The L.B.J. Library
Shortly before her death in 1958, Mrs. Sam Johnson prodded her son Lyndon about keeping his personal papers and documents in good order. He took her advice. When Lyndon Johnson left the White House eleven years later, he carried with him 31 million pieces of paper--the memos, minutiae and top secrets of his career. It is the largest and most complete presidential collection ever assembled,* and the library that houses it is on the same scale: a $10 million, eight-story marble vault dominated by a 60-ft. "Great Hall" built on a hill overlooking the University of Texas campus in Austin.
The huge library contains records of every telephone call to and from Johnson during his presidency, diaries of every minute of those five years--including notations about naps and meals --staff memos by the tens of thousands, tons of task-force reports and Cabinet studies, and millions of feet of microfilmed records of Government agencies. Stored in red buckram boxes embossed with the presidential seal, they will fill four floors of archives. But the 43,000 boxes will represent only the surface; in addition, there are nearly 1,000,000 photographs of Johnson's official and family activities, reel after reel of color movie film, and an oral-history section that includes 600 taped interviews with such diverse personalities as George Wallace, James Farmer, Dean Rusk and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who gave three long interviews on L.B.J.'s relationship with his family.
Three million documents, housed in a temperature-controlled basement vault, are still classified top secret, and some of them will be unavailable to the public and scholars until they are declassified and Johnson clears them for release. One document already public is a note from Robert F. Kennedy, handwritten in January 1966: "Listening to my colleagues in Congress (including myself) on what to do and what not to do in Viet Nam must become somewhat discouraging at times. I thought it might give you some comfort to look again at another President, Abraham Lincoln, and at some of the identical problems and situations he faced that you are now meeting."
Center of Power. The Johnsoniana is augmented by the papers of important contemporaries, including Clark Clifford and Drew Pearson. Says Library Director, Harry Middleton: "Dean Rusk gave us his appointment books, which is all he took from the State Department except for his hat." L.B.J.'s penchant for record keeping is not limited to the stuff of archives: the library also houses an exact replica of the Oval Office, complete with the three-set television console, and bronze-backed display cases containing the Johnson daughters' wedding dresses. Lady Bird Johnson, who chose the library site, and has been frequently seen directing its construction over the past five years, is behind some of the more personal touches. Says she: "Visitors want to sniff the presidency, to see firsthand the real belongings that were part of the center of power."
The library will be formally dedicated May 22 in the finest Johnson tradition with 2,400 guests due to watch the ribbon cutting, then file into Memorial Stadium for a barbecue. Invited guests include President Nixon and Vice President Agnew, but not War Critic, Senator William Fulbright, or Former Press Secretary, George Reedy, whose book The Twilight of the Presidency reportedly offended L.BJ. Lyndon Johnson may belong to history, but some grudges apparently do not.
* The Harry S. Truman Library contains 9.3 million documents, the Franklin D. Roosevelt 22 million, the Dwight D. Eisenhower 15.5 million, the Herbert Hoover 4.6 million, and the as yet unbuilt John F. Kennedy Library will contain 17 million documents.
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