Lyndon B. Johnson: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · Cotulla

A year teaching children with no shoes

1908 – 1937 · Texas Hill Country · Cotulla · San Marcos

Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908 in the Texas Hill Country, into a family that had been comfortable and became poor when his father's speculation failed. Humiliation over money is a constant in accounts of his childhood and he never stopped referring to it.

He worked his way through Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and in 1928 took a year out to teach at the Welhausen School in Cotulla, a segregated school for Mexican-American children in one of the poorest counties in the state. The children came without breakfast. He organised sports, debating and a parents' association, spent his own salary on equipment, and drove the staff hard.

He brought Cotulla up for the rest of his life, and he did it most consequentially in March 1965, in the speech to Congress on the Voting Rights Act, where he said he never expected to have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students — and that he meant to use it.

Cynics have always said the story was deployed. It was deployed, repeatedly and effectively, and it was also true, and both things are worth holding at once about Johnson. He was an operator who used everything he had, including the parts of himself that were genuine.

He went to Washington as a congressional aide, and was elected to the House in 1937 as a Roosevelt Democrat.

Why this matters

Cotulla is the only part of Johnson's early life he returned to constantly, and he used it to justify the most important speech he ever gave.

A year with hungry children in Cotulla. What would you ask him?

Ask Johnson

• “What do you remember about the children at Welhausen School?”
• “How much did your family's fall into poverty shape you?”
• “Did you use Cotulla as a story, or did it use you?”
• “What did the New Deal look like from Texas?”
• “Why go into politics rather than stay in teaching?”

Chapter 2 · Master of the Senate

Eighty-seven votes, and then the whole chamber

1948 – 1960 · Texas · Washington

Johnson reached the Senate in 1948 by eighty-seven votes, after a ballot box in Jim Wells County produced two hundred late votes in alphabetical order, almost all for him. The result was litigated to the Supreme Court and stood. He was known afterwards as Landslide Lyndon, and he used the nickname himself.

In the Senate he was extraordinary. He became Minority Leader after four years and Majority Leader after six — faster than anybody before or since — and he ran the chamber by knowing what every member wanted, feared and owed. The physical technique was famous: he would stand very close, take a lapel, and talk without pause until the other man agreed. Photographers called it the Treatment.

He also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction, by removing almost everything from it that would have had an effect. Critics said it was a hollow bill. Johnson's position was that the first one is the hardest and that after it there is a precedent, and the record after 1964 suggests he was right, though nobody could have known it then.

He ran for the presidency in 1960 and lost the nomination to John Kennedy, who then offered him the vice-presidency. He took it, to the astonishment of his staff, and spent three years with almost nothing to do in an administration whose staff regarded him as a provincial.

Why this matters

The 1957 Act was gutted deliberately, and the argument about whether that was cowardice or strategy is settled by what happened in 1964.

The Treatment, and a hollow bill passed on purpose. What would you ask him?

Ask Johnson

• “What actually happened in Jim Wells County in 1948?”
• “How did you know what every senator wanted?”
• “Why pass a civil rights bill with nothing in it?”
• “Why accept the vice-presidency after losing the nomination?”
• “What was it like being ignored for three years?”

Chapter 3 · Eighteen Months

The most productive legislative period since Roosevelt

1963 – 1965 · Washington · Selma

Johnson became president on 22 November 1963. Within five days he told Congress that no memorial to Kennedy could be more eloquent than passing the civil rights bill, and he then spent seven months getting it through a Senate that had killed every such bill for eighty years, breaking a filibuster of fifty-seven working days.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in public accommodation and employment on grounds of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. He signed it in July.

He won the 1964 election by the largest popular margin in American history, and used the majority. In eighteen months he passed Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to schools, the War on Poverty programmes, the immigration reform that ended the national-origins quota system, and — after the violence at Selma in March 1965 — the Voting Rights Act, which suspended literacy tests and put federal registrars into counties with a record of exclusion. Black registration in Mississippi rose from around six per cent to over sixty within four years.

He understood exactly what it cost his party. He is reported to have told an aide on the night he signed the 1964 Act that the Democrats had lost the South for a generation, and the reports of the wording differ. The prediction was right, and the realignment it describes has lasted longer than a generation.

Why this matters

The Voting Rights Act changed the electorate of the South within four years, and it is the clearest case in the period of legislation doing what protest could not.

Eighteen months that changed American law. What would you ask him?

Ask Johnson

• “How did you break a fifty-seven-day filibuster?”
• “Did Selma make the Voting Rights Act possible, or your majority?”
• “Did you really believe you had lost the South for a generation?”
• “Which Great Society programme mattered most?”
• “Why did you nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court?”

Chapter 4 · Vietnam

A war he did not want and would not leave

1964 – 1968 · Washington · Vietnam

In August 1964, after reported attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin — the second of which is now generally accepted not to have happened — Johnson obtained a congressional resolution authorising him to take all necessary measures. Two members of Congress voted against it. It served as the legal basis for the war for the next eight years.

American troop numbers rose from around 16,000 advisers at the end of 1963 to over half a million by 1968. The bombing campaign against North Vietnam ran for three and a half years. Casualties on all sides, and above all Vietnamese civilian casualties, ran into the millions across the war as a whole.

The recordings of his telephone calls, released decades later, show him privately doubtful from the beginning: he did not believe the war could be won at acceptable cost, and he did not believe he could withdraw. The reasoning he gave was that a president who lost Vietnam would lose the Great Society too — that the domestic programme depended on not being called weak.

The Tet Offensive in January 1968 was a military failure for the North and a political catastrophe for Johnson, because it demonstrated that the optimistic reporting had been false. On 31 March 1968 he announced a partial bombing halt and then, at the end of the broadcast, that he would not seek re-election.

He left office in January 1969 and died in January 1973, five days before the Paris peace accords were signed.

Why this matters

Johnson's own recordings show a president who expected the war to fail and continued it to protect his domestic programme, which is the tragedy in its exact form.

A war he doubted from the start. What would you ask him?

Ask Johnson

• “What actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin?”
• “Why continue a war you privately expected to fail?”
• “Did Vietnam have to cost you the Great Society?”
• “What did Tet change, given that it was a military defeat for the North?”
• “Why announce your withdrawal at the end of a speech about bombing?”

Chapter 5 · Two Records, One Man

The problem Johnson leaves for anybody judging him

1969 – now · The LBJ Ranch · Austin

Johnson retired to his ranch in Texas, grew his hair long, started smoking again after a heart attack had made him stop, and was deeply depressed. He gave interviews in which he returned repeatedly to the war. He died in 1973 at sixty-four.

His reputation has moved twice. In the 1970s he was the president of Vietnam and little else, and the domestic record was buried under it. From the 1990s, as the tapes and papers opened and as Robert Caro's biographical volumes appeared, the scale of the legislative achievement became harder to ignore: Medicare, Medicaid, federal education funding, the immigration reform, and the two civil rights Acts that ended legal segregation and restored the black vote in the South.

The problem he presents is not that the good and the bad balance. It is that they are not separable. The same qualities produced both — the refusal to be beaten, the conviction that he could work anybody, the terror of being thought weak. What broke the filibuster in 1964 is what would not leave Vietnam in 1967.

He knew it. In one of the interviews he described the war as a woman he did not love who had taken him away from the thing he did, which is as close to a verdict on himself as he came.

Why this matters

Johnson is the standing case against grading a leader by adding achievements and subtracting failures, because in his case they came from the same source.

Two records that cannot be separated. What would you ask him?

Ask Johnson

• “Would you trade the Civil Rights Act for having stayed out of Vietnam?”
• “What did you get wrong about your own abilities?”
• “Why release the telephone tapes at all?”
• “Was the Great Society finished, or abandoned?”
• “What should a president do when they think a war cannot be won?”

What Johnson changed

Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, created Medicare and Medicaid, ended the national-origins immigration quotas and funded American schools federally for the first time — a domestic record matched only by Roosevelt's. He also escalated the Vietnam War while privately doubting it could be won, and it ended his presidency, split his party and killed a great many people. Neither half of that record is a footnote to the other.

A debate that continues

Did Johnson escalate in Vietnam out of Cold War conviction, or to protect the Great Society from the charge of weakness? His own recordings support the second reading and historians still weigh how far to take it.

Keep exploring — ask Johnson

• “Can a leader's greatest strength be the same thing as their worst failure?”
• “Should a president continue a war they believe cannot be won?”
• “Did legislation or protest do more for American civil rights?”

Related lives

• Thurgood Marshall — Twenty-Nine Wins From Thirty-Two Arguments
• Fannie Lou Hamer — Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired
• Phyllis Schlafly — She Beat An Amendment That Had Already Passed
• Harry S. Truman — Eighty-Two Days, And Nobody Told Him Anything

Related themes

The Great Society · Civil rights legislation · The Vietnam War