Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library

The Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library is a windowless block of cream travertine on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, dedicated in 1971 in the state Johnson called home. Larger than the earlier libraries, it sits beside the public-affairs school that also bears his name, and for years it admitted visitors free of charge, drawing some of the heaviest attendance in the system.

Its records document a presidency of extremes. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, and the sweeping "Great Society" — the most ambitious domestic program since the New Deal — while the war in Vietnam deepened around him, splitting the country and ultimately driving him from the race for a second full term.

The museum is known for a few distinctive touches: a four-story glass wall behind which the red archival boxes of his papers are displayed like a monument, and a robotic, joke-telling figure of Johnson himself in animatronic form. A reproduction of the Oval Office, built at seven-eighths scale, lets visitors stand where the decisions were made.

The library does not shy from the contradiction at the center of Johnson's record — the president who did more than almost any other for civil rights and the war on poverty, and who was consumed by a war he could not win. That tension is the story the building tells.