His exemplary presidential museum in Austin explores the times that still haunt us.

T he introductory video at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin describes Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) as a “sheer, raw brute.” He was indeed that and much more. My parents thought he was a monster and a psychopath but one with a coherent vision — the culmination of the New Deal — and nuts-and-bolts cunning in how to get there. He was far more dangerous, they thought, than Jack Kennedy, and, as president from 1963 to 1969, infinitely more destructive.

I left agreeing with my dead parents, and I’ll add my dead grandparents. LBJ was immensely destructive, but I also left awed, pitying, and sad. The library is an unforgettable experience. For the public, it’s really a history museum. Both word and image are delivered with curatorial smarts. A good curator wants you to leave both intellectually and emotionally charged. The library’s curators do this, and here’s another feat: they’ve interpreted LBJ in a meaningful way for visitors like me who lived through his epoch and also for younger visitors who didn’t.

First, the architecture. Gordon Bunshaft designed the building. He also designed the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale, which opened in 1963 and is similar. Both buildings are minimalist, monolithic, cream-colored boxes, with few windows, and multiple-story, glass-enclosed stacks that are an illuminated box within a box. The stacks at the LBJ library hold many of the 45 million documents, million feet of film, and 600,000 photographs; they overlook a spacious interior Great Hall. I’d call the exterior pagoda brutalism, but it works beautifully, softened as it is by the commodious plaza it occupies, planted with oak trees and with a low fountain. There’s also 17,000 square feet of exhibition space, mostly chronological and biographical.

Lady Bird Johnson (1912–2007), his long-suffering, tough, and amazing wife, started working on the library project in 1964. At the library’s dedication in 1971, Johnson said, “It is all here: the story of our time — with the bark off. . . . This library will show the facts — not just the joy and triumphs, but the sorrow and failures, too.” Johnson was big — 6 feet 4 inches — with a Texas-size personality, and, rare in these cold, clinical days, he was so physical a pol that he seemed to breathe in our mouths, imbedding his wants in us if not by logic than by a lungful.

The museum starts at the very beginning. His father was a farmer, occasional speculator, voluble and ribald, more a rascal than a scoundrel, and he served in the Texas legislature. He was a boom-and-bust provider. LBJ’s mother, from a family that once had serious money, was a college graduate who married much beneath her and invested most of her attention and considerable ambitions on her oldest child, Lyndon. They weren’t poor — LBJ’s boyhood home in Blanco County in Texas’s Hill Country is a nice folk-Victorian house — but they lived among the hardscrabble poor.

The galleries are cozy and the narrative bite-sized and fast-paced as LBJ moves from Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos to teaching gigs. He said his passion for bettering the lives of the poor started when he taught — briefly — at a school in Cotulla, a mostly Mexican-American town near the border.

The story has to be clipped and brisk because LBJ is the classic high-stepper, a man on the rise, an obsessive networker and information gatherer, a natural master of intricacy, and a seeker of mentors. Stars aligned for him. The 1928 Democratic National Convention was in Houston. He wrangled a guest pass. He met Texas pols who liked his energy and impressive look. He grabbed his first gold ring in 1931 when one of his new best friends introduced him to Richard Kleberg, a King Ranch heir who’d just been elected to Congress. Kleberg, a dilettante, needed to assemble a staff, and LBJ struck him as a doer of things that he’d rather not be bothered with. He hired Johnson as his legislative secretary. So, at 23, LBJ landed in Washington, a place made for him. There, he schmoozed with FDR, who took a shine to him. Up, up he goes, as Austin’s congressman in 1937, to the Senate in 1948, then minority leader, then majority leader.

The library is at its best as a storyteller in presenting the 1950s and ’60s. Each chapter in Johnson’s life — the late ’50s, when he was at peak power in the Senate, the early ’60s, when he was miserable as vice president, and intervals during his presidency — starts with an expansive look at the larger culture. It’s an evocative walk down memory lane that places us side-by-side with Johnson. Each wall is topped by a video, so we hear “Age of Aquarius” and Johnny Cash, Dustin Hoffman asking “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” and we see Peggy Fleming on the ice. Then we see artifacts — a Pop Tarts box, a Breakfast at Tiffany’s movie poster, Dr. Seuss books, Barbie and Ken dolls, tie-dye frocks and hippie headbands, and newspaper front pages and magazine covers. Space launches, world power summits, “Make Love, Not War,” the Generation Gap, civil rights marches, Martin Luther King’s assassination, then RFK’s a few weeks later. Following these vignettes are intricate history galleries showing us how the Vietnam War, the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and the Race to the Moon unfolded.

Then, there are the tapes. At the library, they call them “the Crown Jewels,” more than 800 hours of taped calls and meetings from 1963 to 1969. The tapes went to the LBJ Library in 1973 with a provision barring their release for 50 years. In 1984, some transcripts were released as part of the Westmoreland v. CBS lawsuit. Lady Bird later agreed to drop her 50-year embargo. The LBJ library’s director feared that the tapes would deteriorate before then. The first stash hit the airwaves in 1993. Transcripts were gradually released over the next 15 years. There are listening stations throughout the galleries.

Among left-wing quarters, the tapes would rehabilitate Johnson, Lady Bird thought, showing how hard he worked in cajoling people to support the Great Society and how essential his combination of charm, savvy, persistence, and pure passion had been. Then there’s the tape of Johnson’s chat with the head of Haggar Clothing Company. He needed new trousers and liked his Haggar slacks but said, “The crotch, down where your nuts hang, is always too tight.”

Who knows whether what we’d call empathy today was genuine in Johnson’s many calls to Mrs. Kennedy after the Kennedy murder and into 1965. The one I heard sounded genuine, but only up to a point. Johnson knew he had to do everything he could to defang the Kennedys, who, he knew, hated him as much as he hated them. Jackie was a prospect for cultivation, he understood. She understood it, too. Each seems to be acting in a play.

There’s nothing like the Johnson tapes among American presidents. Either the technology was primitive, as in FDR’s time, or the president, like Eisenhower, was too reticent and too guileless. Nixon was too cool and lawyerly, so his taped conversations, even the crude ones and the dodgy ones, bore rather than spellbind. Johnson bullies, goads, and flatters. He has concrete goals in mind and won’t take no for an answer. It’s all delivered with that thick Texas drawl, which sounds archaic, but Johnson was born in 1908 in a Texas that hadn’t left the frontier era very long before. It makes him seem primordial, from a time when appetites were big. After the 1968 election, Johnson gave Nixon a tour through his system of Dictaphones, hidden microphones, and activation devices in spots at the White House. Nixon loved what he saw, loved it too much.

Johnson taped phone calls with Lady Bird. In one, he’s positively submissive as she critiques his performance at a press conference. “I’d give you a B+,” good on content, but he talked for too long, looked down too much, and had “not enough change of pace,” with one long answer after another when, here and there, a short, crisp answer would move things along. She evaluated camera angles and acoustics. She was, after all, a communications mogul. She used some of the cash she inherited from her mother to buy a radio station in Austin and, later, a TV station, building a $150 million empire mostly on her own but with some considerable help from LBJ’s political connections — a swamp that the library skirts.

Johnson coached Martin Luther King on messaging in an early 1965 call but then lectured him on how important momentum and sequencing is in passing legislation. Johnson knew King had the Voting Rights Act on top of his agenda, but Johnson had all the threads of the Great Society to promote as well.

Then there’s Vietnam. I listened to Johnson’s May 27, 1964, conversation with McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, a smoking gun if there ever was one.

“What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” Johnson asked. “What is it worth to the country? . . . Sure, we’ve got a treaty, but hell, everyone else has got a treaty out there, and they’re not doing a thing about it.” Then: “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.”

Robert McNamara, his secretary of defense, smooth and corporate but still a skunk, claimed in his 1996 autobiography that he’d advised Johnson to get out, but that LBJ was gung-ho. Two years later, the tapes proved that McNamara was wild-eyed for war while Johnson was very ambivalent, looking for a middle-of-the-road exit. Alas, as another Texan said, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and a dead armadillo.”

Johnson was cunning incarnate. He and he alone triggered a recording, often by a hand signal to his secretary, and 800 hours amounts to 33 days. No one, not even LBJ, could talk on the phone or be in meetings 24 hours a day, but if any human could come close, he’s the one. He was president for more than six years. Lots went unrecorded, so we’re not getting the unvarnished Johnson. We’re getting what Johnson wants posterity to hear. About a hundred conversations are excerpted in kiosk screens. This can be a rabbit hole, but it’s part of the immersive experience. All the tapes can be accessed via the library’s website.

“I can’t win, and I can’t get out,” Johnson said over and over. The horror of what Lady Bird called “the boxes coming home, day after day,” then, starting in 1967, race riots in big cities, campus chaos, LBJ believing that he no longer understood the country, that he no longer understood Congress, about whom he said, “We’re like an old married couple . . . . I’ve asked them for too much. . . . I can’t ask them for more.” He and Lady Bird came to feel trapped in the White House, in a state of siege. How did it unravel so quickly from LBJ’s zenith in 1964? The curators leave us to ponder, a good place to be.

Quibbles? I’ve got a few, but they aren’t big. Like Johnson or not, the library is superbly curated. A case on Johnson’s election to the Senate in 1948 doesn’t utter a peep about his 87-vote win, surely a result of stuffed ballot boxes in counties on the border with big Mexican-American voters and high illiteracy. I didn’t find anything about Walter Jenkins, LBJ’s longtime chief of staff, arrested a month before the 1964 election for soliciting sex in a YMCA restroom. The cover-up was intense. Also untreated are Bobby Baker; Billie Sol Estes; FBI wiretaps; the Abe Fortas scandal; endless lies surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the subsequent war quagmire; lies about guns versus butter, war in the rice patties, and our Great Society welfare; and, among Johnson’s worst moments, picking up one of his beagles by his ears. And it’s true: he did drag whomever he was meeting into the loo to continue the conversation while he evacuated his bladder or bowels. That didn’t make the cut.

The library hedges, even beclouds, his relationship with the Kennedys. His campaign for president in 1960 failed, and badly. Johnson, a superb strategist and tactician when running a Senate of a hundred people and dealing with Ike — and he liked Ike, too — seemed out of his depth as a national figure. He was Southern, a real barrier. He felt he’d have more power as vice president under JFK, in his opinion a lightweight, and that he could make his way through force of personality. He thought he could lead Congress from the VP’s chair. He looked at the odds, too. JFK, as the 35th president, joined a club in which seven of his predecessors, or 20 percent, had died in office. As the Senate majority leader, LBJ had zero chance. As VP, well, one in five is better than nothing.

So he took the leap and likely, by hook or by crook, delivered Texas. As vice president, he was miserable. Kennedy’s Ivy League cohort in the administration despised Johnson. He was the hick from San Marcos, the back-alley wheeler-dealer, an arm twister, and cozy with conservatives. Johnson thought that “the Harvards,” as he called them, never needed to persuade anyone of anything, entitled as they were. They were, he said, “like a pack of nuns who’ve convinced themselves that sex is dirty and ugly and lowdown” and who saw political persuasion as “rape instead of seduction.”

Johnson was never an intellectual, but by 1963 he was very much an anti-intellectual, though, strange to say, he dearly wanted the intellectuals to love him as they loved FDR, even as they loved JFK. The library doesn’t plumb Johnson’s estrangement from “the Harvards” and theirs from him, but it created huge problems for the war effort, the Great Society, and the campus upheaval at the end of his time in office. The curators probably wanted to ditch his time as VP as fast as they could, rushing to November 22, 1963, and the many dramas, high points, and low points that followed.

A 50-foot-long photo-engraved magnesium wall mural by Naomi Savage in the Great Hall depicts Johnson at different stages of his life — as a congressman with FDR, as a U.S. senator with Harry Truman, then with Eisenhower, as vice president with JFK, and as president. Savage was the niece of modernist photographer Man Ray. She learned from him how to translate photographs into engraved, textured images on metal. The look is high realism and abstraction. It dates to the opening of the library and isn’t bad.

Off the Great Hall, there’s a small rotating exhibition gallery with a fun and provocative show on the 50th anniversary of Jaws. The novel was written by Peter Benchley, who, I learned, was once a speechwriter working for LBJ in the White House. His novel about the great white shark was published in 1974, the year after Johnson died of a heart attack. Jaws obviously isn’t Beach Blanket Bingo but, rather, concerns fevered dreams, alien menaces, law and order, and relentless, implacable force. To my knowledge, LBJ never bit anyone, but as a personality and historical figure he, like the shark, still feels large and in charge, with staying power and in our heads as an icon of the 1960s.

His last years were at his ranch, a manse a mile from where he was born, not far from the folk-Victorian house where his mother taught elocution. At the end, he saw himself as a crusader for liberal causes, for dreams conceived during the Great Depression and thought impossible to realize. Johnson believed he’d made them come true, but for all his effort, for all the bills passed, new rights born, and programs launched, he knew he left office reviled, mocked, and spent. It’s an epic story, a tragedy, of a big man lost in the labyrinth of dreams, deceits, and flaws.