Presidential Recordings Program

John S. McCain III, (1936-) currently a Republican Senator from Arizona and presumptive Republican nominee for President, was a U.S. Navy pilot during the Vietnam War. In October 1967 he was shot down over North Vietnam, taken prisoner, and held captive as a prisoner of war for five and a half years. His father, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., was Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command (CINCPAC) during much of the time his son was a POW.

We've compiled transcripts of the most substantive mentions of the McCain family in the LBJ and Nixon recordings. Given the time period the tapes span, most of these discussions relate to the Senator's father, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr. (1911-1981), who became a four star admiral in the U.S. Navy and served during the Vietnam War as CINCPAC from 1968 to 1972. Senator McCain's grandfather, John S. McCain, Sr. (1884-1945), was also been an Admiral in the U.S. Navy.

In this July 1964 call, about 3 weeks before the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, LBJ asks Robert Wagner, a former Democratic Senator from New York, to leak to the press that the party leaders support the President's right to choose his running mate and that a divided party is something to be avoided.

LBJ suggest that he say, "that they don't want the president to be required to sleep with anybody he doesn't want to sleep with. And he ought to have a man with vice president that he trusts and likes and can work with him. We oughtn't to have a divided ticket to start, and therefore, you expect to support the man the President selects . . .  I just don't think it can do us a bit of good to have a divided thing there, a divided party."

Of all the congressional members on the Warren Commission, Ford was the least known to President Johnson. He had been first elected to the House in 1948, the same year Johnson won his Senate seat. Ford's first and only intensive encournter with Lyndon Johnson had occurred in 1957, when both men served on a bipartisan House-Senate committee formed to draft the legislation creating NASA.

In this conversation, Bob Haldeman updates the President on recent press coverage of pro-administration veterans countering the anti-Vietnam War protests of John F. Kerry.

In April 1971, as John Kerry led a demonstration of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Washington, DC, the Nixon White House sought to discredit him. In this conversation, Nixon aide Chuck Colson told the president that in his opinion Kerry had turned against the war out of political opportunism after he returned to the United States.