The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum is one of 13 Presidential Libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. The Library houses 45 million pages of historical documents, including the papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson and those of his close associates and others. The Library was dedicated on May 22, 1971, with Johnson and then-President Richard Nixon in attendance. The current director is Presidential historian Mark K. Updegrove. President Johnson is buried at his ranch, near Johnson City, Texas, at the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park.
The Library, adjacent to the LBJ School of Public Affairs, occupies a 14-acre (57,000 m²) campus that is federally run and independent from The University of Texas at Austin. The top floor of the Library has a 7/8ths scale replica of the Oval Office decorated as it was during Johnson's presidency. The museum provides year-round public viewing of its permanent historical and cultural exhibits and its many traveling exhibits. The Library has the highest visitation of any Presidential Library (with the exception of the first two or three years of any new Presidential Library, which in some cases sees more visitors).
After her death in July, 2007, the body of Lady Bird Johnson lay in repose in the Library and Museum, just as her husband's had after his death, 34 years earlier.
Famous quotes containing the words lyndon baines johnson, lyndon baines, lyndon, baines, johnson, library and/or museum:
“We have not been fair with the Negro and his education. He has not had adequate or ample education to permit him to qualify for many jobs that are open to him.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“That’s just the trouble, Sam Houston—it’s always my move. And damnit, I sometimes can’t tell whether I’m making the right move or not. Now take this Vietnam mess. How in the hell can anyone know for sure what’s right and what’s wrong, Sam?”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“A big family must be fun. I imagine it makes you feel you belong to something.”
—Barré Lyndon (1896–1972)
“This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)