Two Presidential Library's

After walking through the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas I come away convinced that Ike was the country's last decent President, and that we may never have a man as well-suited to the job again. That he was a military man who cautioned about the 'military-industrial complex', played golf, took up painting in his later years, and produced a grandson who would go on to marry his Vice-President's daughter, are all to his credit. I'm told on good authority that Ike was a reader, and devoured Louis L' Amour westerns like candy, though no mention was made of this important fact is made in his Presidential Library.

The top floor of the the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas is closed due to a leaky roof: I wonder what this means, beyond the obvious, and if LBJ would have taken a stand on climate change, given the rapacious nature of the extraction industry and the powerful role it plays in local, state, and national politics. As I came of political age during LBJ's reign, sitting at a card table at a mall in Torrance, California in 1968 registering voters on behalf of Eugene McCarthy, the almost forgotten poet/politician, I'm familiar with the general path of Johnson's political trajectory though hazy on many of the details: his library reminds me that LBJ was a protean achiever with a gut-level understanding of the downtrodden, the poor, people of color, and accomplished many wonderful things on their behalf. LBJ had five telephones in his West Wing office and would often work all five at once.

Regarding Vietnam, LBJ's downfall as President, I come away from his library thinking that he simply slipped on the banana peel of history, but not sure whether or not this is the way I'm supposed to come away thinking.