Lyndon B. Johnson

• 1. Introduction

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  Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One, just hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on the 22nd of November 1963. The photograph of that moment, taken by Cecil Stoughton, became the most famous image ever captured aboard a presidential aircraft. Standing beside a blood-spattered Jacqueline Kennedy, Johnson placed his hand on a Bible and took the oath from District Court judge Sarah T. Hughes, becoming the only president in American history to be sworn in by a woman.

  From that single, electric moment, the questions multiply fast. Who was this man who stepped into one of history's most wrenching transitions? How did a boy from a rocky, poverty-struck Texas farm rise to command the most powerful legislature on earth? What drove him to pass more sweeping civil rights and social legislation than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, while simultaneously deepening America's involvement in a war that would consume his presidency? And why, in 1968, did he simply walk away from a second term he could almost certainly have won?

  The answers run through a life that was by turns brilliant, crude, compassionate, ruthless, visionary, and self-destructive. Johnson was born on the 27th of August 1908, near Stonewall, Texas, in a farmhouse on the Pedernales River. He died on the 22nd of January 1973, at his Texas ranch, having outlasted his own presidency by just four years. In between, he reshaped American life in ways that are still being argued over today.

• 2. The Pedernales River Boy

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  Robert Caro, whose biography of Johnson spans multiple volumes, described the land where Johnson grew up as a place "without electricity, where the soil was so rocky that it was hard to earn a living from it." His father, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., lost a great deal of money, and the family's poverty was not merely a biographical detail; it became the engine of everything Johnson would later attempt in Washington.

  Johnson was not even given a name until he was three months old. His parents could not agree on one. His father finally settled on "Lyndon" after a county lawyer named W. C. Linden, with his mother agreeing only on the condition that the spelling be changed.

  At 15, Johnson was the youngest student in his graduating class at Johnson City High School, finishing in 1924. He participated in debate and public speaking, two skills that would define his career. Reluctant to attend college immediately, he spent time in California working odd jobs at a cousin's legal practice and doing day labor before returning to Texas and enrolling at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1926.

  The turning point came between 1928 and 1929, when he interrupted his studies for nine months to teach Mexican-American children at the segregated Welhausen School in Cotulla, Texas, 90 miles south of San Antonio. He later recalled the experience in a 1965 speech: "I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor." He graduated in 1930 with a Bachelor of Science in history, then took a position teaching public speaking at Sam Houston High School in Houston before politics claimed him entirely.

• 3. The Ambition Machine

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  Richard M. Kleberg won a Texas congressional seat in a 1931 special election and appointed Johnson as his legislative secretary, providing Johnson's first real foothold in Washington. Kleberg had little appetite for the daily work of a congressman and delegated freely. Johnson, by contrast, had appetite for almost nothing else.

  Caro's characterization of Johnson's drive was stark: "Johnson's ambition was uncommon -- in the degree to which it was unencumbered by even the slightest excess weight of ideology, of philosophy, of principles, or beliefs." This was not a compliment, but it was an accurate observation of how Johnson operated. He was elected speaker of the "Little Congress", an organization of congressional aides, and used it to cultivate relationships with Congressmen, newspapermen, and lobbyists. His friends soon included aides to President Roosevelt and fellow Texans like Vice President John Nance Garner and Congressman Sam Rayburn.

  In 1935, Johnson was appointed Texas state administrator of the National Youth Administration. Within six months, 18,000 young Texans were working on roads, parks, schools, and other public buildings. He resigned two years later to run for Congress.

  His Senate career opened a new dimension of political influence. Once in the majority leader's chair after 1954, Johnson deployed what two journalists described as "The Treatment": a sustained, physical, near-hypnotic assault of cajolery, statistics, mimicry, scorn, and the hint of threat, delivered with Johnson's face, by their account, a "scant millimeter" from his target's. Caro and another biographer, Robert Dallek, considered him the most effective Senate majority leader in American history. One observer suggested he was "the greatest intelligence gatherer Washington has ever known", tracking not just how every senator planned to vote but their philosophies, their weaknesses, and what it would take to move them.

• 4. Stolen Elections and Silver Stars

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  Johnson's political career included two episodes that shadowed him for decades. The first was a 1941 special Senate election in Texas in which he appeared to be leading before late returns handed victory to Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel by just 1,311 votes -- a margin of 0.23 percent. In The Path to Power, Caro argued that lobbyists from the Texas alcohol industry had rigged ballots in O'Daniel's favor. O'Daniel was a prohibitionist who had proposed a law restricting alcohol sales near military bases; business interests preferred to move him to the Senate and install the more permissive Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson in Austin.

  Johnson learned from that loss. In 1948, he ran again, this time managing vote tallies with greater care. He won the Democratic primary by 87 votes out of 988,295 cast, a margin built in part on 200 ballots from Jim Wells County's Box 13 that election judge Luis Salas later said in 1977 he had certified as fraudulent, 200 for Johnson and two for Stevenson. The added names were written in the same handwriting, in alphabetical order, at the end of the voter list. Caro's 1990 book argued that thousands of additional fraudulent votes existed in other counties, including 10,000 votes switched in San Antonio. Johnson prevailed legally when his friend and future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas helped establish that the federal courts lacked jurisdiction over a party's naming of its nominee. The general election produced a sound win, and Johnson went to Washington permanently nicknamed "Landslide Lyndon", a label he cheerfully embraced.

  The second shadow was his World War II Silver Star. On the 9th of June 1942, General Douglas MacArthur awarded it to Johnson for gallantry during an aerial combat mission over New Guinea. Accounts differed. Caro said both that the evidence suggested Johnson was cool under fire when Zeroes attacked his B-26, and that "the fact is, LBJ never got within sight of Japanese forces. His combat experience was a myth." Johnson received the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and the World War II Victory Medal as well, but the Silver Star followed him as a point of lasting dispute.

• 5. The Great Society

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  Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2. That evening, he told aide Bill Moyers, "I think we may have lost the South for your lifetime -- and mine." The prediction was sharp and accurate. It was also the act of a man who signed the bill anyway.

  The legislative record that followed was staggering in scope. Johnson's War on Poverty, declared in his 1964 State of the Union, drove the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line from 23 percent to 12 percent over the course of his administration. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created the Job Corps and VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. By the end of 1965, 2,000 VISTA volunteers were deployed on community projects across the nation.

  The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare and Medicaid. The key architect was Representative Wilbur Mills, who structured Medicare as three layers: hospital insurance under Social Security, a voluntary program for doctor visits, and a state-administered welfare program for the poor. The bill passed the House on April 8 by 110 votes, then cleared the Senate on July 28.

  The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 doubled federal education spending from $4 billion to $8 billion. The Higher Education Act of the same year established federally insured student loans. Johnson also created the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, and signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967.

  On the environment, Johnson signed more than 300 conservation measures into law. The 1964 Wilderness Act alone preserved 9.1 million acres of forestland from industrial development. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 repealed the National Origins Formula that had restricted immigration from outside Western Europe; the annual inflow doubled between 1965 and 1970 and doubled again by 1990.

  Historians and political scientists rank Johnson in the upper tier of American presidents for his domestic achievements, describing his presidency as the peak of modern American liberalism in the 20th century. Congress ultimately passed almost 96 percent of his Great Society programs.

• 6. Vietnam and the Unraveling

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  When Johnson took office in 1963, there were 16,700 American military personnel in South Vietnam. The number would rise to hundreds of thousands before his term ended. Johnson's decision to escalate was shaped by the containment doctrine that governed American foreign policy, by pressure from pro-war politicians like Barry Goldwater, and by a fear that walking away from Vietnam would destroy his domestic political standing and the international reputation of the United States.

  In August 1964, ambiguous evidence suggested two U.S. destroyers had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson obtained the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, giving him blanket congressional authorization to respond militarily. In February 1965, after a Viet Cong attack on Pleiku Air Base killed eight Americans, Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a systematic bombing campaign that continued until late 1968. On the 8th of March 1965, 3,500 troops went ashore near Da Nang in the first conventional ground deployment of the war.

  By 1966, the press had begun to describe what became known as the credibility gap: the distance between what Johnson said in press conferences and what was actually happening in Vietnam. Democratic Governor Warren E. Hearnes of Missouri warned in late 1966 that Johnson would lose his state by 100,000 votes, despite having won it by 500,000 in 1964. By January 1967, the number of Johnson's strong supporters had dropped to 16 percent from 25 percent just four months earlier.

  Johnson had entered the 1968 New Hampshire primary. The results were disappointing enough that he withdrew his candidacy entirely. He retired to his Texas ranch and kept a low public profile for the remaining years of his life. Privately, he expressed views that complicated his public legacy further: in 1967 he told advisor W. Marvin Watson that he believed the CIA was somehow involved in Kennedy's assassination, and shortly before his death he told speechwriter Leo Janos, "I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger."

• 7. Civil Rights and Contradiction

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  On the 7th of March 1965, demonstrators attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery were met by state and county police who fired tear gas and beat and trampled protesters. The footage of what became known as "Bloody Sunday" generated outrage across the country. Johnson's response was immediate: he sent voting rights legislation to Congress and addressed a joint session with words drawn from the civil rights movement itself.

  The Voting Rights Act passed the House in August 1965 by 333 to 85 and the Senate by 79 to 18. Its effects were measurable and fast. In Mississippi, the African-American voter registration rate rose from 6.7 percent to 59.8 percent between 1964 and 1967. Between 1968 and 1980, the number of Southern Black elected state and federal officeholders nearly doubled.

  After the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, Johnson went on television to announce the arrest of four Ku Klux Klan members implicated in her death. He called the Klan a "hooded society of bigots" and warned them to "return to a decent society before it's too late." He was the first president since Ulysses S. Grant to arrest and prosecute Klan members.

  The contradiction ran deep, though. As a congressman in the 1930s and 1940s, Johnson had voted against anti-lynching legislation, anti-poll tax legislation, and the Fair Employment Practice Committee, consistent with virtually every other Southern Democrat of the era. His 1948 Senate campaign victory rested on fraudulent ballots. His 1964 campaign deployed FBI wiretaps on Martin Luther King's hotel room during the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. As majority leader in the 1950s, he had negotiated civil rights bills by stripping their enforcement mechanisms.

  At the 1968 Democratic convention in Atlantic City, the Credentials Committee's offer to seat two Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates as observers rather than replacing the segregationist delegation infuriated civil rights activists. SNCC chairman John Lewis called it a turning point in the civil rights movement. The sense of betrayal from Johnson's handling of the MFDP contributed to a fracturing of the coalition that had produced his 1964 landslide, and the Voting Rights Act's landmark passage did not insulate Johnson from that fracture.