The Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library got a bump in attendance in the wake of Lady Bird Johnson’s death, and they have hopes of keeping the magic alive with a new exhibit featuring the man himself.
Tourists with a hankering to discuss the saga of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill and other career highlights will enjoy the presence of a an LBJ reenactor until mid 2008.
Johnson will be played by local Austin actor Michael Stuart, who has impersonated the tall Texan before.
Stuart [hatted] played Johnson in a local production of “The Dead Presidents Club”
Keeping him company is the presidential musum’s permanent exhibit featuring an animatronic Johnson cracking jokes.
“There is something very strange about the people who have assembled themselves around the President over the past few years.” *
As Karl Rove steps into what shadows the Texas sun will provide, History News Network is trying to answer the WTF factor of the Bush Presidency.They are polling: Did Karl Do It?, but more broadly HNNists are asking how we came to be led off the cliff by people with such supreme confidence they were destiny’s darlings.
Daniel Brendan Larison wonders:
“There is something very strange about the people who have assembled themselves around the President over the past few years. Many of them seem to have an outsized sense of their own world-historical importance, and many of them are convinced that they have a superior understanding of the lessons of history, but their grasp of history never seems to escape the generic, the vague and the facile.”
David Greenberg writes in “Slate” [excerpted by HNN] on how beyond the desperate analogy lunges [“It’ll be like the occupation of Japan!”] , Bush’s madman calm may reveal his sense of himself as channel for forces which passeth understanding.
The selling of former Reagan CIA Director William Casey’s Florida home is being sold as the passing of an era, with quotes in the Palm Beach Daily News that “The place reeks of history.”
The sale does recall a colorful, bygone era, when a youthful Osama Ben Laden could be recruited to play his part in Afghanistan’s great game and we didn’t care fuck-all for the consequences.
Oh, how we laughed, but then someone checked and spoiled the fun.
The popular quote:
“A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job.”
I haven’t seen it in any of the obits I’ve read so far, but the late Reagan presidential Svengali Michael Deaver was the source of the single greatest quote ever uttered on the media and US Presidents.
Mark Hertsgaard’s “On Bended Knee: the Press & the Reagan Presidency quotes Deaver as saying:
“You let me supply the pictures, I’ll let you write the story” 
