse inside not just the white house but the dynamics of the relationship between president and mrs johnson um it is absolutely indelible to me there is a recording on which mrs johnson says miracle of the jet age she is exclaiming about the wonder of being able to fly from coast to coast in the same day it's an expression i have used since the moment i first heard it and what's exciting to me about the miller center they're such wonderful contextualists and archivists that i hope there's room for a recording a collection of them just called atmospherics i hope we can hear uh the great recording of the president talking over the noise that gunsmoke is making on the tv in the first residence i hope we can hear all those cans of diet root beer and fresca being opened by the president i hope we can hear the exchange conversation when lucy baines comes in the oval office and her dad greets her the way any dad would be happy to greet any daughter obviously swelling with pride these are the moments you you come for the history you come for the news value but what often stays with you is the family you get to overhear on these tapes beautifully said and the other thing is that how many times i have felt and i'll bet you that melody and brian i don't want to put words in their mouths but i'll bet you that you've both felt the same way you'll hear a conversation that you know just knocks you out and shows you what a human being lbj is and funny he is and you know so interesting to be around and then you realize that lbj were around to see this thing published or played in public he would be horrified and angry which brings me to the hagar slax tape when lbj in 1964 describes in too too granular detail how he would like his trousers cut he's talking to the head of hagar slacks and after my first book came out i was talking to mrs johnson i said were you happy with the way that the the tapes and the book were received and you know she always would tell you what she really thought she said well i was but to tell you the truth i could have lived the rest of my days happily without hearing you play the hagar slax tape on tv but she said you should know that tape is my grandchildren's favorite and i've never quite figured out why that was but about a month later i got a letter from old mr hagar who was still live offering me a free pair of custom made hagar slacks so that's an experience i never had before in this business um listening to the lady bird tape one of the things that i really appreciate and i think listeners should appreciate is that for a president in particular there are very very very very few people who will speak truth to power who will tell you exactly what they think whether you like it or not and i think the spouse is usually one of those people and you hear that i mean she takes through a list she didn't even just say oh you know a couple things were good and a few things were bad and we'll work on them she clearly had written them down and she ticked through them one at a time and it was because she loved him she wanted him to be the great president that he wanted to be that the nation needed but someone has to play that role and i think presidents rely on their spouses their close family members you know their few key staff who will who will say that to you also lbj people always said he had mood swings but you'd never really see or hear them you really hear them on these tapes case in point democratic convention 1964 when lbj is so upset by criticism of him but more criticism in time magazine of lady bird that he says you know i'm not sure i'm going to accept this nomination why don't we go back to texas and he fell into what can only be called the depression which he was subject to i think throughout his life and ladybird you just hear it on these tapes is the one person who could pull him out of it and she says to him essentially you do that you'll also essentially being conceding what your critics are saying well i i could not agree more with what i think all three of you are getting at these tapes are wonderful for what they tell us about lbj's approach to policy and the policy making process but the most memorable parts are often the bits of information the bits of insight into his personal life his personality the way that he conducted himself day in and day out and one of the really impressive things about the miller center site is that it calls attention to this dimension of lbj's leadership and life inside the white house and yet of course the tapes also inescapably do shed light on policy questions so let's come to some of those policy questions let's come first of all to civil rights and melody i'd like to come back to you and one of your uh favorite conversations here let's listen to lbj speaking with martin luther king on january 15 1965. this is a couple of months before lbj would stand before congress and announce we shall overcome in support of the monumental legislation known as the voting rights act of 1965. here is a really i think revealing conversation that shed some light on lbj's approach tactically to the civil rights problem and also his relationship with one of the giants clearly of the civil rights movement i think it's very important that we not to say that we're doing this and we not do it just because it's negroes and rights but we take the position that every person born in this country when it reaches a certain age that he have a right to vote just like he has a right to fight and that we just uh extend it whether it's a negro whether it's a mexican who it is and number two i think that uh we don't want special privilege for anybody we want equality for all and we can stand on that principle but i think if you can uh contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and you yourself taking very simple examples of uh discrimination where a man's got to memorize a long fella whether he got to quote the the first uh 10 amendments are he's got to tell you what amendment 15 16 17 is and ask them if they know and show what happens and some some people don't have to do that but when a negro comes in he's got to do it and we can just repeat and repeat and repeat i don't want to follow hitler but he had a he had a he had an idea that if you just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough uh even if it wasn't true why people accept it well now this is true if you can find the worst condition that you run into in alabama mississippi or louisiana south carolina where uh well i think one of the worst i've heard of is the president of the school at tuskegee or the head of the government department to hear something being denied the right to cast a vote and if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio and get on television get it on uh in the pulpits get it in the in the meetings get every place you can uh pretty soon the the fellow that didn't do anything but follow drive a tractor he'll say well that's not right that's not fair and then that will help us on what we're going to shove through in the end [Music] and if we do that we will break through as uh it'll be the greatest breakthrough of anything not even except in this 64 act i think the greatest achievement of my administration i think the greatest achievement in foreign policy i said to a group yesterday was passage of the 1964 civil rights act but i think this will be bigger because uh it will do things that even that 64 i couldn't do boy there's so much to talk about in this conversation but let's start with what it tells us about lbj the the legislative tactician melody can we go to you first sure as a tactical matter this moment has to be put in context and he's got a lot of legislation up on the hill i mean he is trying to move his great society program which is so broad it touches every aspect of american life into the chagrin of some and one of the things he had said to president kennedy when he was alive and advice that wasn't taken was you've got to get the order of these things right because if you send all of this up at the same time particularly with civil rights and with the southern caucus your legislation will sit behind it and they won't move anything and he started his administration following his own advice and in part what he is trying to do is to move parts of the war on poverty legislation while he also wants to move forward with voting rights and so he is trying to ultimately um he's trying to do several things i mean as the tape conversation goes on he's trying to convince dr king you know just hold off on it on a minute we'll move this but i've got these other things going and they're going to be good for african-americans people of color my language of today as well but just give me a moment on this and at the same time he's also telling him there are ways that we can try and build momentum and to create a sense of inevitability and play into people's sense of justice and fairness if they only understand what's going on if they only understand how unjust and how fair it is and unfair this all is and i think there he's thinking very tactically about how to create the momentum and the environment to move this piece of legislation and at the same time move other parts of his legislative program and i think as a human matter and i love this and i would love as we would all to talk to him today to see what he would think and how he would feel his sense that that feeling of fairness and justice existed in the body politic that if people only knew if they could only see they would come around there's more to say but those are the things that jump out at me when i think about what he's trying to do strategically and also you know what what he believes is possible among and with the american people these conversations and then of course there are several with martin luther king jr um shed so much interesting light i think on the relationship between lbj and the civil rights movement generally and of course king in particular brian williams what's your sense of what these conversations tell us about about that subject well something melody just uh touched on and this needs to be said especially as a new generation of students during this time when often our younger folks feel that all history should match current sensitivities you are going to hear figures of speech terminology and vocabulary that is uh time specific and thankfully our country doesn't talk the way some of the people on these tapes notably our president uh talks back then but it's i hope it's helpful um to teach how our language standards and mores have uh migrated remember the new york times used words to describe our japanese adversaries during world war ii that we would never dream of using in conversation or anywhere else for that matter in 2021 but i think on on the subject of civil rights to me especially when the president is talking to thurgood marshall he tips his hand he tips his hand especially late at night this is a huge goal to him listening to the specific recording with dr king you are reminded that everything old is new again here we are in 2021 so many states are throwing the kitchen sink at the problem of these people wanting to come out and vote and they are putting up new barriers uh to voting which is um it's stunning and depressing to watch at the same time michael beschloss lbj's attitudes toward race have been a subject of endless speculation and scholarship over the years when did he become a true champion of civil rights what were the sources of his empathy for the experiences of african americans and so many other categories of americans what in your view do the conversations tell us about some of those big questions that have long surrounded lbj and the question of race well the biggest question mark i think you'd agree that in the story and always ask about a president is if he gave great speeches as lbj certainly did especially the voting rights after selma speech in march of 1965 had he just hired a really deaf speechwriter or did he really mean it was it coming from his soul and i would go so far as to say that if he had not made these tapes there probably by now would be several histories saying that lbj used terrible words in private palled around with dick russell and other southern segregationists was never really serious about civil rights but was persuaded to come out with a civil rights bill and a voting rights bill later on a fair housing bill by bobby kennedy or other northern liberals or because he was afraid of not getting the nomination in 1964 and that he was never serious about it you listen to these tapes you listen to the one we just heard of lbj and mlk that's someone who is really serious who felt it down in his gut and as i think all of you know you talk to family members where did this come from many of them will say catolla you know when he was teaching mexican-american students in southern texas as a young man and this is someone who in 1948 had to run for the senate from texas which did not exactly give him a lot of leeway to be very pro-integration or pro-civil rights and the real question is a did he produce when he was president he certainly did more than anyone except for abraham lincoln number two did this come out of real conviction and i think the tapes demonstrate that it sure did another major policy problem clearly for lbj was of course the situation in vietnam and many of the conversations deal with this all-important topic let's listen to a conversation again this one comes from may 27 1964 and lbj is on the phone with his national security advisor mcgeorge bundy this is at a point where lbj is trying to keep vietnam off the agenda and off the front pages but is well aware that major decisions are looming before him a few months down the road i'll tell you the more i just stayed awake last night think about this thing the more i think of it i don't know what in the hell it looks like me we're getting into another korea it just worries the hell out of me i don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we're committed once i believe the chinese communist coming into it i don't think that we can fight them ten thousand miles away from home and never get anywhere on in that area i don't think it's worth fighting for and i don't think we can get out and it's just the biggest damn mess it's an awful mess one thing that they'll say i'm worth to me what is laos worth to me what is the worth to this country now we have now we got a treaty but we got a treaty but hell everybody else got a treaty out there and they're not doing anything about it yeah now of course if you start running the communist they may just chase you right in your own kitchen yeah that's the trouble and that is what the rest of the uh that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us that's that's the dilemma that's exactly but everybody i talked to it's got any sense now they just said oh my god please give us something of course i've read uh mansfield stuff this morning and it's just uh milk toast as it can be got no spine at all yeah but uh this is a terrible thing we're getting ready to do mr president i just think that the biggest is the only big decision in one sense that was this one is one we're having you that we either reach up and get it or we let it go by and i'm not telling you today what i do in your position i just think the most we have to do is to pray with it for another one clearly there are a few questions surrounding lbj so controversial as his role in the decisions to escalate the american commitment there in 1964 in 1965. what does this conversation tell us about how lbj was processing this decision and would ultimately of course arrive at the decision to go ahead with escalation later in that year and in early 1965. uh brian williams should we start with you well um it shows us the obviously he says it out loud the conflict within him about the conflict in southeast asia the american public would have been very curious to know that their president deep down perhaps after a bourbon or two in the evening with the one of the harvards as he referred to the national security structure around him that he inherited largely uh felt this way i don't know how i would feel if i had lost a brother son or father in the vietnam war and suddenly stumbled across uh this recording which uh it gives new meaning to the word ambiguity ambiguity is putting the the best possible light on it and then as the history of the vietnam war unfolds we fold in uh westmoreland we get into milai all of the issues that all of us who were alive and kicking back then remember and have read about subsequently you hit on such an interesting complexity i think in this conversation and perhaps others like it we might listen to something like this and become more sympathetic to the very difficult bind that lbj was in and yet we also might find reason to be more critical of him for going ahead with an escalation that he knew would be very problematic and dangerous how how might we as people listening to this you know many decades after the fact um wrestle with the complexities of lbj's legacy where should we come down between sympathy for his bind and criticism of the decisions that he ultimately made almost every thought you can have about lbj and vietnam would be true he was ambivalent as brian has said he was tortured by the knowledge and he says it on these tapes i could get involved in vietnam we could have fifty thousand american dead and every campus in this country could be in flame that's my language not his but it's pretty close to his language and you know i listened to this years later i said you're absolutely right listen to yourself take your own advice but at the same time he was being urged by an awful lot of people around him this is not the only reason but brings us to the secretary of defense robert mcnamara robert mcnamara wrote a famous book in the mid-1990s and the burden of the book is essentially don't blame me for vietnam i was only secretary of defense blame president johnson who was gung-ho for going into the war in vietnam and that shows one of the benefits of these tapes because unlucky for mcnamara about a year or two later came out a lot of tapes on vietnam with lbj talking to mcnamara and far from telling lbj that vietnam has got a lot of problems that you should consider mcnamara is there saying i was president kennedy's secretary of defense and i can tell you he would have done this and i can tell you essentially that it is necessary for us to win in vietnam in order for us to prevail or survive in the cold war so i would like to think also and i think this is probably true that lbj knew that making tapes of these conversations would protect him against opportunistic advisers like mcnamara who tried to claim later on that they gave him advice that they actually didn't give him and that was the basic inspiration that richard nixon had as brian and i have talked about in in doing his own tapes because he was worried that henry kissinger would claim credit for the opening with china the daytime with the soviet union the settlement in vietnam nixon wanted tapes to make sure that the actual story would uh be shown on a real record and i can't help but think that lbj did too the tapes show us or allow us to hear something that we often talk about which is the loneliness of this job and we talk about it a lot there's that faint the famous kennedy portrait if you kind of looking down you can get the sense of the burden of the office and this gives you a sense of it in real time with real policy and you know how do i get out not sure how we got in you know all of the issues that surround this and quite frankly a staff person who's at the end tells him well we should pray on this and and i i'm a person of faith i believe in the power of prayer but i i also know that my former bosses would have wanted me to come forward with something in addition um to that and suggestions but i say all that to say that at the end of the day the buck stops with that desk and the the weight of these decisions is is enormous and i think the tapes give you a sense of that and it isn't as though there's one of these decisions every few weeks there are multiple decisions like this every single day and melody as you pointed out earlier lbj in this period is dealing with a whole array of different subjects i wonder if you have any thoughts about to what extent lbj's comments about vietnam are shaped very profoundly by his calculations with respect to the domestic arena and his desire to pass the great society absolutely and there are many debates and michael and brian and other historians um have talked about all the the reasons why lbj moved forward as he did in vietnam but it is clear and he makes statements and he's angry and frustrated and you hear that many times because of vietnam because of the massive resources human um and financial that are going into vietnam that could support and could fund his great society program but instead they're going into an effort that he doesn't even completely believe in but doesn't know exactly how to bring to an end or bring to an end in a way that he would deem to be successful so there was a direct conflict between what he had to do as a matter of foreign policy and what he wanted to do as a matter of domestic policy in fact i think i think there's uh a quote where he's comparing this to kind of uh his wife and and the mistress you know who who in fact you know he he wanted to be faithful to but here he was um and this awful adventure um in vietnam and at the same time as time went on the criticism that was coming from those with whom he had aligned himself with on the civil rights agenda on the war on poverty agenda for example martin luther king's very very sharp critique at riverside church um and that of of others which had to be painful just a kick in the gut to someone who cared profoundly about this domestic agenda we collected over the last couple of weeks questions from our friends of the library community and many of them were directed at questions that have already arisen but several of them point out that lbj was of course the subject of any number of biographies and histories long before these tapes came along and then the tapes come and give us all this new evidence to work with in your estimation what is the one if i can ask a slightly unfair question the one takeaway from the tapes that significantly alters what we thought we knew about lbj before this material became available i'm struggling with the one thing because we oft we talk about the complexity of him we talk about uh the strategic his strategic sensibilities his ability to get things done i think that the the tapes weave that together for us um while we've listened to individual moments it's when you put all of this together that you get the sense of of who he is and all of his strategic genius his legislative appetite and [Music] what fueled maybe this is it what i believe that his desire was to be obviously he wanted to be president more than anything he wanted to be a great president and he knew great presidents had to do great things and you can see in these tapes um what fueled that and how he tried to meet meet that achievement in all of its uh in its in its most fulsome nature to me it is a master class to borrow from the social media fed vernacular of today it's a lesson in how to do president um it's um the granularity of some of these phone calls these are not the sexy phone calls these are not the phone calls that make headlines get written about or talked about when he calls the state department desk officer for a specific country it makes you stop when listened to in 2021 and ask yourself did our former president understand that there was a desk officer at the state department for each of the nations around the world before we had the formalized um situation room we have today johnson unable to sleep calls down to the military office and asks about the air mission he knew was being carried out overnight u.s time in vietnam he wants an accounting of all the aircraft did they all make it back safely on and on and on of his lobbying techniques um his granular knowledge of what's in certain pieces of legislation how all the cabinet departments work he gets doug dillon on the phone secretary of treasury the man who signed the money when i was a kid and almost is his better in terms of describing the work of the department of treasury it's how to president and uh that to me is is one of the great unsung takeaways from these recordings beautifully said no surprise by melody and brian and i love the fact that brian mentioned lbj waiting up at night for those american flyers to come back from having bombed north vietnam and hoping that they had survived and the fundamental question that i think the tapes really answer that i think no other source could have done did lbj have a soul was he doing civil rights and voting rights because it was politically smart did he do what he did in vietnam because this was one of the master manipulators and transactional leaders of all time he was those things but what the tapes show is this is someone with enormous sensitivity and emotion and heart and soul when he was doing civil rights he was doing it because he could empathize with those who had been locked out in this country for centuries when he fought poverty the same thing he had seen that back to the time that he was a child and as brian says when he was up late at night hoping and praying and he got more and more religious as the war went on as you can see on these tapes this is someone who lady bird once said in one of her diaries i think that was not published she said i wonder if lyndon can really be an effective commander-in-chief because he's too emotional and he cares too much when those flyers go out at night he cares too much whether they're going to come back or not and she was saying that a real commander-in-chief has to distance himself at least a little bit so if you're asking you know did he have regrets about the tens of thousands of young americans who died because of his decisions in vietnam look at his last four years those are not the last four years of a happy man other people might have been able to calm themselves into thinking that they had done everything right it speaks very well for the kind of soul that this man had and above all the fact that that soul you can see at the center of every one of these major political decisions that we both honor and criticize wow beautifully put i mentioned at the outset that this was really a dream team of commentators about these tapes and i think that uh you've absolutely lived up to that advanced billing i can't thank you enough what a wonderful way to celebrate the lbj library's 50th anniversary but above all to help us think about these wonderful resources that we are making available through our partnership with the miller center the site will be lbjtapes.org and we hope that everyone from scholars to people with just really a passing interest in the johnson presidency in the 1960s will visit the site and make extensive use of it in the years to come melody brian michael thank you so much again for all of your insight today really appreciate it thank you mark it's a pleasure thank you you

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Length: 58min 10sec (3490 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021