The Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs are pleased to announce the expansion of the website LBJTapes.org, which now features almost 140 representative conversations from President Johnson’s secret White House tapes.

The LBJ Library, the LBJ Foundation, and the Miller Center launched the website in 2021 to call attention to one of the most remarkable archival assets from the Johnson presidency on the 50th anniversary of the LBJ Library. The site featured 100 conversations at that time, but all three partners were eager to add material. Further additions are likely in the years to come.   

LBJTapes.org provides extraordinary access to Johnson’s thinking on a range of subjects. Visitors can listen and read along as Johnson builds the Great Society, fights a War on Poverty, lobbies on behalf of civil rights for African Americans, and struggles with the war in Vietnam. They can also observe Johnson organizing the presidency, campaigning for office, and managing the press—all “with the bark off,” as LBJ himself would have wanted.

To access the entire body of Johnson’s recorded conversations, visitors can view the LBJ Library’s full collection of Recordings and Transcripts of Telephone Conversations and Meetings.

By highlighting excerpts from Johnson’s conversations and embedding each scrolling transcript within a wider set of historical resources—including photographs and biographies of the conversation participants, relevant entries from Johnson’s Presidential Daily Diary, and links to the LBJ Library’s finding aids and oral histories—The LBJ Telephone Tapes offers a curated experience for visitors. Full, annotated transcripts for many of these conversations are available through the Presidential Recordings Digital Edition (University of Virginia Press), the publication portal for the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. Support for these transcripts has been provided by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Visitors can navigate LBJTapes.org via two menu options at the top of each page: “Browse the Conversations” for a topical search, or “Search Conversations” for a faceted search. A timeline of Johnson’s presidency situates all of these exchanges within their historical context.

The LBJ Library is one of 15 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Use NARA's Presidential Library Explorer to discover more textual material, photographs, artifacts, audio, and video holdings about Lyndon Johnson. For descriptions of resources in the National Archives Catalog, see LBJ White House Telephone Recordings and Transcripts, LBJ Oral Histories, and LBJ Daily Diary.