AUSTIN, Texas — In the last months of his administration, President Lyndon B. Johnson voiced worry over the Vietnam peace talks and recommended that 1968 presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey select Hawai'i U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, a Japanese-American, as his running mate.

Forty years before a minority would be picked to lead the Democrats' presidential ticket, Johnson recommended Inouye join Humphrey's ticket as vice president.

According to a CBS News report, Johnson told Humphrey, "He (Inouye) answers Vietnam with that empty sleeve. He answers your problems with Nixon with that empty sleeve. He has that brown face."

Humphrey balked at the suggestion, despite being one of the Senate's foremost liberals.

"I guess maybe it's just taking me a little too far, too fast," Humphrey said. "Old, conservative Humphrey."

Johnson also complained bitterly about suspected interference with planned peace talks by supporters of GOP presidential hopeful Richard Nixon, according to tapes made public yesterday by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin.

Other tapes show Johnson consoling Sen. Edward Kennedy after brother Robert Kennedy was assassinated, discussing antiwar riots in Chicago, promising a smooth transition to Nixon's incoming administration and swatting down last-minute regulations proposed by his Cabinet secretaries.

"You bureaucrats have just gone around and figured out anybody in the world that you can stir up and make mad," he scolds IRS Commissioner Sheldon Cohen a month before leaving office.

At a news conference yesterday, Luci Baines Johnson, the president's younger daughter, said emotions flared when she listened to the tapes — the most recent, and final, batch, capping 640 hours' worth that have been made public since 1993.

"During this time of transition as we are focusing on the Bush family opening the doors of the White House to the Obama family, it brings back a flood of memories," she said.

Johnson said, though, that the tapes' release makes her glad, because now historians and a younger generation can fully view her father — and appreciate his frantic efforts to end a war she stressed he didn't start.

Several tapes show Johnson livid over a perceived threat to his peace push. He told several senators that people close to Nixon secretly urged South Vietnam to delay going to peace talks in Paris, to deprive Humphrey of a last-minute election boost. The Nixon supporters promised Saigon's representatives a better deal from their man, he said.

"They ought not to be doing this, this is treason," Johnson told Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., on Oct. 31, 1968, five days before the election.

While the president didn't accuse Nixon of treason, he said, "If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the (peace) conference table, that's going to be his responsibility." Also, Johnson suggested he might leak contents of intercepted communications between Nixon supporter Anna Chan Chenault and officials in Asia.

"It would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important," he said.

Three days later, Nixon called Johnson. Nixon denied involvement in or approval of "somebody trying to sabotage the Saigon government's attitude."

"Good God, we want them over in Paris. We've got to get them to Paris or you can't have a peace," Nixon said.

Nixon said he would do whatever Johnson wanted him to do to help before or after the election.

Reporters picked up rumors about the alleged intrigue by Nixon supporters before the election. But the story of Chenault's alleged interference didn't break until early 1969, said library archivist Regina Greenwell.

Former Johnson aide Harry Middleton said the president and Humphrey, his vice president and would-be successor, decided not to make public the alleged diplomatic interference by Nixon supporter Chenault and others for fear the nation "couldn't survive another blow," though disclosure might have changed the race's outcome.

Still, in a conference call with top advisers a day before the election, Johnson appears at least tempted. "I don't want to have information that ought to be public, and not make it so," he said.

Allegations of Nixon's influence in the peace conference have been reported before, but the tapes provide a look at how Johnson handled the issue behind the scenes, said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor and expert on the presidency at the University of Texas in Austin.

Shortly after the election, Johnson invited Nixon and his wife to the White House — as President Bush recently extended hospitality to President-elect Barack Obama and his wife.

There, the similarity in presidential transitions may end.

While Bush has approved a raft of controversial last-minute regulations on endangered species, coal-fired power plants and mountaintop-removal mining, Johnson turned down Cabinet secretaries who wanted to add 7 million acres to the national parks, kill road projects and reorganize the Labor Department.

He told Cohen of the IRS, who wanted to change how deferred stock compensation was treated for tax purposes: "No quickie regulations."

"You've had five years over there," Johnson said. "Why the hell haven't you issued it before?"

McClatchy-Tribune News Service and Associated Press contributed to this report.