 On December 4th, 2008, the library achieved a milestone that had been 15 years in the making. The library's archival staff released to the public a final collection of tape recordings capturing President Johnson's telephone conversations during his time in office. These recordings, made by LBJ across his five years as president, are a truly stunning collection of historical sources, almost 850 hours of tape that provide unique access to LBJ's decision-making, his personal style, and his personality. Thanks to the tapes, we can, for example, listen in on LBJ speaking with Martin Luther King just a few days after Johnson became president. Well, I'm going to sport them all, and you can count on that. And I'm going to do my best to get other men to do likewise, and I'll have to have y'all's help. I never needed more than I do now. Well, you know you have it, and just feel free to call on us for anything. Thank you so much, Martin. All right. Call me when you're done. I sure will. Call me when you're down here next time. I certainly will. We can also hear LBJ anguishing about the war in Vietnam, as in this revealing conversation from May 1964 with his National Security Advisor, Mick George Bundy. I'll tell you the more I just did work last night, think about this thing, the more I think of it. I don't know what in the hell we're looking at me, we're getting into another career. Needless words, the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we're committed. Historians now know that six presidents, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, made recordings of their meetings and conversations during their time in the White House. But LBJ was the only one to make recordings stretching across his entire presidency, and the LBJ recordings surely rank among the very most revealing. One person who's carefully worked with the recordings is Melody Barnes. In 2020, Melody helped make an award-winning podcast called LBJ in the Great Society. Melody, what did the recordings reveal about LBJ that we might not otherwise know? I found when working with the recordings and sharing them with audiences that they are a treasure trove and a particularly poignant and powerful way to communicate about LBJ using his own voice, letting President Johnson reveal himself to audiences in a way that the written word just doesn't quite do. So it gives us a 360-degree view of Lyndon Johnson as a strategic master, and what he was really feeling as he was launching and driving the Great Society. Gradual release of the recordings between 1993 and 2008 reflects the extraordinary dedication and skill of the LBJ Library's archivists, who found the right technology to process this material, catalogued it, and made it available to the public. The recordings are now a valuable asset for anyone trying to gain a deeper appreciation of the Johnson presidency or the 1960s more generally.