#LBJ Library

[deadpresidents]

"I'm sure that the Presidents who stand out in our history and in our memory are those who led the nation through times of great trial and challenge...Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman. On the other hand, these very same Presidents would not be regarded now as great if their reactions and their responses had been weak, or if they had failed to achieve some of their major goals of if they had run away from the challenges...Greatness is an elusive thing and the judgment of history is sometimes different from that that is made when a President's in office or just after he leaves office. Wilson died a broken and disappointed man because he failed to win approval of the League [of Nations]. Yet history has judged that he was right in that fight and the willful men of the Senate who opposed him were wrong...There are a great many misconceptions about the Presidency...Some people think the President is a man who welcomes visitors to our country, who signs the laws that Congress sends him, who occasionally makes a speech about one of our problems, a kind of father or figurehead. Others see him as a manipulator or as an arm twister who is interested in power and how to use it. Others see him as a solitary figure surrounded by yes men, insulated from all [counselors], isolated from the real world. But very few people have any idea of the long and tedious and grinding work that goes into every Presidential day. I doubt that there was a single day of the Presidency, Sundays included, that I didn't give two or three hours to just solitary reading. There was hardly a night that I was President that I didn't read two or three hours. Even if it were a State Dinner or dancing...when I retired for the evening, I would have two hours of night reading ahead of me...No President in history has been able to do all the things that he or the people hoped he could accomplish at the time of election. But that doesn't mean that the job is impossible and that doesn't mean it's doomed. It's doable."

-- Former President Lyndon B. Johnson, on some of the unseen work of the Presidency.

Here's a great photograph taken by White House photographer Robert Knudson of some of LBJ's "night reading" homework, waiting for the President on his bed in the White House on October 12, 1966:

(I want to thank the incredible archivists at the @lbjlibrary and the National Archives ( @usnatarchives on Tumblr) -- especially, in this case, Chris of the Audiovisual Archives at the LBJ Library -- for tracking down a high-quality version of this specific photo for me. Without having any specifics on when or where the photo was taken, I reached out to the LBJ Library and vaguely described seeing this photo in the past and they quickly found a high-quality file that they sent me. The LBJ Library has done this numerous times for me over the years and I cannot express how grateful I always am for their help. The archivists at the National Archives and the NARA's Presidential Library system are incredible public servants and one of the very best examples of our federal government providing services to and for the American people.)

[sildarmillion-grounds]

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum

LBJ Library: LBJ Presidential Library

Located in the LBJ School of Public Affairs Campus. Visited 27 August 2018.

More pictures from the LBJ School of Public Affairs Campus, including the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. Visited January 9 2020.

[carolynmappleton]

I recently came upon recordings of the 1972 Civil Rights Summit which included a good friend of mine, the late Dr. Melvin P. Sikes. The recordings are posted as a group on the YouTube channel of the LBJ Library. What a marvelous event!

Ten years later, I would go to work for Mel in the College of Education at UT while I was attending graduate school. We became fast friends. I helped Mel transition to Professor Emeritus. A link to a book he co-authored is below. It is an excellent discussion and recommended.

[lesbianjudasiscariot]

tysm to the lovely @stringcage for pointing out that jinx's shadow is vi! so i have two sorta theories on this that i wanna share ♡

vi is going to feel obligated to follow jinx in her path of destruction because she feels responsible for jinx and who she has become. the shadow representing how vi is not acting in her own interest rather following jinx

the shadow is to show how vi is now forever in jinx's past as jinx has gone so far and has turned full villain mode that vi no longer sees her as her sister powder and has accepted they are enemies

obviously which ever way it goes it will be way more nuanced but omg i have not stopped thinking about this 12 second clip and had to get my thoughts out there!!

[mike-jacque-c-the-world]

04/09/24 - Austin, TX - THE JOHNSON TREATMENT - Meet Ralph, an old friend from my high school days. He’s from Phoenix and is visiting with us to see yesterday’s total solar eclipse and a little bit of Austin as well. Our first stop today is the LBJ Presidential Library. Lyndon Johnson liked to intimidate people, when cajoling them to agree to his point of view, by invading their personal space and pointing his finger at them: they called it ‘The Johnson Treatment’. Here, Ralph is showing you how it’s done.

[1percentcharge]

sorry if this is an insane thing to send you but I thought your air horse one drawing would fit in perfectly in the scary lbj animatronic room at the lbj presidential library

i love that. everyone go tell your friends this is an unedited photo

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Book Report: Royal Audience

Welcome to another semi-recurring feature, where I read the royal books so you don’t have to.

A new royal book has recently been published. This one I found at my library in the “new books”/“this just in” section.

It’s about the Special Relationship between the US and the UK, focusing mainly on The Queen’s relationship with the POTUS.

There’s a lot of history and international politics discussed, but I found it an easy, enjoyable read. I do wish the photographs had been in color instead of black and white so it’d be easier to see the details, which are often discussed in the text. One thing that quickly became clear while reading is that of the men whom are considered The Queen’s favorites, the only thing they all have in common is that they gave attention to and supported the whole family at-large, like hosting Charles or Anne, being friendly with Margaret, giving opportunities for Philip to visit solo, etc. The POTUSes that just gave attention to The Queen and Philip weren’t as successful as nurturing the Special Relationship.

So without further ado, anecdotes about The Queen’s Presidents:

Hoover: The Queen never formally met him “in office,” but she sat next to him at dinner once in the ‘50s.

Wilson: The Queen never met him but he did visit George V at Windsor Castle (the first POTUS invited to Windsor) and that visit set the tone for many of the POTUSes’ visits to The Queen.

FDR: Another POTUS that The Queen never met, but her parents did. George VI and the Queen Mother were the first reigning monarchs to visit the US in 1939 and it was a smashing success. While the Americans have always had an affinity for the BRF, it was this tour (in which FDR and Eleanor served the royals their first hot dogs) that cemented how much Americans supported, or would show up for, the royals if/when they came to visit:

As the Washington Post once wrote, “She’s not our queen but before we’re through with her, she’ll probably think she is” and as Obama once quipped to Charles: “it’s fair to say that the American people are quite fond of the royal family…they like them much better than they like their own politicians.”

Truman was POTUS when Elizabeth and Philip had their first official tour of the US in October 1951 as Duchess and Duke of Edinburgh. The trip, conducted as part of a visit to Canada, was delayed due to King George’s lung surgery and resulted in Elizabeth and Philip taking the BRF’s first international flight. Apparently everyone was so nervous about the flight that the Royal Navy deployed battleships every 700 nautical miles across the Atlantic just in case. By taking the flight, the royals were only a week behind schedule and they sailed home with 97 pieces of luggage.

Eisenhower: the Eisenhower were considered family friends by the royals. He remains the only POTUS to be invited to Balmoral and Elizabeth sent him her personal recipe for drop scones which - yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus - is published in the book, for all you home bakers. The Queen made her first state visit to the US under Eisenhower coinciding with the 350th anniversary of the Jamestown Colony (a trip Her Majesty would repeat 50 years later for the 400th anniversary and made me late to school but that’s another story for later). This state visit is what finally knocked Sputnik off the American front pages.

Kennedy: If you watched the Kennedy episodes of The Crown’s Season 2, you can skip this chapter. Kennedy once met a young Princess Elizabeth though, when his father was the US ambassador.

Johnson: The Queen never met Johnson in person. LBJ didn’t like traveling and preferred to focus on domestic affairs and Vietnam. But Princess Margaret did meet LBJ while on a visit to the US, which is also chronicled on The Crown, which the author takes great pains to mention is fiction because Margaret and LBJ never actually did kiss 🙄. LBJ and The Queen were friendly in letters though.

Nixon: hosted The Queen’s very first Thanksgiving dinner when he visited London in November 1958 (while Eisenhower’s VP) to open the American Memorial Chapel at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Queen’s acceptance of the invitation to Thanksgiving dinner caused such a consternation because Nixon hadn’t lacked a tuxedo that all the men in the American delegation who had traveled with him and worked at the embassy were measured to find someone from whom Nixon could borrow a tuxedo. Nixon’s visit to Buckingham Palace in February 1969 was the first time that color film was used at the palace.

Ford: hosted The Queen and Philip during the US’s bicentennial celebrations. It is considered to be one of The Queen’s most successful visits/tours. The tour was in July 1976 and if you know East Coast summer weather, you have an idea already what the weather was like. First there were rough seas that made even Philip seasick (they flew from London to Bermuda, then sailed on Britannia from Bermuda to Philly). Then there was humid muggy heat in Philly that The Queen was fanning herself often. And then in DC, it was even swampier with daytime temps of 100F in the shade. The bicentennial visit later became the theme of The Queen’s 1976 Christmas message - reconciliation.

Carter: Carter was the POTUS most considered to be The Queen’s peer since they were closest in age, and that’s about the only thing they had in common. He horribly offended The Queen Mother by kissing her at the G7, hosted Princess Anne on her first solo trip to the US (wherein she shocked the press by being more like Philip in her temperament than The Queen), and personally lobbied Westminster Abbey to include his favorite poet - Dylan Thomas - in Poets Corner. His wife, Rosalyn, is the only FLOTUS The Queen didn’t meet.

Reagan: After Eisenhower, probably the POTUS The Queen was closest to, over their shared love of horses. Their relationship reminds me of the classic “introvert adopted by extroverts” trope (albeit in its own unique way). The Reagans’ first trip to the UK was chaotic in its planning with offenses left and right that made Margaret Thatcher reel. Charles and Nancy had a wonderful relationship and were close for the rest of her life.

Bush 41: Bush (another peer who of similar demographics to The Queen; they were just a few years apart in age, he served in WW2 with a career that reminded her of Philip’s, each had four surviving children, their eldest sons were relatively the same age) was favorite POTUS #3 after Eisenhower and Reagan. The relationship started off rocky, but it was Pickles - a puppy from the Bushes’ dog given to a friend whom The Queen had visited - that smoothed everything over and the two couples got along well. The Queen’s official visit under Bush 41 began with the infamous ‘talking hat’ speech and saw her take in her first baseball game. It was proposed that Philip should throw the first pitch out but The Queen nixed it, though she did join Bush for a little walkabout on the field before the game started. (Boo. I would’ve rather liked to see Philip throw the first pitch. I bet he’d have thrown a strike without any practice.)

Clinton: Clinton prioritized the relationship with Blair more than with The Queen, which ended up salvaging the Special Relationship after Blair’s predecessor (John Major) practically blew it up by getting involved in the 1992 POTUS election when he/his government campaigned for Bush. But Clinton came around to The Queen in the end. Clinton is notably the first president who was younger than The Queen and I suspect his presidency marked a change in how The Queen approached the special relationship.

And also, there’s a very good chance that this chapter illustrates Meghan’s obsession with Hillary Clinton - Diana and Hillary had a good enough friendship, even if only a working relationship, that Diana co-chaired a White House breakfast with Hillary. The book also points out that much of Diana’s post-BRF work in the US took place in the Clinton administration, so now I’m wondering if perhaps Meghan sees the Clintons as a partial extension of Diana’s network and that’s why she tries so hard with Hillary. (And also there’s the obvious that Hillary knew/met Diana so maybe Meghan has been trying to court Hillary to be part of the “Meghan is just like Diana” fan club.)

Bush 43: had the first official full state visit of The Queen’s reign, which was also only the second state visit by a US President (Wilson in 1918). There were significant security concerns due to the War on Terror and this is also when the Daily Mail’s reporter was a footman for 2 months; the reporter broke his own cover to report on the state visit. The Queen had her final state visit to the US in May 2007 as part of the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Jamestown. (Her visit was the unofficial kickoff to the official celebrations, which began the week after.)

I didn’t know this, but The Queen personally donated a significant sum to the 9/11 memorial funds. Also The Queen enjoys Mexican food. A lady after my own heart!

Obama: Obama’s relationship with Britain began cool, owing to family tragedy closely connected with British colonialism in Kenya. He and the PM at the time, Brown, didn’t seem to get on, but The Queen stepped in and it’s thought her gentleness with the Obamas is what softened Obama’s consideration of the British. I do believe that Obama was the first head of state to see The Queen as more a grandmotherly figure and that helped boost The Queen’s global reputation (Bush 43 and Clinton saw her as motherly, and everyone through Bush 41 saw her as a contemporary/peer).

In the epilogue, the author writes that he believes Obama was favorite POTUS #4. I think the Obamas had a special friendship with The Queen, but sometimes I feel like it was more of mentorship, with The Queen showing them a generous kindness they weren’t expecting that led to both of them learning from her what it means to be diplomatic without losing sense of themselves.

Trump: His working visit in 2018 and the state visit in 2019 both were preceded by chaos and politics. A lot of people looked to The Queen’s symbolism in her outfits for how she felt about him. Trump held The Queen in high esteem, which she seemed to reciprocate diplomatically, but he had waffling views on Britain itself and that seemed to affect how the Special Relationship was managed (ie one day they were allies, the next day, Trump was assailing the mayor of London on Twitter).

Biden: No one quite knew what to do with him. He had proud Irish heritage so everyone thought he wouldn’t regard Britain well, but at the same time, Biden was outspoken against Brexit and Boris Johnson, which aligned with mainstream feelings of the day, so they weren’t sure how the wind was going to blow. But the Special Relationship prevailed, with Biden in a unique position that saw him speaking more about the generosity and the humanity of The Queen given what was happening to her - first the COVID protocols, then Oprah interview, then Philip’s passing, then her own illness.

(Biden is in the “Queen as motherly” club with Clinton and Bush 43.)

[tupelomiss]

While at the LBJ library in Austin, Tx they had a Music through the decades display and it had our man Elvis Presley in it !!

@vintagepresley @precious-little-scoundrel

[mariacallous]

One phrase encapsulates the methodology of nonfiction master Robert Caro: Turn Every Page. The phrase is so associated with Caro that it’s the name of the recent documentary about him and of an exhibit of his archives at the New York Historical Society. To Caro it is imperative to put eyes on every line of every document relating to his subject, no matter how mind-numbing or inconvenient. He has learned that something that seems trivial can unlock a whole new understanding of an event, provide a path to an unknown source, or unravel a mystery of who was responsible for a crisis or an accomplishment. Over his career he has pored over literally millions of pages of documents: reports, transcripts, articles, legal briefs, letters (45 million in the LBJ Presidential Library alone!). Some seemed deadly dull, repetitive, or irrelevant. No matter—he’d plow through, paying full attention. Caro’s relentless page-turning has made his work iconic.

In the age of AI, however, there’s a new motto: There’s no need to turn pages at all! Not even the transcripts of your interviews. Oh, and you don’t have to pay attention at meetings, or even attend them. Nor do you need to read your mail or your colleagues’ memos. Just feed the raw material into a large language model and in an instant you’ll have a summary to scan. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude as our wingmen, summary reading is what now qualifies as preparedness.

LLMs love to summarize, or at least that’s what their creators set them about doing. Google now “auto-summarizes” your documents so you can “quickly parse the information that matters and prioritize where to focus.” AI will even summarize unread conversations in Google Chat! With Microsoft Copilot, if you so much as hover your cursor over an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc, or PowerPoint presentation, you’ll get it boiled down. That’s right—even the condensed bullet points of a slide deck can be cut down to the … more essential stuff? Meta also now summarizes the comments on popular posts. Zoom summarizes meetings and churns out a cheat sheet in real time. Transcription services like Otter now put summaries front and center, and the transcription itself in another tab.

Why the orgy of summarizing? At a time when we’re only beginning to figure out how to get value from LLMs, summaries are one of the most straightforward and immediately useful features available. Of course, they can contain errors or miss important points. Noted. The more serious risk is that relying too much on summaries will make us dumber.

Summaries, after all, are sketchy maps and not the territory itself. I’m reminded of the Woody Allen joke where he zipped through War and Peace in 20 minutes and concluded, “It’s about Russia.” I’m not saying that AI summaries are that vague. In fact, the reason they’re dangerous is that they’re good enough. They allow you to fake it, to proceed with some understanding of the subject. Just not a deep one.

As an example, let’s take AI-generated summaries of voice recordings, like what Otter does. As a journalist, I know that you lose something when you don’t do your own transcriptions. It’s incredibly time-consuming. But in the process you really know what your subject is saying, and not saying. You almost always find something you missed. A very close reading of a transcript might allow you to recover some of that. Having everything summarized, though, tempts you to look at only the passages of immediate interest—at the expense of unearthing treasures buried in the text.

Successful leaders have known all along the danger of such shortcuts. That’s why Jeff Bezos, when he was CEO of Amazon, banned PowerPoint from his meetings. He famously demanded that his underlings produce a meticulous memo that came to be known as a “6-pager.” Writing the 6-pager forced managers to think hard about what they were proposing, with every word critical to executing, or dooming, their pitch. The first part of a Bezos meeting is conducted in silence as everyone turns all 6 pages of the document. No summarizing allowed!

To be fair, I can entertain a counterargument to my discomfort with summaries. With no effort whatsoever, an LLM does read every page. So if you want to go beyond the summary, and you give it the proper prompts, an LLM can quickly locate the most obscure facts. Maybe one day these models will be sufficiently skilled to actually identify and surface those gems, customized to what you’re looking for. If that happens, though, we’d be even more reliant on them, and our own abilities might atrophy.

Long-term, summary mania might lead to an erosion of writing itself. If you know that no one will be reading the actual text of your emails, your documents, or your reports, why bother to take the time to dig up details that make compelling reading, or craft the prose to show your wit? You may as well outsource your writing to AI, which doesn’t mind at all if you ask it to churn out 100-page reports. No one will complain, because they’ll be using their own AI to condense the report to a bunch of bullet points. If all that happens, the collective work product of a civilization will have the quality of a third-generation Xerox.

As for Robert Caro, he’s years past his deadline on the fifth volume of his epic LBJ saga. If LLMs had been around when he began telling the president’s story almost 50 years ago—and he had actually used them and not turned so many pages—the whole cycle probably would have been long completed. But not nearly as great.

[djag2007]

Retro Stethoscope 🩺

Not to get political, but…

I was at the LBJ Presidential Library and they had a stethoscope on display to commemorate the signing of the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965. 🩺

[snapthistiger]

exercise 01092024

bike ride to the gym

3 x 10 lat pull

3 x 10 tricep press

3 x 5 dips

3 x 10 row

45 minute spin class

6 x 5 seated press

bike ride to my Mom's then the library and on home

the gym workers received Dove chocolates

my Mom was sleeping so i visited with the sitter. dropped off the LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson book for my Mom to start reading. tomorrow morning my Mom has her 1st appointment with the kidney doctor so i will be picking her up around 730a and taking her to see that doctor. Mom's general practitioner referred her due to slowly declining kidney function

bottom = books i was looking at in the biography section. she likes books about the 1960s and 1970s when she was in her 20s / 30s

super breezy and cool today / Peanut inside most of the day. she doesn't like the wind and not fond of cool weather either

started working on my 2023 taxes and estimating taxes for 2024. blech.

hope you have a peaceful afternoon and evening..

[deadpresidents]

It's been a tough week to be an American, so here's something to think about for Independence Day.

When Lyndon B. Johnson was President, he was so determined to do as much as possible in the time that he had that, according to Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (who was also a personal aide to LBJ in his final years in office and retirement), his swimming pool at the LBJ Ranch in Texas "was strangely equipped with special rafts for a telephone, a notepad, and a pencil; if the President thought of someone he wanted to call or something important he wanted to record, he could float over to the various rafts that held the necessary equipment."

Notice that she used the plural "rafts" -- as in there were more than one of these rafts in the small pool at his ranch in the rural Texas Hill Country. And, while most business obviously wasn't done in the swimming pool, some of it was, and it was part of the way LBJ operated as a political genius. A political genius who helped leave behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Head Start and school breakfast programs, Job Corps, PBS, NPR, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, Fair Packaging and Labeling for things you shop for and Truth-In-Lending laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (which included the Fair Housing Act, Indian Civil Rights Act, and codified federal hate crime laws), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which eliminated racially discriminatory immigration policies), the first Clean Air Act (arguable the most important environmental protection law in American history), and much, much, much more including...oh, what was it? Oh yeah: the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid.

[sildarmillion-grounds]

UT vs. Tulsa game at the Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium. Hook 'Em Horns! 🤘🤘September 8, 2018.

Top 4 pictures are from the game. Rest are the view of campus from the stadium. Can see the LBJ Presidential Library, the Bass Concert Hall, and the UT Tower.

[187days]

Day Seventy-Eight

Happy new year!

My colleagues and I were back at school at 7AM sharp for PLC meetings. Dean 1 and The Principal both dropped in on mine at different times (because we're awesome). The Principal also caught me later to ask after two teachers who have had some rough stuff happen in their personal lives lately. Awkwardly, I had my hands full of packages because a supply delivery had come in during the break, but I set them down and had a quick, serious convo before getting on with my prep time.

I started a new unit in Global Studies on government and history. That got the ninth graders right back into school mode because the first day of a new unit is always old school in my classes. We went over the unit guide, the learning goals, when/how they'll be assessed, and so on. Then I taught the unit vocab as I always do: I wrote each definition on the board, they copied it down on paper. I also gave examples of how each term is used in discussing current events, and fielded a variety of questions. That meant we went on a few tangents (about trade, the Cold War, the UN, the war in Ukraine, and one particularly interesting one about why I didn't pause what I was doing to talk about the terrorist attack in New Orleans) but they were good tangents. That's what makes the class interesting.

In APGOV, we ate mini-cupcakes (because when the government almost shuts down, we almost eat cake) and discussed the budget deal that passed while we were on vacation. Then I read Heather cox Richardson's piece about President Carter, and- since we're closing out the unit on civil liberties and civil rights- played a video clip of President Carter discussing civil rights in 2014 at the LBJ Library. He focused a lot of his remarks on women's rights, which led to a good discussion in class afterwards.

And then it was time for track practice! The sprinters did some hallway sprints- varying distances, depending on their events- and some block work. The relay teams also did some baton passes (The Head Coach did, indeed, shake up the girls 4x200 team). And we had a visit from one of our former athletes, which was very cool.

All in all? A solid first day back.

[god-breast-america]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_N7SfpJIKh/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Shoutout to the lbj library social media intern that made this

OH MY GODDDDD😭😭😭😭😭

[fullmusicbardsquared]

wait why did biden come to the LBJ library today or whatever....isn't he racist.......you could pick up a random old person on the street and I guarantee they could have given a better speech on the legacy of the civil rights movements