Lyndon B. Johnson

President of the United States (1963–1969)

• Born: August 27, 1908
• Birthplace: Near Stonewall, Gillespie County, Texas
• Died: January 22, 1973
• Place of death: Near Stonewall, en route to San Antonio, Texas

An astute, skilled, and compassionate professional politician, Johnson advanced the cause of civil rights and expanded the government’s role in social welfare through his Great Society programs.

Early Life

Lyndon B. Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was the first of five children of Rebekah Baines and Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. His mother, a graduate of Baylor University, taught school briefly before her marriage to Sam Johnson, a Gillespie County tenant farmer, real-estate agent, and politician. A frontier Populist, Sam Johnson demonstrated political courage as a member of the Texas legislature. During World War I, when anti-German sentiment ran to extremes, he rose to oppose a bill aimed at German Americans. Later, he joined forces with Governor James Ferguson to oppose the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. A further claim to remembrance lies in the fact that he introduced in the legislature the bill that saved the Alamo from demolition. Johnson’s gregarious and extroverted father represented a contrast to his sensitive and introspective mother.

Johnson began his education at age four in a country school near his home along the Pedernales River in the Texas hill country. Later, he attended a school in the small community of Albert and then transferred to high school in nearby Johnson City, where his parents had moved. He served as president of his six-member graduating class of 1924. After high school, Johnson, then fifteen years old, had not decided on a career for himself. He left with a group of friends to travel to California, where for two years he worked at odd jobs. Returning home, he worked as a laborer before deciding to enroll in college, as his mother had desired. She selected Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, about sixty miles from his home. Johnson worked throughout his entire college career, for a time as the college president’s assistant. He left college for one year to teach school at Cotulla in the South Texas brush country, where he encountered for the first time the struggles and deprivations of the Hispanic Texans whom he taught. Despite his year of teaching, he completed his B.S. in history (1930) in three and a half years. The following year, he taught secondary public speaking and debate at Sam Houston High School in Houston, where his first-year debate team went to the state finals. His career as a teacher ended abruptly when Richard M. Kleberg of the King Ranch family won an off-year congressional election in 1931 and selected Johnson as his secretary.

In Kleberg’s Washington office, Johnson became, in effect, the manager. He mastered the operations of federal institutions and bureaucracies, took care of Kleberg’s constituents, made as many influential contacts as he could, and found federal jobs for Texas friends and associates. A workaholic for whom the sixteen- or eighteen-hour day was normal, he set the pattern of diligence, commitment, and loyalty that he would later expect from his own staff. After the 1932 presidential election brought in the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Johnson worked on behalf of the new programs and often influenced a reluctant Kleberg to support them. While a member of Kleberg’s staff, he established several important working relationships with experienced political leaders who served him well later, the most significant being a fellow Texan, Sam Rayburn, later to become a powerful Speaker of the House of Representatives.

More important, following a whirlwind courtship, he married Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor on November 17, 1934. The daughter of a businessman and landowner from Karnack, Texas, Lady Bird Johnson became a valued adviser, supporter, and counselor, as well as a gracious host and often his most effective personal representative.

After leaving Kleberg’s staff in 1935, Johnson was selected by Roosevelt to head the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal organization designed to help young people remain in school during the Depression, largely through providing public works jobs in summers. In this office, Johnson came to understand the power of government programs to help needy people, including minorities. Continuing his torrid pace of work, he gained national recognition as an effective leader.

Life’s Work

By the time Johnson enrolled in college, he was reasonably sure that his life’s work lay in politics, though he was unsure as to how it would develop. His career in political office lasted thirty-two years and included every elective office within the federal government. It began with a congressional election in 1937, to fill an unexpired term in the Tenth District of Texas, which included the state capital of Austin and Johnson’s home region. He ran on a platform of all-out support for Roosevelt. A tireless campaigner but not always an inspiring speaker, Johnson often included in his campaign catchy or novel elements that his opponents found corny. In 1937, his slogan, “Franklin D. and Lyndon B.,” succeeded in identifying him with the popular president.

As a congressman, Johnson formed a close working relationship with Roosevelt, supporting the president’s programs while looking out for his own district and the economic interests of Texas. More quickly than many others in Congress, he realized that the nation was on a course toward war and strongly supported the president’s rearmament efforts. He took time out in 1941 to run for the Senate against Texas Governor W. Lee O’Daniel, losing the race by a narrow margin. During World War II, he served briefly in the Navy before Roosevelt summoned all congressmen in military service back to Washington.

Following the death of Roosevelt in 1945, Johnson realized that world conditions had changed considerably since the early days of the New Deal. Employment levels were high, and a victorious nation was prosperous once again. Perceiving the major challenge confronting the United States to be communist expansionism, he supported President Harry S. Truman’s efforts to rebuild the armed forces. Formerly a strong supporter of labor, Johnson cast his vote in favor of the restrictive Taft-Hartley Act.

When the opportunity came for another Senate race in 1948, Johnson ran against Governor Coke Stevenson, campaigning throughout the state in a helicopter, then a novel mode of transportation. With the support of the National Democratic Party, he won the primary by a narrow margin, and in the one-party state that Texas then was, this was tantamount to victory.

He selected as his Senate mentor Richard Russell, the Democrat from Georgia, whose guidance helped Johnson to advance quickly to positions of power and prominence. Senate Democrats chose him as party whip in 1951, minority leader in 1953, and majority leader in 1955. Through his total commitment to success, his boundless energy, his own abilities as an organizer and leader, and his grasp of Senate operations and traditions, he became perhaps the strongest senatorial leader in American history. As a leader, his primary watchwords were pragmatism, compromise, reason, bargaining, and consensus. During deliberations, he preferred face-to-face discussion and debate, including bargaining, for in this mode he usually held the advantage. Almost six and a half feet tall, long limbed, with a broad forehead, large nose and ears, and prominent cheekbones, Johnson commanded a formidable presence. A complex man of many moods, known for homely language and abundant anecdotes, he was highly persuasive.

As Senate leader, Johnson forged the consensus that enabled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first legislation of its kind in eighty-seven years. In foreign policy, he persuaded Democrats in the Senate to adopt a bipartisan approach in support of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He believed that the opposition party should operate in a constructive manner, especially in foreign affairs.

In 1960, he sought his party’s nomination for the presidency but lost in the primaries and at the convention to Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy chose the powerful Johnson as his running mate, hoping to carry the South, which had defected almost wholesale to Eisenhower in the two previous presidential elections. Despite his record on civil rights, Johnson had respect and strong support in the South and succeeded in swinging enough votes to win.

As vice president, Johnson undertook important missions and responsibilities. He represented the president in travels abroad, oversaw the high-priority national space program, and pressed hard, with reasonable success, for equal opportunity employment. He gave speeches on foreign policy, indicating that he understood that many conflicts are regional or local, not the result of the East-West confrontation. Yet where Southeast Asia was concerned, he clearly perceived the conflict in the context of the larger ideological struggle. He accepted the view, a legacy of the Eisenhower years when John Foster Dulles as secretary of state shaped American policy, that the fall of one Southeast Asian nation would precipitate the fall of all the others the domino theory.

Following the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Johnson became the thirty-sixth president and led the shocked nation along the course charted by his predecessor. Perhaps no other vice president was better prepared to assume the powers of the presidency. With a long career of public service behind him and with his energy undiminished, he undertook enormous efforts on both domestic and foreign fronts. The overwhelming support he received in the 1964 national election against the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater gave him a mandate to proceed with his own programs. He declared war on poverty and vowed to end it. He brought forward important legislation in almost every area on the domestic front, a cluster of programs together known as the Great Society. In health care, the environment, housing, inner cities, education at all levels, and, above all, civil rights, he proposed new and important legislation. The nation had not experienced anything like the amount of new domestic legislation since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term.

In foreign policy, he continued to regard the East-West conflict as paramount. He met with Soviet premier Aleksei Nicolayevich Kosygin to explore avenues of agreement. Yet the main foreign policy preoccupation remained the war in Vietnam. In an effort to secure a non-Communist South Vietnam, Johnson increased the level of American commitment to half a million troops. Casualties mounted, little progress was discernible, the war became increasingly unpopular at home, and the president felt obliged to seek a negotiated peace that did not come until long after his term had ended.

Having decided not to seek a second full term, Johnson left the White House in January, 1969, to return to his Texas ranch in retirement. He died there, within a mile of his birthplace, on January 22, 1973.

Significance

When Johnson left office, he was deeply unpopular with both conservatives and liberals. Historians have included him among the strongest of American presidents since then, however, despite his failure in Vietnam, which has become more understandable in the larger context of American post–World War II foreign policy. In domestic affairs, it will be apparent that his influence has endured. His Great Society was in essence a continuation of Roosevelt’s New Deal. It sprang from Johnson’s deepest sympathies and concerns for the underprivileged, a reflection of his Populist roots.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured fundamental rights to millions previously denied them. Johnson championed federal support for education, from the preschool Head Start program, to job training programs and federal programs for higher education. Medicare and increased Social Security benefits brought greater financial security to older Americans. Medicaid and increased welfare appropriations improved the lot of those in need. Although some Great Society programs had limited or mixed results, housing and urban projects among them, the Great Society effectively extended the benefits of an affluent society to a larger number of people.

Bibliography

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“Lyndon B. Johnson: Biography.” LBJ Presidential Library, www.lbjlibrary.org/life-and-legacy/the-man-himself/biography. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023

Lerner, Mitchell B. “‘Almost a Populist’: Texas, the South, and the Rise of Lyndon Baines Johnson.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 3 (2014): 236. Project MUSE. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Miller, Merle. Lyndon: An Oral Biography. New York: Putnam’s, 1980. Print.

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