Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973)

Overview

• Born August 27, 1908, Stonewall, TX

• Died January 22, 1973 (aged 64), Stonewall, TX

• Member of the Democratic Party

• 36th President of the United States (November 22, 1963-January 20, 1969)

• 37th Vice President of the United States (January 20, 1961-November 22, 1963)

• Senate Majority Leader (January 3, 1955-January 3, 1961)

• Senate Minority Leader (January 3, 1953-January 3, 1955)

• Senate Majority Whip (January 3, 1951-January 3, 1953)

• U.S. Senator from Texas (January 3, 1949-January 3, 1961)

• Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas’s 10th district (April 10, 1937-January 3, 1949)

Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential portrait

Early life

• Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in Stonewall, Texas, on August 27, 1908.

• His parents, Samuel Ealy Johnson, Jr. and Rebekah Baines Johnson, settled in Texas before the Civil War.

• Lyndon was the oldest of five children.

• The nearby town of Johnson City was named in honor of the Johnson family, famous for farming and ranching.

• Lyndon’s father was a rancher and part-time politician, even though he did not inherit the family’s ranching ability, and experienced financial troubles; he lost the family farm when Lyndon was in his early teens.

• Despite struggling in school, Lyndon B. Johnson graduated from Johnson City High School in 1924 at the age of sixteen.

• Johnson enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University), where he was involved in debates and campus politics.

• After he graduated in 1930, he briefly taught in a segregated school.

• His political determinations were already realized: in 1931, Johnson was appointed legislative secretary to Texas Democratic Congressman Richard M. Kleberg, and relocated to the nation’s capital, where he rapidly developed a network of congressmen, newspapermen, lobbyists, and friends, among them allies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

• In 1934, Lyndon B. Johnson met and married Claudia Alta Taylor, known as Lady Bird to her friends; she was four years his junior.

• Claudia soon became Johnson’s highest-ranking advisor; she also used an unassertive inherence to help finance his run for Congress in 1937, and worked in his office for several years.

• She even later purchased a radio station and then a television station, through which the Johnsons became rich.

Johnson’s birthplace

Johnson, ages sixteen (L) and twenty-three (R)

1924 1931

Richard M. Kleberg

Johnson as a congressman

Early Political Career

• After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in late 1941, President Roosevelt assisted Johnson in winning a commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a lieutenant commander.

• Johnson took part in an expedition of the South Pacific and flew on a combat mission.

• Not long into the operation, Johnson’s plane had to retreat because of mechanical difficulty, but he still won a Silver Star medal for his involvement; soon after, he returned to Washington, D.C. and resumed his legislative duties.

• In 1948, Johnson was elected as a senator from Texas in a close and controversial election.

• He quickly rose through the Senate ranks, and became the youngest minority leader in Senate history in 1952; two years later, the Democrats gained control of the Senate, and Johnson was elected majority leader.

• Johnson had a mysterious ability to collect information on his fellow legislators; he even knew what position each of his associates held on political issues.

• With unbelievable inducement skills and an impressive presence, he could successfully "button-hole" political allies and opponents alike to influence them with his way of thinking; he was later able to secure passage of numerous measures during the Eisenhower administration.

Johnson as a lieutenant commander

Results of the 1948 Senate elections

Johnson as a U.S. Senator

Vice President, 1961-1963

• By 1960, Johnson focused on a bid for the presidency.

• However, he was no match to the young and enthusiastic one-term Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was nominated for president on the first ballot at the Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles.

• Kennedy recognized that he needed support from Southern Democrats, the majority of whom endorsed Johnson, to win; accordingly, after the convention, Kennedy offered Johnson the vice presidency, and Johnson accepted.

• Johnson delivered the South, and the Kennedy/Johnson ticket defeated Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon and his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. in a close race.

• Even though he was at no time relaxed in the role as vice president, Johnson presided over the space program, directed negotiations on the nuclear test ban treaty, and worked to enforce equal opportunity legislation for minorities.

• He also strongly backed Kennedy's decision to send U.S. military advisors to South Vietnam to help combat a communist revolution. 

• Nonetheless, much to his dismay and frustration, Johnson was excluded from Kennedy’s inner circle and had little influence on decision making and legislative issues.

Kennedy/Johnson campaign poster

Kennedy delivers his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention

Results of the 1960 presidential election

Presidency, 1963-1969

• On November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m., President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, while sitting in a motorcade; Johnson was only two cars behind Kennedy when the shots rang out from a warehouse.

• Only a few hours later, Johnson became the thirty-sixth president aboard Air Force One during its return to Washington, D.C.

• Less than a week later, the new president addressed a joint session of Congress and declared: “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today. The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. Today, John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind. He lives on in the hearts of his countrymen. No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.”

• Throughout the following year, Johnson continued Kennedy’s domestic programs and pushed through Congress some of his own, such as a tax cut and the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first real civil rights law since Reconstruction.

Johnson’s swearing-in ceremony aboard Air Force One

President Johnson’s address before a joint session of Congress, November 27, 1963

Presidency, 1963-1969 (cont.)

• In 1964, Johnson ran for the presidency against Barry M. Goldwater, a conservative Republican Senator from Arizona.

• With public opinion overwhelmingly supportive of the Democrats, Johnson won by a landslide, earning him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon”; he won sixty-one percent of the popular vote to Goldwater’s thirty-eight percent, the largest margin of victory in U.S. presidential election history.

• Johnson used his election decree to declare “unconditional war on poverty in America” and wage war against communism in Southeast Asia.

• In early 1965, Johnson pushed a comprehensive legislative agenda known as the Great Society, a set of domestic programs with the goal of reducing poverty and ending racial injustice, became the most committed and far-reaching domestic program in U.S. history; two years later, he nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.

• With strong bipartisan support, scores of bills were passed that upheld urban renewal, education, the arts, environmental improvement and conservation, and the expansion of depressed regions in the country.

• Great Society legislation comprised the passage of the Medicare and Medicaid acts and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and led to the founding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

• Congress would pass the second and final Civil Rights Act of the sixties in April 1968.

Johnson/Humphrey campaign poster

President Johnson with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, and James Farmer

President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” speech

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Results of the 1964 presidential election

President Johnson’s Voting Rights speech

Nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court

Final Years

• By 1967, the escalating war in Vietnam was undermining Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency; his approval rating fell to forty-seven percent the year before.

• His administration's handling of the war was met with disapproval by a majority of Americans, and anti-war protests continued on college campuses and major cities; the protestors chanted, “Hey, hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

• By 1968, over 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam, and the war was nowhere near its end.

• When the Democratic primaries began in March 1968, the Democrats were divided over the war, and split into three factions.

• Johnson lost control of his party, and his approval rating sunk to thirty-six percent.

• While it was assumed that Johnson was going to run for re-election, he announced in a surprising move on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek a second term.

• Only four days after that announcement, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

• Robert F. Kennedy emerged as the likely front runner by June, but was assassinated in Los Angeles only moments after his victories in the California and South Dakota primaries; Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey ran as the Democratic nominee in November, but lost to Richard Nixon.

President Johnson announces that he will not seek re-election

Final Years (cont.)

• When Johnson left office in January 1969 after almost six years in the White House, the incoming Nixon administration promised to resume peace talks in Vietnam, even though it would take another four years until the U.S. completely withdrew its soldiers from Vietnam.

• Johnson’s health had been declining since he suffered a heart attack in 1955; even though it was never disclosed to the public, the condition of his health and concern that he might not live through a second term were his reasons for declining to run for re-election.

• He died of a heart attack at his Texas ranch on January 22, 1973, only two days after Nixon was inaugurated for his second term; he was sixty-four.

• The day before he died, he learned that peace in Vietnam was finally reached.

Outgoing President Johnson with president-elect Nixon at the latter’s first inauguration

Sources

• http://www.biography.com/people/lyndon-b-johnson-9356122

• http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/the-war-on-poverty-after-50-years

• Fred I. Greenstein, The Presidential Difference, third edition (2009)

Other links • President Lyndon Johnson - Address to Congress: https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEw8yWpK0jA

• Lyndon Johnson State of the Union Address - War on Poverty (January 8, 1964): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgsVrIXkix4

• "Daisy Girl" Rare 1964 Lyndon Johnson Political Ad -aired only once- 9/7/64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Id_r6pNsus

• Lyndon B. Johnson - Inaugural Address: The American Presidency Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq_6NroQTWE

• President Johnson's 1965 State of the Union Address, 1/4/1965: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uou8EppdfAM

• Excerpt: LBJ's Voting Rights Speech "The American Promise“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNjlwwf2K9g

• President Johnson announces he will not run for re election 1968: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYqmO0PJ5Zk

• LBJ Presidential Library: http://www.lbjlibrary.org/

• LBJ presidential papers: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/lyndon_johnson.php