Lyndon B. Johnson

Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, in a farmhouse on the Pedernales River, the first of five children; his father, a state legislator, rode up and down the river announcing that his son would be governor of Texas someday. Their house in Johnson City had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. At twelve Lyndon told classmates he would one day be president. His father, a better politician than farmer, piled up debts and lost the family farm when Lyndon was a teenager; Johnson later said that at fourteen he resolved never to be the victim of a system that let cotton prices crash and ruin families like his own.

After high school he drifted — to California for odd jobs, then onto a Texas road crew, where he fell into drinking and fighting — before enrolling at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1927. Student-teaching at an impoverished Mexican American school in Cotulla, he pushed long-neglected children to take pride in their achievements. In 1931 he went to Washington as a congressional aide and was electrified by politics. In 1934 he met Claudia Alta Taylor, known as “Lady Bird,” and married her three months later.

Appointed Texas director of the New Deal’s National Youth Administration in 1935, Johnson helped young people stay in school and find work. In 1937, at twenty-eight, he won a seat in Congress as a Roosevelt ally and brought electricity to the Hill Country of his youth — the achievement he called his proudest. He lost a 1941 Senate race in which both sides were accused of fraud, then won a Senate seat in 1948 by just 87 votes in a primary marred by suspicious tallies, earning the mocking nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” In the Senate he found his true calling: majority leader from 1955, he made the post one of the most powerful in government and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first in almost a century.

As Kennedy’s running mate in 1960, he helped carry the South. On November 22, 1963, riding two cars behind Kennedy in Dallas, he became president and was sworn in aboard Air Force One that afternoon. He won passage of Kennedy’s civil rights bill and tax cut and declared a War on Poverty. After defeating Barry Goldwater in a 1964 landslide, he won Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to education, the Voting Rights Act, and a 1965 immigration law that abolished national-origin quotas — along with programs for urban renewal, environmental protection, consumer safety, and the arts and humanities.

Johnson believed the federal government could and should end poverty and racial injustice. A child of the New Deal who had seen his own family ruined by forces beyond its control, he saw government as an engine of opportunity, and in May 1964 he called for a Great Society that would end “poverty and racial injustice.” As vice president he had publicly backed Kennedy’s decision to send military advisers to South Vietnam to resist a communist insurgency.

Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam without finding a strategy for victory, withdrawal, or peace with honor; American casualties mounted and the antiwar movement grew. By 1968 his approval rating had fallen below 30 percent. His road to power had been shadowed by the disputed 1948 primary. Critics on the right saw the Great Society as government overreach, and the reaction against it helped fuel a conservative countermovement.

Johnson left office in January 1969 demoralized and discredited, and died at his Texas ranch on January 22, 1973, a few hundred feet from where he was born. His civil rights and social welfare programs kept many Americans out of poverty and secured the rights of citizenship for minorities. But Vietnam, where more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Southeast Asians died, clouded his legacy, and historians continue to debate how to weigh the two.