Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson passed more consequential domestic legislation than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, and destroyed his own presidency in Vietnam. Born in the Texas hill country in 1908 to a family that lost its money, he taught for a year at a segregated Mexican-American school in Cotulla, an experience he cited for the rest of his life. He came to Washington as a congressional aide in 1931, ran the Texas National Youth Administration, and entered the House in 1937. He won a Senate seat in 1948 by eighty-seven disputed votes, earning the nickname Landslide Lyndon. As Senate majority leader from 1955 he became the most effective legislative operator of the century, working through personal knowledge of every member — the Johnson Treatment, conducted at close range. He accepted the vice-presidency under John Kennedy in 1961 and was largely sidelined until Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963. He used the shock deliberately. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public accommodation and employment; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 destroyed the machinery of black disenfranchisement in the South. He signed both knowing, as he reportedly said, that he had lost the South for the Democrats for a generation. The Great Society added Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to schools, immigration reform ending national-origin quotas, and a war on poverty that cut the poverty rate substantially. He won in 1964 by the largest popular margin in history. He then escalated in Vietnam from about 16,000 advisers to 550,000 troops, concealing the scale from Congress and the public. After the Tet Offensive he announced on 31 March 1968 that he would not seek re-election. He died in 1973.
- Lived: 1908 CE – 1973 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: 36th Vice President of the United States (1961–63), 37th President of the United States (1963–69)
