Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson: The Legislative Colossus Undone by a War

After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the President turned to his aide Bill Moyers and said, "I think we may have lost the South for your lifetime — and mine." He was right, and he signed it anyway. That single sentence contains the whole of Lyndon Johnson: the political arithmetic done instantly and coldly, the willingness to spend everything he had accumulated, and the certainty that he would pay for it. Four years later a different war would take the rest.

Hill Country, and a Classroom in Cotulla

Johnson was born on 27 August 1908 near Stonewall, Texas, the eldest of five children of Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines, and descended through his mother from the Baptist clergyman George Washington Baines. He graduated from Johnson City High School in 1924 and went to Southwest Texas State Teachers College, where he edited the school newspaper and began learning what he was actually good at. In 1928 and 1929 he taught Mexican-American children at the segregated Welhausen School in Cotulla, Texas. He referred back to that year for the rest of his life; it is the origin of a commitment to educational access he would eventually write into federal law.

The Climb: Congress, War, and 87 Votes

In 1931 he became congressional secretary to Representative Richard Kleberg, an apprenticeship in the mechanics of Washington. In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt's administration made him Texas director of the National Youth Administration. Two years later, at twenty-eight, he won a House seat representing Texas's 10th district, holding it until 1949 and using it to pull federal money into the Hill Country — rural electrification, the Mansfield Dam. He served in the Naval Reserve during the Second World War and received the Silver Star from General Douglas MacArthur in June 1942, an award questioned ever since, because accounts differ on whether his B-26 saw combat over New Guinea.

His 1948 Senate race is American political folklore. He won by 87 votes out of nearly 988,000 cast, a margin delivered in part by disputed ballots from Box 13 in Jim Wells County, and acquired the sardonic nickname Landslide Lyndon. The result was tainted. The seat was real.

Master of the Senate

Johnson became Majority Whip in 1951 and Majority Leader in 1954, and historians have generally concluded that he was the most effective Senate majority leader in the institution's history. His instrument was intelligence in both senses: he knew every senator's position, ambition, weakness and debt, and applied it in person. The method acquired a name, the Treatment, and a literature. Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, and the hint of threat — sometimes within a single conversation, delivered at a distance of inches.

In 1960 John F. Kennedy took him onto the ticket to hold the South. As Vice President he was institutionally marginalized, though he chaired the National Aeronautics and Space Council and championed the Apollo programme.

Air Force One

On 22 November 1963 Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One, administered by Judge Sarah T. Hughes — the only president in American history sworn in by a woman. The Miller Center's judgment is that he advanced the Kennedy legacy and obtained far more out of Congress than Kennedy would likely have got. In November 1964 he crushed Barry Goldwater with 61.05 percent of the popular vote, the highest share ever recorded, taking forty-four states and arriving in his own right with majorities of 68 to 32 in the Senate and 295 to 140 in the House.

The Great Society

What he did with that mandate has few parallels. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, colour, national origin, religion or sex. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked disenfranchisement at its machinery. The Fair Housing Act followed in 1968. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare and Medicaid, which now cover tens of millions of Americans and which the Miller Center notes still command bipartisan support. His 1964 State of the Union declared an unconditional war on poverty; the poverty rate fell from 23 percent to 12 percent during his administration, with Job Corps, VISTA and Community Action Agencies as instruments. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act doubled federal education spending from four to eight billion dollars, and he added the Higher Education Act and Head Start. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 repealed the National Origins Formula and remade the demography of the country. He signed more than three hundred conservation measures, including the Wilderness Act, Clean Air Act amendments and the Highway Beautification Act.

The War That Ate the Presidency

He campaigned in 1964 promising, "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home," while preparing to do exactly that. After reported attacks on American vessels in August 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by overwhelming margins, handing him broad war powers. Operation Rolling Thunder began in February 1965; 3,500 Marines landed at Da Nang in March. Troop numbers reached 175,000 by November 1965, 275,000 in 1966, and peaked at 535,000. He also sent 20,000 Marines into the Dominican Republic to forestall what he called a communist insurgency.

The Tet Offensive in early 1968 was a military defeat for the North and a political catastrophe for Johnson. Television coverage of what the Miller Center describes as endless and seemingly pointless battles destroyed public confidence, Eugene McCarthy's strong showing in New Hampshire exposed his weakness inside his own party, and on 31 March 1968 he announced a bombing halt and his withdrawal from the race. He retired to his Texas ranch and died on 22 January 1973.

Why Lyndon Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is narrow, extreme, and genuinely rare: an ability to model the internal state of another politician — what he wants, what he fears, what he owes, what he can survive voting for — and to run that model on a hundred people simultaneously while tracking a bill through committee. It was not book intelligence and Johnson himself was insecure about that; it was social computation of an almost freakish accuracy, coupled with physical stamina and a total absence of shame. Historians' consensus that he was the most effective majority leader ever is not a figure of speech but a comparative claim, and the legislative record of 1964 and 1965 is the evidence. No other American president has moved so much structural legislation so fast.

The counter-case is not a footnote; it may be the main text. That same modelling ability failed catastrophically when the subjects were Vietnamese rather than senators, and 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese paid for the error. He lied to the electorate about his intentions in 1964 and opened a credibility gap that never closed. His Senate seat was won on ballots that were probably fraudulent. The Miller Center's own summary refuses to resolve any of it, concluding that the legacies of death, renewal and opportunity attached to his administration are ironic, confusing and uncertain, and will likely remain that way. Genius, if the word applies here, describes a tool and not a verdict.

Legacy

Johnson's presidency marks the high-water line of twentieth-century American liberalism, and simultaneously the moment that produced what historians describe as a conservative counterrevolution and a dramatic political polarization. Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act and a country reshaped by the 1965 immigration reform are all still in force. So is the argument about Vietnam. He remains the case study every ambitious politician is handed: proof of what raw legislative skill can build, and of what it cannot see.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1980
• Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award — 1965
• Affiliated with National Youth Administration and Sam Houston Math, Science, and Technology Center
• Educated at Texas State University, Georgetown University Law Center and Junction School
• Worked as politician, teacher and rancher