I kept calling it the museum, but when I got there, they told me that the building was ten stories. Three stories for the museum portion, open to the public, and SEVEN stories to contain the documents and videos related to his administration--that was the library portion.

I was not prepared for what happened inside. LBJ, yeah, I thought. Texan. Big hat. Sorrowful face. Signed into law the civil rights act. But I had forgotten the rest. And the travelling exhibit there was the Sixties and the Counterculture. It was as if I were walking into a time capsule. Not that all the exhibits were so fantastic, although they were good, but because I had lived through it and brought my own memories to the experience.

It was if on some level I were living through it again. Through the JFK assassination (on exhibit was Jackie Kennedy's letter to LBJ that she wrote the day after the funeral of her husband), through the Watts riots, through the Black Panthers and the Chicago Seven, and the Beatles and Mamas and the Papas, and Hair, and mini skirts, and the peace sign, and Angela Davis, and SDS, and Vietnam and civil rights protests and Martin Luther King and then HIS assassination, and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and Master's and Johnson and the sexual revolution, and LSD, and Vietnam, and the walk on the moon. Waves of it hit me until I was literally reeling. I thought I was going to pass out. And I had to tell myself to take deep breaths. I think I was close to tears a lot of the time, and I held my breath trying to hold them back so that I wouldn't look like a crazy person. Breathe, breathe.

I remembered the mini skirts I used to wear, and the guy I fell in love with because he looked like John Lennon. I remembered hearing my teacher tell me that the president had been shot while she broke down in tears and then sent us home. I remembered not wanting to watch TV news anymore because I was tired of hearing how many people had died in Vietnam, and then feeling guilty for not wanting to know. I remembered Walter Cronkite and how I trusted him and how there's nobody like that now.

But part of the reason I was reeling and emotional was that I had not realized how many programs President Johnson signed into law as part of the Great Society. Manpower, Head Start, National Endowment for the Humanities, Highway Beautification (that I think of as DO NOT LITTER), Medicare and Medicaid, Endangered Species Preservation, Motor Vehicle Air Pollution laws, Bilingual Education, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Fair Packaging and Labeling, and many many more. Of course, the LBJ library is going to present him in the best possible light. Can't wait to visit the Nixon library.