Today, we spent the afternoon visiting the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin. We hadn’t visited the Library in a number of years and wanted to see what had changed.
The LBJ Library is located in downtown Austin on a 30-acre site on the UT campus. The ten story building is modern monolithic in design and has visitor exhibits on the third, fourth, and tenth floor. The other notable feature is that it has a five-story glass encased view of the actual archives, which visitors can see, from the Great Hall on the fourth floor. It was dedicated on May 22, 1971.
Sue and me in front of LBJ’s Presidential Limo, a 1968 stretch Lincoln that was used in both D.C. and Austin.
There is also an animatronic LBJ that tells humorous stories from LBJ’s speeches. One of them goes something like this:
"A little boy was praying for his Momma. She was a poor widow and was having trouble making ends meet, so the little boy wrote a letter to God: "God, I'd be mighty thankful if you would send Momma a hundred dollars to help out." Well, his letter wound up in the postmaster general's office. And the postmaster was so moved by the letter that he took twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, put it in an official Washington D.C. Postmaster General envelope and sent it to the widow. Two weeks later, he gets another letter from the boy addressed to God. The letter thanked God for everything and the great help that the money provided. It also asked for another hundred dollars with this added caveat- “Only please God, this time send it direct. Last time it went through Washington and they withheld eighty percent.”
Photo Below-Sue in front of the LBJ storyteller. She thought it was creepy, the way the eyes moved and the hand creaked when it moved. In her own words:
“I found him kind of creepy, especially the eyes. I thought, what if you were accidentally stuck in the museum after they locked up for the night? Say you were studying in the archives and lost track of time. And A-LBJ started to move and talk, when nobody was around to trigger his motion sensors! And he didn't tell his funny stories but instead said stuff like, 'I don't take kindly to strangers snooping in my private papers.' Then the lights go out. And you run for the doors, stumbling around in the dark, only find the doors are locked from the outside! Then you hear a squeak from behind you...”
The Library had a section on the Vietnam War. Here I am in front of the Special Forces (SF) display. The beret on display has a 5th Group SF Flash on it; I was in 12th Group (1985-87), which no longer exists.
A view of the archives.
According to the visitors brochure, "The library houses 45 million pages of historical documents, 650,000 photos, one million feet of motion picture film, and 5,000 hours of recordings from the public career of Lyndon Baines Johnson and those of his close associates."
If you’re in Austin, and up to the drive, you can also go to nearby College Station and visit the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M. My wife and I visited it about two years ago and it was also pretty cool.
On the other hand, if you find yourself in the Los Angeles area we highly recommend the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley California. That library has the old Air Force One airplane from the Reagan era and the "Gipper" sweater of Notre Dame fame.
Finally the G.W. Bush Library is getting off the ground and will be located in Dallas (approximately four hours from Austin). Sue and I are looking forward to visiting that one when it gets up and running.
-JP
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