Basic Information
Name: Lyndon Baines Johnson
Nickname: LBJ
Born: August 27th, 1908
Died: January 22nd, 1973
Nationality: American
Hometown: Stonewall, Texas
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Teacher, congressman, senator, vice president, president
Education: Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University), B.S. in education
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines Johnson
Siblings: Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt, Sam Houston Johnson, Josefa Johnson White Moss, Lucia Johnson Alexander
Spouse: Claudia Alta Taylor "Lady Bird" Johnson
Children: Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, Luci Baines Johnson Turpin
Friends: poor folks everywhere
Foes: Robert Kennedy; Vietnam War protesters
Analysis
Just a Country Boy
Crude or charming, bullying or compassionate, self-assured or totally insecure.
Lyndon Johnson was a Texas-sized ball of contradictions.
Some trace his difficult personality to his childhood. His father was a state legislator, his mother a college-educated fish out of water in the Texas Hill Country. Johnson watched his father lose the family farm and go broke. The lesson he learned: I can't fail. His mother alternately made him the center of her universe or ignored him if he disappointed her. The lesson: I have to perform for people to pay attention to me (source).
Johnson graduated from Southwest Texas State Teacher's College in 1930 and took a teaching job. But he soon was bitten by the political bug and got a job working for a Texas Democratic congressman and moved to DC. The gregarious young country boy soon was in the thick of things, buddying up with the press, lobbyists, and lawmakers.
In 1934, he met Claudia, a.k.a. Lady Bird, Taylor, and married her not long after.
There was no doubt that when Johnson really believed in something, he'd go all in. In 1935, as Texas director of the National Youth Administration, LBJ worked 17 hours a day for weeks on end. The NYA could make a real difference in the lives of impoverished young people, he said. Get them off the streets and into school or job training. Make them productive citizens, and we all reap the benefits.
He drove the people around him hard. "Everything had to be done NOW!" an NYA staffer remembered. "And he could get very, very angry if something couldn't be done immediately (source).
Boy Wonder
Texans sent Johnson to the House of Representatives in 1937 when he was just 29, and he moved up to the Senate in 1948. A master of wheeling and dealing, he got himself selected to be Senate minority leader—a position that became majority leader after the 1955 elections that resulted in a Democrat majority.
As a southern politician growing up in the Jim Crow south, Johnson understood racial politics. Early in his career, he wasn't exactly a civil rights activist. Johnson had opposed Truman's civil rights bill and was instrumental in watering down President Eisenhower's 1957 civil rights legislation. He knew his white constituencies would oppose it, and he knew why they wouldn't.
In 1960, Johnson and Bill Moyers both noticed racist graffiti scrawled on a fence while riding together in a motorcade. Later, Johnson said to Moyers:
I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. (Source)
Political correctness was obviously not one of LBJ's concerns.
That pattern continued through his career in the House of Representatives (1937-1949) and the Senate (1949-1961), where he was the king of twisting arms (or making threats) to corral the votes he needed to pass legislation. He wasn't about to change when he got to the White House.
Veep
When JFK won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, he knew he needed a southerner on the ticket to balance out his appeal to the aristocratic east coast crowd that formed the base of his support. Despite opposition from his brother Robert F. Kennedy, who hated Johnson, he tapped Johnson as his VP. They were the political Odd Couple: Kennedy suave, genteel, charming; LBJ coarse and pushy. But the gambit worked. JFK narrowly defeated Richard Nixon, and LBJ was a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Nobody knew how close that would be.
Suddenly POTUS
We all know what happened on November 22nd, 1963. Riding in a motorcade through Dallas with his wife and the Governor of Texas, JFK was shot and killed. The assassination was a national trauma, but the transition of power quietly occurred on Air Force One as LBJ was sworn into office. Every American alive at that time had that image seared into their memory.
Johnson felt he had a mandate: to sign into law the civil rights legislation that Kennedy had initiated. After the assassination, he knew he had the political capital to push the legislation through. It was his chance at a do-over of his opposition to Eisenhower's Civil Rights Act of 1957.
The Irresistible Force
Once in office, LBJ was famous for giving people who opposed him "The Treatment". He'd cajole, harass, intimidate, soothe—do whatever was necessary to bring the person around to his way of thinking. He'd get all up in someone's face, even if he had to contort his 6-foot-4-inch frame to look a shorter adversary in the eye or drag his staff or visitors into the bathroom to continue a discussion while finishing his business on the can.
There was no personal space in LBJ's Oval Office.
The Do-Over
Since the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision overturning segregation in public facilities, clashes over civil rights were turning the country inside out.
As part of his "New Frontier" domestic agenda, JFK had advocated for a civil rights bill, but he was hesitant about it. He knew it would face certain opposition from southern legislators, and he didn't want to risk seeing the rest of his agenda go down because of it. But he knew he had to do something—Americans were treated to nightly newscasts of Freedom Riders being assaulted, civil rights activists being attacked by police dogs and water cannons in Birmingham, Alabama. JFK's civil rights bill was stalled in the House Rules Committee when Johnson assumed the presidency in 1963, and southern congressmen wanted to keep it there.
As a senator, LBJ knew how to twist arms to get bills passed, and he knew all the tricks the opposition could use—he'd used them himself. This time, he threw the full weight of the executive office behind the civil rights bill despite knowing the political risks involved. Johnson biographer Robert Caro wrote that when, after an all-night discussion about the bill, someone told LBJ to just give up on the lost cause of civil rights, the prez replied, "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" (source).
Johnson took the reins and shepherded the bill through Congress at every step, getting it out of committee and onto the House floor. He cajoled, bribed, bullied, and threatened (LBJ's specialty); cut deals with segregationist legislators; made endless speeches pushing Senate passage of the House version of the legislation; personally called and lobbied senators he'd need to end the Republican filibuster of the bill.
On June 10th, the Senate invoked cloture—a procedure to end debate on a bill—and the longest filibuster in the history of the Senate came to an end. It had lasted 60 days. (That's right. Some senators filibustered for 60 days to keep African American citizens from eating at the same restaurants as whites.) LBJ signed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 on July 2nd.
Rock the Vote
Johnson wouldn't stop there.
Martin Luther King had been keeping up the pressure on LBJ to pass comprehensive voting rights legislation. Southern states had many strategies for keeping African Americans from exercising their legal right to vote: poll taxes, literacy tests, and plain old intimidation. Johnson wanted to put off introducing any voting rights bill; he'd already been through a bruising political battle with his Civil Rights Act.
But King was tired of being patient. He'd been told for decades to be patient. He knew Johnson could get this done if he chose to push for a voting rights bill. He and colleagues from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a march from Selma to the statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama to demonstrate for voting rights.
On March 7th, 1965, the marchers were stopped by state police in the middle of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The nonviolent protesters were beaten, trampled, and gassed. Once again, Americans were shocked at what they saw on their TV screens. So was Johnson. On March 15, he addressed a joint session of Congress to urge them to pass legislation to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. He ended the speech with words that convinced everyone that he meant business: "We shall overcome."
A few days later, LBJ had his bill. On August 9th, 1965, with Martin Luther King watching over his shoulder, Johnson signed the bill into law.
Downhill from Here
As president, Johnson had the opportunity he'd craved all his life: He'd do everything possible to help the poor and forgotten. He would have an even bigger impact than his own hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His Great Society programs came under bitter partisan attack, but many continue to shape the lives of Americans today. But it was a civil war in Indochina that prevented Johnson from seeing these programs through himself.
Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had all been sending advisors to Vietnam to combat communist influence and support South Vietnam. LBJ, like his predecessors, was convinced that a communist victory in Vietnam would mean that communism would spread and eventually dominate all of southeast Asia. The U.S. policy had long been one of "containment," fearing that if Vietnam fell to the communists, other countries in southeast Asia were vulnerable, too. Johnson didn't want to be the guy who allowed that to happen on his watch.
In 1964, it was reported that American navy vessels had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress passed a resolution allowing Johnson to do whatever was necessary to protect American forces. Still, during the 1964 presidential campaign, Johnson vowed to maintain the peace and only escalate military involvement if absolutely necessary.
"Necessary" came pretty quickly.
When communists began to make advances in South Vietnam, Johnson began a massive bombing campaign. It didn't work. He sent the Marines—the first American forces sent to Asia since the Korean War. Nine months later, there were almost 275,000 American troops in South Vietnam. Johnson hoped that this presence would send a signal to the communist North that the war was unwinnable; they'd have to negotiate the status of South Vietnam.
The North didn't cooperate, however. On January 31st, 1968, North Vietnam launched an all-out, do-or-die offensive against the South. They threw 85,000 troops into a series of guerilla attacks in an attempt to capture the South's major cities. Although the offensive was not a military success, it made the public suspicious of Johnson's claims that the war was winnable. Americans were tired of hearing the body counts every night on the evening news.
By 1968, almost 600,000 Americans were in Vietnam, and 30,000 soldiers had been killed. Johnson's approval ratings were tanking. Another Democrat, Eugene McCarthy, took the unprecedented move of deciding to try to win the presidential nomination away from Johnson, the sitting president.
After a scary good showing by McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, and the announcement by Robert Kennedy that he'd also decided to campaign for the nomination, Johnson decided to bow out. He'd seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall.
No Democrats won the 1968 presidential election. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, months after the assassination of Dr. King. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Veep, was defeated in the general election by Richard Nixon on Nixon's promise that he had a secret plan to end the war. He didn't, but whatevs. It would take four more years and tens of thousands more American lives to end the war in Vietnam.
Because of the war, Johnson had become so unpopular that the Dems sustained enough losses in the 1966 congressional elections that LBJ couldn't easily push some of his Great Society legislation through Congress. The endless war drained financial resources that would have funded some of LBJ's domestic initiatives.
It's not necessarily the legacy he wanted, but he probably wouldn't be too surprised. After all, Johnson allegedly said, "If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim'" (source).
Johnson retired to his ranch in Texas with Lady Bird, where he died in January 1973. Despite his unpopularity towards the end of his term, his disastrous prosecution of the war in Vietnam, and constant opposition to his domestic policies, much of Johnson's Great Society is alive and well today.
Much of what those hopeful UMich grads heard in 1964 is still an awesome vision, even if Americans have different ideas about how to get there. Some of us see government as the last resort solution to systemic problems of racism, poverty, and threats to the environment. Some of us want the government to butt out of our business as much as possible and let the private sector and market forces keep our air clean and our citizens healthy.
There are plenty of arguments.
And we can thank Lyndon Johnson for those.