You're going to kill yourself."He took it back and said, "I've now raised you, girls. I've now been President. Now it's my time!"From that point on, he went into a very self-destructive spiral.— Historian Michael Beschloss[281]
After leaving the presidency in January 1969, Johnson went home to his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, accompanied by a former aide and speechwriter Harry J. Middleton, who would draft Johnson's first book, The Choices We Face, and work with him on his memoirs entitled The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963–1969, published in 1971.[282] That year, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum opened on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin. He donated his Texas ranch in his will to the public to form the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park, with the provision that the ranch "remain a working ranch and not become a sterile relic of the past".[283]
Johnson gave Nixon high grades in foreign policy but worried that his successor was being pressured into removing U.S. forces too quickly from South Vietnam before the South Vietnamese were able to defend themselves. 