President Johnson's tapes provide a remarkable inside look at city, state, and federal government officials struggling to establish control over the civil unrest in large, urban cities such as Detroit, Washington DC, and Chicago in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

For Black History Month we have released some new transcripts of conversations between Dr. Martin Luther King and President Johnson from 1965.

On December 1, 2009, President Obama addressed the nation on the issue of troop levels for the war in Afghanistan, announcing that he was sending around 30,000 more troops Afghanistan, a move that amounts to a significant escalation of the U.S. military presence in the region.

Sending troops into harm's way is arguably the most difficult decision a president confronts. The White House tapes of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon capture remarkably intimate and candid behind-the-scenes views of presidents agonizing over this decision in another war fought in distant lands for complex geo-political reasons.

"[G]oing to the moon is the top-priority project. . . . I do think we ought to get it, you know, really clear, that the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the agency and one of the two—except for defense—the top priority of the United States Government."

"[W]e’ve spent half the expenditures, we’ve wrecked our budget on all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them [the Soviets] and demonstrate that starting behind it [them], as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them. I think it would be a helluva thing for us."

John F. Kennedy, November 21, 1962

We have posted a collection of transcripts of conversations involving and directly related to the long Senate career of Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy. Drawing from the JFK, LBJ, and Nixon tapes, it includes calls between the newly elected Senator and his older brother, President John F. Kennedy; calls with President Johnson during the 1964 election campaign while bedridden recovering from a broken back suffered during a plane crash; and President Nixon's efforts to spy on Kennedy in the leadup to the 1972 election.

Election Night

In March 1965, several men and women in Alabama tested President Lyndon Johnson’s legendary political skills. Martin Luther King, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton, John Lewis, and hundreds of other activists exposed the brutality of white supremacy in Selma, while Governor George Wallace was orchestrating his own responses in Montgomery. As the president struggled to satisfy the demonstrators’ demands for voting rights, the notoriously brutal Al Lingo of the state police and Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County (where Selma was the county seat) and the arch-segregationist Governor Wallace made the balancing act even more difficult. In particular, over a two week period, Wallace retreated on his word, made inflammatory statements, and blamed the President for problems.

On April 5, 2005, Peter Jennings, the longtime ABC news anchor, announced on-air that he was suffering from lung cancer. His death four months later produced an outpouring of admiration for the 67-year-old former Canadian. Although he had little formal education, Jennings was hired as the ABC early evening anchor on Christmas Eve in 1964 at the age of 26 and would begin broadcasting in February 1965. Ironically, at the time that the young Jennings was breaking into one of the most coveted spots in television news, Edward R. Murrow, one of the pioneers of the genre, was slowly dying from what President Lyndon B. Johnson called "cancer of the lung." Murrow had left CBS news in 1961 to become director of the United States Information Agency and had thrived in the high-profile position until he was diagnosed with cancer in 1963, with surgeons removing one of his diseased lungs in October 1963. By January 1964, his health had deteriorated so much that he resigned his USIA post.

Rehnquist was nominated by President Richard Nixon^∇ in late 1971 and sworn in January 7, 1972. The 47-year-old had a reputation for being an outspoken conservative, a reputation he lived up to while on the court. He rose to Chief Justice in 1986, nominated by President Reagan^∇. Rehnquist had served in the Nixon administration as Assistant Attorney General from 1969 to 1971.

President Johnson, like Kennedy before him, demonstrated impressive political savvy by including Eisenhower’s advice in determining policy. Johnson forged a strong bi-partisan relationship with his predecessor, appealing to Eisenhower both as a friend and a sage. Receptive to the Republican General’s counsel on foreign policy, Johnson often communicated with Eisenhower in person at the White House or over the telephone. While the two Presidents differed in war strategy, Johnson still sought Eisenhower’s opinions and benefited from the General’s reservoir of experience and wisdom. And with the Vietnam War becoming more and more difficult, Johnson could use all the good advice he could get.

On November 6, 1971, the United States conducted a controversial high-yield nuclear weapons test beneath Amchitka Island, Alaska. Earlier that day the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 4–3 vote, had declined to issue an injunction to halt the test. In White House conversations later that month, President Richard Nixon^∇ claimed that he had been prepared to defy the Court and order the test to proceed if the injunction had been granted.

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara found himself struggling with a mounting sense of frustration over the Vietnam War. McNamara concluded in early 1967 that a comprehensive analysis of the history of U.S. involvement in post-1945 Vietnam was needed, partly out of a need to answer his own questions about how things had gone wrong. McNamara ordered his Second Military Assistant, Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert G. Gard, to initiate a study into the history of America’s role in Vietnam, with an emphasis on the internal policy-planning and decision-making within the U.S. government. Shortly thereafter, on June 17, 1967, the Vietnam Study Task Force was officially created under the direction of Leslie H. Gelb^∇, the director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense.

by Marc Selverstone

See also Marc Selverstone's op-ed in the Boston Globe on March 9, 2006, available here.