The first piece about national politics in the first edition of Texas Monthly, dated February 1973, related the story of a civil rights summit that had convened two months earlier at the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library, in Austin—a gathering much like the one President Joe Biden will address this coming Monday. The story described one of Johnson’s last public appearances, to commemorate the opening of the administration’s papers on civil rights. In his remarks, he grappled with the unfinished and possibly fragile nature of what he had done to advance equality under the law. He was physically fading, unsteady onstage, and mindful that the nation had entrusted itself, for four years, to Richard Milhous Nixon. The story was short and understated. It was also…