The Recordings Program. It is quite wonderful actually to be here with everybody. It is something of a reunion in fact since kent was with us for years and years and spending his time at university of South Carolina. For the next 75 minutes, well share with you insights from the secret white house tapes. And well look to explore the dynamics therein and to relate them to see what kind of questions they prompt us to ask about contemporary dynamics about the history they contain, about parallels to todays events, about the practice of democracy itself. Just a word about the Recordings Program, we were established in 1998. And our goal, we are the only institution of its kind doing it, is to analyze and transcribe the secret president ial tapes that president s made from 1940 through 1973. That is from Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon. We do this work at the Miller Center. We actually do it off site as well because so much of the work these days is browserbased. But we publish our work through the university of Virginia Press and its electronic imprint rotunda, the president ial recordings Digital Initiative is our digital addition is our publication. We also publish snippets of conversations, kind of the greatest hits through millercenter. Org and will share many clips with you today. And before we fully get going, i just wanted to acknowledge a few people who have helped us along the way. The National Historical publications and Records Commission in arm of the National Archives and Records Administration has been very generous in support and long time sustained and we appreciate their belief and confidence in us and in the work that we do. Id like to acknowledge kerry matthews, an associate editor and our Program Administrator and kerrys guiding hand is evidence in everything that we do. She keeps us honest and makes sure there are as few mistakes as possible appearing in our work and if there are any that appear today that is all on me. And then finally i would like to acknowledge mark saunders. Mark saunders was the director of the university of Virginia Press, the founder and motive force behind rotunda, the electronic imprint and a close friend. Mark passed away this past weekend suddenly. It is a tremendous loss for all of us. Mark had the great vision for our program taking us from Letter Press Editions that we were publishing with norton that worked out very well but mark ushered us into the digital age. And we are deeply saddened by his loss. We will miss his guiding hand. But in the spirit of what mark wanted, which was for us to be an important voice in bringing this history to the United States, and encouraging Greater Transparency into the workings of the government and into the presidency. With we will push on. And so we are pleased to be here today. To help us sort out of connections between past and present, nicki hemmer, Nicole Hemmer will be our guiding hand today. Nickis perfect for this job. She is an assistant professor in president ial studies at the Miller Center. She is a member of the president ial Recordings Program. And, again, a wonderful colleague. She is also the editor and founder of the Washington Post series made by history and of the podcast past, present. And im deeply grateful to nicki for running over here from the session that she had just moderated to help us. Thanks. Thank you, mark. Im really looking forward to the panel. Working in the secret white house tapes is as exciting as it sounds. You get to be a fly on the wall of the oval office during the 1960s and early 1970s. A time when Big Decisions are being made and big plots are being hatched and were going to hear a little bit of that day. And were going to start with mark who is going to talk to us a little bit about what the white house tapes tell us about endless wars, something that is incredibly as you could imagine. And the chairman of the president ial Recordings Program and the author of the book constructing the monolinl, the United States and Great Britain and international communism. So why dont you start us off. So the United States has been at war on a were footing for 17 years, 18 years this coming fall. Most conspicuously in iraq in afghanistan and in locales as somalia, yemen, libya, syria. Collectively these engagements have been known as the war on terror or the global war on terror. Most recently President Trump in his state of the Union Address referred to them as endless wars. And several president s preceding trump recognized theyre endurance and had sought to, at various points, disengage in the midst of ongoing hostilities. They didnt do so willingly necessarily or even with the same amount of enthusiasm. But do so, they sought to. President bush in the status of forces agreement with iraq. Something he was led to pursue. Looked to extricate the United States from iraq by december 2011, u. S. Forces were to be out of combat forces were to be out of the cities by the middle of 2009, but by december 2011 u. S. Combat forces were to be out of iraq. President obama through his afghanistan review that took place in the fall and into the winter of 2009. He looked to begin the departure of u. S. Forces from afghanistan in the summer of 2011. And President Trump most recently had spoken about withdrawal from syria in an announcement that he had made in december of 2018 that it had subsequently been qualified by the pentagon. But this is not the first time in recent history that a president has sought to turn over the fighting in an ongoing conflict to local allies. Particularly in the midst of the unpopularity of these wars and with a specific timetable in mind. That honor goes to vietnam. We associate the term vietnamization with the process that Richard Nixon pursued to deamericanize the war, to wind down the american profile in vietnam and to turn over fighting to the South Vietnamese forces. But this wasnt the only time that americans looked to wind down the engagement in vietnam. President kennedy did so in the middle of his thousand days. In the summer of 1962 president john f. Kennedy began planning to get american troops out of vietnam. Drafts for such planning were produced in early 1963. They were debated and then refined that spring and into may and into june. And then they were presented to kennedy in the fall of 1963. And on october 2nd president kennedy was presented with a plan to get virtually all United States combat troops, they werent combat troops at that time, they were military advisers, but u. S. Soldiers out of vietnam by the end of 1965 and in an effort to kick start that process a thousand advisers were to be withdrawn by the end of 1963. We know about this because of the pentagon papers. Which has a lengthy section on this withdrawal. But we also know about it in much greater color and texture because of the Kennedy White house tapes and what i would like to do for you now is play a combination of tapes, tapes weve spliced together from two meetings that took place on october 2nd, 1963. One a morning session which was a relatively small session between kennedy and his most Senior National security advisers and then an evening National SecurityCouncil Session after which a Public Statement was made in the rose garden of the white house that indicated that the United States would be leaving vietnam by 1965 and that a thousand troops were to be withdrawn by the end of 1963. The people well hear from this in conversation, president kennedy, secretary of defense Robert Mcnamara, National Security adviser Mcgeorge Bundy and chairman of the joint chiefs [ inaudible ]uzn. So many things that i think this conversation prompts aside from Robert Mcnamara being the one seemingly pushing this procs the intensely political nature of the withdrawal process that much of this is keyed to the way folks were feeling in congress, to the flexibility of the timetable that kennedy seems to embrace while the white house statement certainly came out squarely and said that we would look to be out by 1965, kennedy certainly seems to be hedging on that. If 65 doesnt work out, we will get a new date. There are a host of other reasons that kennedy is pursuing this withdrawal. One of the questions that does arise is whether he gets out of it what he really wants. Thats something i think that we want to engage in briefly. Just initially, one of the goals of this withdrawal and of other withdrawals is to encourage your local partners to fight harder, to fight better, to tell them that were not here forever. That doesnt really seem to have happened as a result of the kennedy withdrawal. The local partners didnt really push on as the way the administration wanted. Some changes took place in the short time he was around to see them. We know from what took place in early 1964, that is certainly wasnt sustainable. This is a question we need to ask as we think about timetables for withdrawal going forward. How effective are they . Are president s really able to sustain the domestic Political Support that they want to get from these . Its not clear kennedy was able to do that either. Is it really the case that you are going to induce in your local allies the capabilities and the stiffening function that these withdrawals are supposed to provide . I think that would be my question mark. You listen to these conversations and you are like, these people are really thinking about this. They have a strategy. They have a set of theories. These are very smart people engaging in what historians and americans would come to think of as a very dumb war. And the same goes for some of the wars were currently engaged in today. Is the answer you cant think your way out of these . Whats the lesson to draw . I would say that its a question that ive asked, too, is the extent to which subsequent administrations have reflected on this case or the case that nobody knows better than ken hughes, vietnamization. How much did they look at that and understand it . In kennedys case, i dont think they thought hard before the timetable. They threw it out there for a variety of reasons because the 1964 president ial campaign was coming up and there was a concern that the United States was getting bogged down in asia, as bob mcnamara says. Theyre looking for and certainly willing to engage in that. But if you look at the process that president obama engaged in, the extended months long review for afghanistan, the call that theres an initial surge of troops in spring of 2009, but then in the fall of late fall excuse me, late summer fall of 2009 and we know about this through a series of wellplace and welltimed leaks at the time. Obama was bringing his National SecurityTeam Together again and again and again. With this be a surge of 10,000 troops, 30,000 troops, 40,000 troops or higher . Would we be going full Counter Insurgency . Would we be trying for a counterterrorism approach . This is all played out in the papers. Obama was doing something that i think the Kennedy Administration did not do, which was to think much more rigorously about this, to bring in the stakeholders. One thing that neither did sufficiently. The kennedy didnt do it. Obama was trying to do it was to bring in congress. One of the questions of how do you get out of endless wars well is to think harder about how you get into them. To have a better grip on that, which leads to all kinds of questions about the authorization for the use of military force, which is i think a major matter that we need to engage on the front end of these processes. So everybody knows, the vietnam war did not end in 1963 or 64. It led to a real shakeup in u. S. Politics. An associate professor at the Miller Center and author of the problem of jobs is going to walk us through some of those insurgencies. Were getting into the johnson and nixon tapes. They get a little earthier. Theres going to be some swearing, some slurs in some of the tapes. I want to preface the forthcoming segments with that. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I assure you, im going with a soft johnson this afternoon. Theres much more out there. I have two short clips from Lyndon Johnson, secret white house recordings that i want to share with you this afternoon. My goal in doing so is to contrast the insur agagen contrast the insur agagecies ofe 1960 to political insurgencies today. In doing so, i would like to step back a bit from our standard left right framing of politics. Consider past and present more broadly. As periods of profound challenge of dysfunctional political establishments in the United States. I will offer a simple but i hope important observation about what is different today and perhaps something of what that contrast means. My first clip comes from december 1966, the day after christmas that year, in fact. Lbjs presidency has really begun to end a period of decline by this point. He is facing opposition to the war on poverty. The emergence of a stronger antiwar movement. He has taken serious losses in that november midterm elections. During the long telephone conversation that day with press secretary bill moyers turned to the question of how to keep the director of the office of economic opportunity. Johnson indicated that he would not increase budget to assuage him. He offered a statement about his perception of the statement between funding for the war on poverty and the activist insurgencies to his political left. This is a clear indication of an establishment figures perception and what he saw as the cost. My second clip leaps ahead to the spring of 1968 and the fight for the president ial democratic nomination which mccarthy and Robert Kennedy launched campaigns that sought to channel that political energy, the long hairs, that the president referred to, to challenge for the nomination. On march 23, 1968, president johnson spoke with chicagos mayor. This is the establishment, johnson and daley talking politics. They spoke about how they thought that Bobby Kennedy could be defeated by their network of mayors, governors and members of congress. Their confidence on march 23, 1968, is striking. Of course, despite their confident expectation, lbj would withdraw from the race a little more than a week later. Two months after that Bobby Kennedy would be dead. The thing is though, johnson and daley were not really wrong in this conversation. Humphrey would capture of nomination in chicago. The convention of tremendous disruption and protest. We can discuss this more in conversation. I would argue that the outcome really would have been no different had the contest been between johnson and Bobby Kennedy. Ultimately, despite trying to channel this energy from the activists of the period, both Bobby Kennedy and mccarthy were themselves the establishment figures. One the former attorney general and brother of the slain president , the other a senator. Both attempting to capture that energy of the civil rights and new left and antiwar insurgencies. The johnson reacted to so strongly in the first call. They could not do it at least against the establishment that johnson and daley discussed in the second conversation. Partly this is the political limitations, the limitations of the political strength, that is, of the insurgency itself. After all, nixon does win the election that fall. It is that they were not really of those movements. They were ultimately part of the establishment themselves, not really part of the activism or the insurgency that was challenging that establishment that both they and johnson and daley represented. This is the broad contrast that i want to draw to our current moment. We, too, live in an era of insurgencies. Different position in contrast. Donald trump succeeded in 2016 in part because he could position himself with some degree of authenticity, at least for his core audience, as an outsider figure. Not just mobilizing but actually representing the populous ins insurgent resentment against the political establishment. What that energy actually meant, of course, we can discuss and debate. I would add that sanders, with his long reluctance to join the Democratic Party, represents a variant of the same thing. Here we are today facing the 2020 election. An election that will test trumps ability to ride that populist outsider momentum and energy as well as the ongoing strength of that movement itself. Just as fascinatingly, we will watch again as the Democratic Party establishment, joe biden, elisebee li warren and harris and the cast of many, many, many other con tenor