For more than 30 years Lloyd Bentsen served his country as a U.S. Congressman, a U.S. Senator, and as Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration. He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1976 and was the 1988 Democratic Party nominee for vice president on the Michael Dukakis ticket. When Bentsen retired from public life in 1994 after a long and successful political career, he faced a difficult decision. Where would he leave his historically valuable collection of papers?

For many retiring politicians, the choice is easy. They leave their papers in Washington or establish a hometown archive.

Because of the scope and importance of the Lloyd Bentsen Collection, the National Archives or the Library of Congress would have been pleased to receive his papers. People from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where he grew up and began his public life, would have been delighted to establish a Bentsen library there. But Lloyd Bentsen chose to place them at the Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin, the university where he received his law degree in 1942.

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