Thirty-Sixth President 1963-1969
A farmhouse on the banks of the Pedernales River was the home of Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., a farmer and populist politician who served twelve years in the Texas legislature, and his wife, Rebekah Baines, who came from a genteel youth in the towns of Blanco and Fredericksburg. In this hard scrabble hill country of Central Texas, sixty-five miles west of Austin, the major event of 1908 to Sam Ealy and Rebekah Baines Johnson was the birth on August 27, of their first child, a boy they named Lyndon after a family friend. The boy's grandfather predicted: "I expect him to be a United States senator before he is forty."
When Lyndon was five years old, the family moved to a six-room frame house in Johnson City (population two hundred).
The boy, who would become the school's most prominent alumnus, graduated from Johnson High School in 1924. "He led the normal, uneventful but enjoyable life of a popular, fun-loving teenager," his mother wrote of him. Contemporaries remembered him as one who needed to exert leadership.
The young Lyndon attended college at Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Southwest Texas State University) in San Marcos. In 1929 Johnson took a year's leave from college to earn money, accepting a teaching post in Cotulla, in South Texas. The impression made on him by his students, mostly Mexican-American and poor, stayed with him through his lifetime.
Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. . . . It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance . . . And I mean to use it. Lyndon Baines Johnson, March 15, 1965
In August, 1930, Johnson returned to college and graduated. By the fall of that year, he was teaching at Sam Houston High School in Houston. In 1931 he left teaching to become an administrative assistant to the congressman from Texas's Fourteenth District, Richard M. Kleberg.
The energetic and effective young congressional aide came to the attention of President Roosevelt, who appointed him Texas's state director of the National Youth Administration, which put Depression-era youth to work on public projects. When the congressman representing Texas's Tenth Congressional District, James Buchanan, died suddenly in 1937, Johnson threw his hat in the ring. After campaigning as a supporter of Roosevelt, the young congressman-elect celebrated his victory in a hospital bed as he recovered from an appendicitis operation.
As a congressman, Johnson's major interest was the construction of a series of dams to end the devastation of floods which periodically inundated the Austin area, and to bring electrification to the hill country. He also was instrumental in providing housing to poor constituents.
Johnson made a run for the Senate in a special election in 1941 and his personal contact with the voters, along with his serious message, appeared to overtake his opponent. But after the polls closed, enough uncounted votes were "discovered" to give the victory to his rival. It was the only defeat Johnson suffered at the polls in his political career and he later described it as the "most miserable period" in his life.
An officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Johnson was the first member of Congress to enter the armed services after Pearl Harbor. He was assigned to investigate production bottlenecks on the West Coast and witness the military problems facing U.S. forces in the Pacific. Lyndon Johnson received the Silver Star from General Douglas MacArthur and although he was proud of the award, Johnson wrote that his "brief service" made him "sensitive" about accepting the citation. He left the navy when Roosevelt ordered all members of Congress to return to their elected posts.
After the unsuccessful effort to move to the United States Senate in 1941, Johnson launched another campaign in 1948. He introduced the new phenomenon of the helicopter as a campaign instrument, using it to carry him to communities in every part of the state.
In the final days of the campaign for the Democratic nomination, Johnson held a slim lead over his opponent, former Governor Coke Stevenson. He won with a margin of eighty-seven votes, earning the soubriquet "Landslide Lyndon." The winning votes from box thirteen in a precinct in South Texas were challenged by the Stevenson forces, who claimed they were fraudulent. The dispute went to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, whose decision was favorable to Johnson.
Assigned seats on the Senate Armed Forces and Foreign Relations Committees, the new senator began an association with Army Chief of Staff General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1952 the Democrats picked Johnson as their Senate Minority Leader, although he had served only four years in that body, and at forty-four, he was the youngest Democratic leader in party history.
The ranch owned by Lyndon Johnson's aunt and uncle, a quarter-mile from the house where he was born, was acquired by Johnson in 1951. Christened the LBJ Ranch, it became a magnet for many of the nation's leaders through the 1950s.
When the Democrats gained control of the Senate in
1955, Johnson became majority leader.
He established a close working relationship with Republican President Dwight
Eisenhower, and rallied his party to support most of the administration's
foreign policy. Despite the slim majority, Johnson skillfully managed
legislation, becoming, in the judgment of many, the most effective leader in
Senate history. His legendary style of leadership was a combination of personal
persuasion, intimate knowledge of fellow senators, mastery of detail, and an
impeccable sense of timing.
One memorable alliance forged in the Senate was between the pragmatic Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, leader of the liberal forces.
The tension, strain, and toil of the job caught up with the Majority Leader, who suffered a major heart attack in 1955. His forty-seventh birthday found him recuperating at the ranch with his family.
In 1957 Majority Leader Johnson steered through the Senate a civil rights bill. It was a compromise measure, more important as a symbol than for substance. His skill at accommodating both factions was respected by liberals and conservatives alike. Johnson's record on civil rights to this point had been mixed. Although personally opposed to segregation as a hindrance to Southern progress, and with a history of working to improve the lives of Texas blacks since his National Youth Administration days, as a senator he nonetheless had generally voted with the Southern bloc on racial issues. He now was closely identified with the civil rights bill, however, and that transformed him from a regional into a national figure,
Losing the nomination for president to Senator John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic convention, Johnson was invited by Kennedy to become his running mate. Although most of Johnson's advisers and associates opposed the idea, he accepted and was elected as Kennedy's vice president.
On January 28, 1961, Kennedy assigned the vice
president responsibilities in space and civil rights. Johnson chaired the
National Aeronautics and Space Council, and welcomed Astronaut John H. Glenn,
Jr., in a parade in New York City on his triumphant return from orbiting earth.
On the one hundredth anniversary of the battle at Gettysburg, Vice President
Johnson called for racial equality to become reality at last. Reaffirming his
own commitment to civil rights, Johnson went further than any other national
political leader in seeking a redress of racial wrongs.
Vice President Johnson took on the role of Good Will Ambassador with trips to thirty-four countries as a representative of the administration.
With Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson became president of the United States. Immediately he set out to reassure the people that their government was not crippled, despite the tragedy and trauma of the assassination—and to mold the public's grief into action to improve American society.
Initiatives of the Johnson administration moved the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. closer toward a normalization of relations than at any time since the end of World War II. Other foreign policy measures included programs to encourage Third World countries to form common markets and regional partnerships; the first effort to build bridges to the nations of Eastern Europe; a change in policy toward India that staved off a famine that threatened millions; preservation of the NATO alliance at a critical time; and stabilization of the international monetary system.
The "Hot Line" was a pair of teletype machines, one in Washington, the other in Moscow, that was designed to transmit messages between the White House and the Kremlin in an emergency. It was used for the first time in the Six-Day War between Israel and its neighboring Arab states in 1967. Johnson and Soviet leader Aleksei Kosygin used the hot line initially to exchange assurances that each would exert his influence to try to end the fighting.
But in the public's mind, and increasingly to the frustrated president, all were overshadowed by the dominant struggle of the day.
Vietnam is about two-thirds of what we talk about these
days.
Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary
Lyndon Johnson lived for four years and two days after he left the White House. They were the "milk and honey years," Lady Bird called them. He became a full-time rancher, wrote the memoirs of his presidency, and watched over the construction of this Library. In every phase of its activities he left his signature, written large.
Click on the Photo of the President Below to go to his page.
