A "continuous nightmare:" LBJ tapes from 1968 released

Lyndon Johnson, after he left office, once observed that 1968 “was one of the most agonizing years any president ever spent in the White House.’’

“I sometimes felt that I was living in a continuous nightmare,’’ he said.

Now some of those tumultuos moments, captured on tape, are coming to life with the newest release of the president’s telephone conversations. Among the topics covered during some 13 hours of tapes from the first four months of 1968: Rising dissatisfaction with the war in Vietnam, his decision not to run for re-election and the assassination of Martin Luther King.

“These first four months were a particularly turbulence-filled period,’’ said Claudia Anderson, supervisory archivist at the LBJ Library in Austin, which released the tapes Thursday. “A lot happened.’’

In one conversation that touched on the national unrest, Johnson can be heard nudging powerful U.S. Rep. Wilbur Mills to embrace a package of tax increases and budget reductions, then working its way through Congress, to avoid economic disaster.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get the sentiment for it until you go to tellin’ the country that, by God, it’s dangerous. Now if you don’t feel it’s dangerous, I just  think we’re going to hell,’’ Johnson told Mills. “I think we’re in the most dangerous thing I ever saw in my life and I think it’s going to blow right in our face.’’

Stay tuned. More to come.

-- Jay Root