Between 1940 and 1973, six American presidents from both political parties secretly recorded just under 5,000 hours of conversations. This site is designed as a service to the research community by making freely available all of the presidential recordings, along with relevant research materials, so that scholars, teachers, students, and the public can hear and use these remarkable tapes for themselves.
"It remains the most extraordinary presidential transition in history, and now, with the release of new tape transcripts, it is almost certainly the best documented of the tragic transitions that have followed the deaths of US presidents. That is why the new presidential recordings in the remarkable series presented by the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia are so captivating. They lend history an ear."
David Shribman, Boston Globe
“Here is the raw material of history as it should be presented: with scrupulous concern for accuracy. . . . Historians of the future will know they can depend on this material; the Presidential Recordings Program is creating an invaluable historical resource.” Robert A. Caro
Prof. KC Johnson draws on LBJ tapes as part of his class on inter-American relations, an
international history of the Western Hemisphere from the colonial era to the present. The class website is available here.
With the objective of making the presidential recordings more accessible to teachers and students, the PRP has created the Digital Classroom Initiative.
At the G-8 Summit, an open mike captured some unvarnished comments from President George W. Bush about the current crisis in Lebanon and some of the personalities involved. Although John F. Kennedy controlled his own microphones, he would occasionally forget that they were on. In this July 1962 conversation about machismo in the Pentagon and its absence in the State Department, Kennedy’s offers his own version of the candor exhibited by Bush in Russia.
Caspar W. Weinberger, the Reagan-era defense secretary who died March 28, 2006, got his start in the executive branch from President Richard M. Nixon. Nixon appointed him deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1970. Weinberger became known as "Cap the Knife" for resisting requests for budget increases. During this June 8, 1971, Oval Office conversation, however, Nixon made it perfectly clear that Weinberger was to spend money on creating jobs regardless of the impact on inflation or the budget.
Beginning March 10, 2006, scholars, journalists, and government officials—both former and current—will revisit a topic that remains tightly woven into the fabric of American political culture: the Vietnam War. Convening at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts, they will explore some of the more contentious aspects of this chapter in our history. Among the questions they will be asking are those concerning America’s entrance into war, the roles played by the media and public opinion in shaping the course of the war, and the lessons learned from that conflict.
Arguably, the most vexing of all the great questions of the Vietnam era is: “what if” President John F. Kennedy had not been cut down by an assassin’s bullet and had lived out his term—and perhaps a subsequent one—as President of the United States? Would he have made good on an expressed desire to withdraw America troops from Vietnam and turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese?
Thanks to the secret tape recordings that President Kennedy made during his time in the White House we have some sense of what Kennedy did—and didn’t—plan to do with respect to Vietnam.
