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 The Library houses 45 million pages of historical documents, including the papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson and those of his close associates and others.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.
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“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.... It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“I told them I’m not going to let Vietnam go the way of China. I told them to go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word, but by God, I want something for my money. I want ‘em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want ‘em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things which God in his wisdom had put upon this Earth.”
—Barré Lyndon (1896–1972)
“I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“A man’s library is a sort of harem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)