A downsized version of President Lyndon Johnson’s Oval Office at his library in Texas. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Walking through the LBJ Presidential Library is a history lesson and then some.

Maybe every presidential library is like this. I don’t know. This is the first one I’ve visited.

The 10-story building is on 30 acres at the University of Texas, Austin.

Only staff are allowed on the five floors of archives that contain 45 million pages of documents, 650,000 photos and 5,000 hours of recordings from Johnson’s political career, including about 643 hours of his recorded telephone conversations.

On floors open to the public it’s possible to pick up a phone—landline style like the times—and listen in on conversations the president had with people like then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The LBJ Library is on the University of Texas campus in Austin. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

While I knew of Johnson’s legacy and was alive when he left office, I wasn’t born when he became president. I have zero memory of him or the events he was involved with. My friends I toured the site with on April 26, though, did have memories—like the Vietnam War, the clothing styles and more.

What I didn’t know is Johnson suffered a near fatal heart attack in 1955 or that there is something called the “Johnson treatment” where he would move in on people, getting in their personal space.

Several quotes of Johnson’s are on the walls. Such as:

• “There are no problems which we cannot solve together, and there are very few which any of us can settle by himself.”
• “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity in unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”
• “To deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.”

A limousine that very much looks like the one President John F. Kennedy was riding in when he was fatally shot sits in the entry of the library. That murder is what led Johnson to become president.

“Weighing 5,100 pounds, this four-door Lincoln limousine has a V-8 engine and is equipped with a radio, television, and telephone per Secret Service requirements. The vehicle is not armored, bulletproof, or bomb-proof,” the library’s website says. “In 1968, President Johnson ordered this custom-built limousine to use in his post-presidency. He used it mainly while he was in Austin, Texas.”

Exhibits throughout the LBJ Library talk of his accomplishments. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

A smaller version of what the Oval Office looked like during Johnson’s tenure from Dec. 22, 1963, to Jan. 20, 1968, clearly shows how times have changed. He had three small box-like TVs that he could see to his left from the desk. This was to keep abreast of the news. Those were the days when ABC, NBC and CBS were the primary television news stations.

A portrait of FDR hangs in this oval Oval; the man who gave Johnson “his great desire for public office.”

This library isn’t just about Johnson’s presidency. It’s about his whole life. An 11-minute movie provides an overview of the 36th president.

“Little about Lyndon Baines Johnson’s early life suggested he would one day be president of the United States. Born in 1908, LBJ grew up in the Texas Hill Country, one of the nation’s most remote and impoverished areas. Yet adversity fueled a fierce drive to accomplish great things,” a library exhibit reads. “At first, Johnson headed toward a career in teaching, but his ambitions shifted to politics. In 1937, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hard work and uncanny political skills propelled him to the Senate, where he became one of the most powerful majority leaders in American history, and then, in 1961, to the vice presidency.”

Johnson created the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His signature is on the Freedom of Information Act, Highway Beautification Act, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The latter has been undermined through the years, with the latest blow coming this week by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This is a limo that LBJ used after he was out of the White House. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

It was first lady Lady Bird Johnson who gets the credit for spearheading cleaning up the highways.

“But her concern for the environment ran far deeper. She believed beautification included clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal, historic preservation, and the protection of parks and wilderness areas,” a museum exhibit reads.

A replica of her office is in the library as well; as is much information about her, and the two as a couple and a family.

A special exhibit that opened April 11 and runs through Jan. 2, 2027, is titled What we bring to the table: Tales of history and home. It was timed to run as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary in July.

It’s an exhibit about the people of the United States told through the stories of immigrants—because that is what we are—a country of immigrants. We are also a country of haters, which is clearly illustrated in the exhibit. That’s what is alarming—that the haters are still so prominent.

This exhibit is powerful; the whole library is powerful.