The Nation: Johnson Retrospective

• Share

It was appropriate that Lyndon Johnson should have brought together a crowd as large and richly complex as his own history had been. The ceremonies dedicating the new L.B.J. Library at the University of Texas last week were the greatest omnium-gatherurn of present and former political power since the last presidential inauguration; it was a retrospective gallery of an era. There, under the monolithic and somehow Assyrian proportions of the library, were several thousand of Lyndon Johnson's friends and not a few of his old enemies, along with Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and dozens of the other men who took over Washington when L.B.J. went home. There, in Johnson's considerable embrace, were Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey, Dean Rusk, William Westmoreland, Abe Fortas, Billy Graham, Luci and Lynda, Edmund Muskie, Walt Rostow, secretaries, plumbers, Congressmen, phone operators and, perhaps fittingly, a few hundred antiwar demonstrators near by.

It was not, however, a great day for oratory. Johnson, looking somewhat paunchy and preternaturally proud, said of his library, crammed with 31 million documents of his career: "It's all there—the history of our time, with the bark off." Nixon inadvertently got off the funniest line of the day: "As President Johnson was throwing me—er—showing me through the library . . ." Afterward, the Rev. George Davis of Washington, standing just in front of Vice President Agnew, offered a Spironian benediction rejoicing, among other things, that the University of Texas is "not yet frozen in the glacier of pseudo intellectualism."