speaker mark silverstone for taking the time out of his busy schedule to be here with us tonight marks an associate professor and presidential studies at the miller center at uva and chair of the center's presidential recordings program and hails from westport, connecticut and a graduate of staples high school there so there may be others from westport and staples graduates. so you're in good company tonight marks gonna provide us with overview of the recordings program established by the center in 1998 with highlights of secretly take meetings and phone conversations from various presidents. they'll tell us what he and his team are now working on as well. it is as his current project on president kennedy and vietnam as chair of the recordings program mark edits. hurt white house tapes of presidents john f kennedy lyndon b johnson and richard. i'm nixon. he's the general editor of the presidential recordings digital edition the primary online portal for transcripts of the tapes published by the university of virginia press. mark earned a ba degree in philosophy from trinity college a master's degree in international affairs from columbia university and a phd in history from ohio university a historian of the cold war. he's author of the kennedy withdrawal camelot and the american commitment to vietnam published by harvard forthcoming in 2022 and constructing the monolith the united states great britain and international communism 1945 to 1950. also harvard 2009 which won the stuart l burnath book prize from the society for historians of american foreign relations. there's time mark will answer your questions at the close, which you can submit on the q&a tab at the bottom of your screen. so with that i'll pass this over to him welcome mark. thank you again for joining us tonight. thanks, ron, and thanks to your whole team for setting this up. i'm really pleased to be with you on the heels of this president's day. it's a great time to look back on presidential history at the same time that we're trying to understand this this really difficult and significant moment of history that we're in right now and living through especially the events of the last couple days, but we'll take a look back and maybe that will help to put some of what we're currently living through in some kind of perspective. we're here on the 22nd of february the 290th birthday of george, washington. i remember when february 20 we had a february 22nd off for watching this birthday and february 12th off for lincoln's birthday now combined into into single president's day. we're also speaking about the presidency at a time when there's greater public interest in. presidential records given what the previous president had done with his own so that has been in the news. we're also speaking about presidents on the heels of last nights in the nights before cnn program on lbj, which i thought was a fabulous for part. series on the johnson presidency the tumultuous time that that was from 63 really through january 69 and that forms an important part of the work that we do at the miller center and the recordings program and it was significant that in last night's and the night before's episodes. the tapes were really the star of the show. i think the video the images imagery was fantastic some i had never seen before but having a chance to listen to johnson speak with a variety of private individuals his own aids to get a sense of what was he in his own mind from his own mouth is really irreplaceable. and so that's material that i get a chance to work with every at the miller center. and it's what i have a chance to share with you tonight. and so one of the interesting questions that comes up about this and it's one i had wondered when i started this work back in 2000. i've been at the miller center now for coming up on 22 years is how did these materials even come to light and moreover? how is it that we we got access to them because these are presidential records. they should be classified these you should never see the light of day or at least that was the thought at one time. and as with so much in modern american political life, the threads really go back to richard nixon in the summer of 1973 with congressional increase into the watergate scandal really heating up the former deputy chief of staff alexander butterfield testified before the senate watergate committee and revealed that president nixon did indeed have listening devices set up in the white house. he had them in the oval office, but he also had them in the cabinet room in his office next door the executive office building the eisenhower executive office building. he also had them in the residential quarters at the white house as well as at camp david. so this is an extraordinary rich and voluminous trove of presidential materials that that the watergate investigators wanted to get their hands on nixon stonewalled. turning them over he at first. said that he would provide his own summaries of these and then transcripts of these and then and then hand them over that wasn't good enough for the senate committee. nor was it good enough for the independent council that was looking into these matters. there was haggling back and forth about their disposition. ultimately it came down to the supreme court which decided by a vote of eight to nothing. suggesting that we're indicating that nixon's claim of executive privilege did not matter here because these materials were relevant to criminal cases that were then pending and so nixon gave had to give up these tapes and once the investigators got a chance to listen to them and particularly a tape from june of 1972 about a week or so after the break-in at the democratic national headquarters at the watergate hotel complex. it became clear that nixon had engaged in obstruction of justice and once the the relevant committees who were considering impeachment at the time the house judiciary committee was considering impeachment at the time once they got a hold of this and not only the democrats but the republicans heard this it was clear that the game was up and nixon realized that he would not be able to survive a floor vote of the house and he would in fact be impeached the judiciary committee voted. primitively to send those articles to the floor and so nixon ends up residing the office of the presidency at the end of the first week of august 1974. but with those criminal cases still ongoing and nixon quite honestly still having jurisdiction over those materials because at the time it was believed that they were his personal property. congress decided to act and passed a law in december of 1974 the the presidential recordings and materials preservation act in which congress claimed jurisdiction over those materials didn't want to see them destroyed and wanted to preserve them for history. but also because again they were still relevant to ongoing cases four years later congress took an even more significant step when it passed the presidential records act which transformed these materials these records from the private property of the presidents individuals to the public property of the united states, so they now became ours and it it was left up to the presidential libraries where these materials were being stored from from previous presidents about what to do with them. which leads into a very interesting interesting question of how many presidents have have really done this during their time in office. when did it start and when did it end after butterfield had disclosed that there was a taping going on in the nixon white house. the questions went out to the head of the kennedy library dan fan in the head of the johnson library harry middleton did those presidents tape? arthur schlesinger who was a kennedy acolyte had written on kennedy famously pulitzer prize winning book in 1965 when he heard that that nixon had taped and was then asked about canada. he said kennedy never would have done that. he was far too smart to do anything. that's stupid. and of course fence said yes indeed president kennedy did tape and harry middleton said the same thing about the johnson teams. so now we were off to the races these two other presidents taped. who else did? and that leaves us back to franklin roosevelt who began the regime of surreptitious presidential taping other presidents have have taped their materials and we can go and into the into the future and fast forward to bill clinton and barack obama who taped their conversations largely with journalists so that they knew exactly what was said if they needed to to consult in the future. but the practice of taping their conversations in secret without anybody else in the room knowing that they were being taped whether those were cabinet officials presidential aids and again private individuals were coming into the white house that began with with franklin roosevelt. now roosevelt's only taped about eight hours of material the miller center in fact beginning in july is going to begin a project on the roosevelt takes and it should be very exciting. we'll be able to finish that up over the course of the academic year and then publish shortly thereafter, but it wasn't just roosevelt. harry truman taped he didn't like the whole prospect of taping. he's thought it was unethical unethical as did roosevelt as well roosevelt taped from august of 1940 until just after he was elected in november of 1940 and then never taped again. he was uncomfortable with with doing so truman was very uncomfortable with doing so after finding out from fdr an fdr's aids really that that fdr had taped truman tried it a couple times, but but he didn't want anything more to do with it. and so really after april of 1945. he didn't touch it. so i'd eisenhower taped a little bit four or five hours or so really idiosyncratic. it's hard to get a a good sense of rhyme or reasons to why he taped when he did the best we can determine is that it seemed to be conversations that might have been sensitive that he wanted a record of but the golden age of taping really begins with jfk and kennedy begins taping in the summer of 1962 and that lasts right through into november of 1963 about 260 hours of material. that is both telephone tape and meeting tape the vast majority of those are meeting tapes. lyndon johnson carried on the tradition of taping johnson who had also taped while he was vice president began taping from the very moment that he became president and we have 800 hours of lbj material about 650 of them on the telephone and about a hundred and fifty of them being meeting tapes, but it's richard nixon who wins the award for the greatest taping scheme that we have seen of these presents 3400 hours of nixon materials tape from february of 1971 through july of 1973. and the reason that there are so many nixon tapes is because he was using her voice activated system. so every time that he stepped into a room with a beeper on his on his belt buckle. a voice activated recorder would kick off and so whether nixon was speaking with aids whether he was watching tv and then left the room and the tv stayed on that would be captured as well which is why we have hours and hours of washington. i'll say the name washington redskins football games because that was the name of the team at the time. was it that the miller center comes to to take this on in 1998 philip? zelica who had moved from harvard to the university of virginia to be director of the miller center had been involved in a project to transcribe the kennedy cuban missile crisis tapes and philip brought that project with him from harvard to the university of virginia. and thought that why were while we're taping the the missile crisis tapes? that's great. that's that's 13 days or so. let's see if we can tape the entire corpus of kennedy materials which stretched again to 260 hours, but then let's go further and try to transcribe all of the presidents who taped and so the presidential recordings program began in 98 at the miller center and we're going strong as ron mentioned we've been doing this for for 24 years now and at the end of the the conversation here, i'll give you a better sense of how you can access these materials yourself. but i want to play some tapes for you and give you a sense of what's on them. we're gonna jump from kennedy to johnson to nixon and we'll see how many i can get through before we turn to q&a because i know that there will be a lot of questions about this. so let's start with jfk and it's it's a tape that is important for me for my work. i've just completed a manuscript on kennedy in vietnam and the focus was not necessarily on a comprehensive soup to nuts kennedy in vietnam. those kinds of narratives are out there and they're they're worthwhile and valuable. i was interested in a smaller segment of the kennedy vietnam story which relates to his planning to withdraw the united states from vietnam by 1965. lots has been lots have been written about this recently and because of some material that kennedy taped we have a way to try to get to the bottom of what kennedy was thinking about vietnam yet large but also what he was thinking about with respect to this planning that had been going on since the summer of 1962 to get the united states out by 1965 a time when he expected that he would still be present. so the conversation we're going to hear is from early october 1963. it will feature defense secretary robert mcnamara chairman of the joint chiefs maxwell taylor. they have just come back from a fact-finding trip to vietnam and they deliver to kennedy this report, which says a variety of things about the way the the administration should be handling a really troublesome ally in good in gm the president of south vietnam, but more than that, they give kennedy a plan to extricate the united states from this conflict. look like it was in in some trouble at the time. so we're gonna hear kennedy ask about this thousand. that's a thousand troops to get out by by the end of 1963. we'll also hear from kennedy's national security advisor mcgeorge bundy maxwell taylor again, the chairman of the joint chiefs and george ball. who's the number two at the state department. we're going to hear three excerpts in this clip. the first two are from a morning meeting when kennedy and just a couple of other aids are meeting with taylor and and mcnamara and then the last segment this third excerpt and you'll hear the difference in the quality of the tape itself that comes from an evening session of the national security council when they're debating what they should say to the public about this should they announce that they're gonna get the united states out by the the end of 65, 65, so it's a fascinating. four minutes or so of conversation listen to mcnamara the quality of his voice. this is a man who later embraced the notion that vietnam was mcnamara's war. so kennedy mcnamara taylor from october of 63 this thousand reductions can really that's going to be an assumption that is going well. and if it don't go well one of the major premises two major terms, we had a first complete we can complete the military campaign in the first three scores. before the fourth chorus 65 the second is extends beyond that theory we believe we can train the continues to take over the essential functions and the drawable to our forces and this thousand conjunction with that higher the list of the units here at the least forces. i think it's wasteful and complications for their problems in ours the question to me is whether we want to get publicly pinned to a date six may all right goes back to arabic too as it does. it's something we deflated version. i was just you. i always ask the question. when can we finish this job on the sense that you will reduce this insurgency to a little more than sporadic it. they would say 64 the ample cup. i realize that i'm assailant. assuming no major factory new factory. that is the twig. i realize that okay. here the only employers to put magazine is entire reporters in this one has whether or not wars and before them up asleep. territory 65 and i i'm sure that i am need anything are us forces. of course, the schedule would have laid out worked out because we can train you the job. there is some by the end of this year again is that there may be this signal maybe ambiguously red. we're not quite sure what's wrong reason for state. you so far over the optimistic, and i don't i'm not sure. but by units so that the war doesn't go well. exercises were not an influence the course of action and he managed to take the congress of people, but we do have a plan for reducing the exposure of us combat personnel to the grill actions in south vietnam. so the people stopped the obnoxious gradually develop a capability to stress himself. i think this will be a great value to us in immediately in a very strong views of fulbright and others that we're bogged on a national be there protection. so that withdrawal the thousand man withdrawal actually did go through in in early december of 1963. of course. jfk was not around when that happened. that was under lyndon johnson and and shameless plug that it is my book. i i cover johnson's approach to withdrawal policy and as we know that that never fully went through because by the end of 1964 johnson was conducting reprisal strikes on north vietnam and then into 1965 more sustained strikes. would rolling thunder bombing and then by the middle of 1965 100,000 troops were going in that would rise to over half a million by 1968. but lbj is a fascinating character. not only with respect to vietnam, but with respect to power and bob caro's wonderful work. on lbj really is a study of power and i want to play a couple of clips from lbj that gives you a sense of how he wielded that power one of them comes from just 10 days or so after he became president. it's a conversation between johnson and jackie kennedy the late president's widow, and it's notable for a variety of reasons, but particularly for johnson, who knows that he is going to need to stay in the good graces of the kennedy family. he has picked up the mantle from the fallen present. he's trying to to pass kennedy's legislative agenda tax cuts foreign aid, and then eventually civil rights and then he's gonna need to go into a 1964 presidential campaign not alienating the candy forces, which will be a real challenge given where we know bobby kennedy will be at that time. so here he is early process sweet talking jackie kennedy and she doing it back to him which gives you just as much a sense of how how much jackie was a political player in her own right? so here's lbj and jackie kennedy from early december 1963. mr. president, i just want you to know you allowed and by so many and so much i'm one of them i tried i didn't dare bother you again, but i got kenny o'donnell over you to give you a message if you ever saw you to give to you about my letter that was waiting for me last night first thing you you get some things to learn one of them is that you don't bother me you really strength, but i wasn't gonna send you in one more letter. i was just send me anything. you just come over and put your arm around. that's all you do when you haven't got anything else do let's take a walk. let's walk around the backyard just let me tell you how much you mean to all of us and how we can carry on if you give us a little space. you know what i want to say to you about that. no, how rare a letter is an impressions and writing. do you know that i've got more and your handwriting that i do in jack now and for you to write thing today, you know your tape announcement and everything. i want you just know this that i told my mother a long time ago when everybody else gave up about my election in 48. yeah, my mother and my wife and my sisters and you females are courage that we men don't have a