Lyndon Johnson - MSN Encarta

Article Outline

Introduction; Early Life; Political Career; President of the United States; The Decision to Retire

Introduction

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), 36th president of the United States (1963-1969). Johnson was the first candidate from a Southern state to be elected president of the United States for more than a century. He became president on November 22, 1963, hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Texas. In 1964 Johnson was elected to a full four-year term by the largest popular majority in modern U.S. history. His triumph represented a victory for the average voter in U.S. politics, with which Johnson, as a congressman, Senate leader, and vice president, had identified himself.

Johnson was one of the most masterful politicians in the history of the Congress of the United States. He was a champion of bipartisan and consensus politics. His positions on public issues were always in line with what he believed to be the middle ground of popular opinion. He excelled in getting things done. He was not an innovator of programs or ideas. His domestic program, which he called the Great Society, was an extension of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s. In foreign affairs, Johnson pursued the basic U.S. postwar policy of containing Communism. His belief in consensus politics and his unquestioning devotion to accepted political beliefs were both a strength and a weakness. With these attitudes he won passage of far-reaching domestic legislation, but the same beliefs occasionally trapped him in policies that were no longer relevant to the rapidly changing world. President Johnson hoped that his administration would be evaluated by the success of his Great Society program. Johnson also hoped to improve the climate of international affairs, chiefly by reaching an understanding with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). At the end of his term, however, it seemed more likely that the frustrations of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War throughout his presidency would overshadow his impressive domestic record and his somewhat less successful efforts to improve relations with the USSR.

Early Life

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Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on a farm near Stonewall, Gillespie County, Texas, on August 27, 1908. His grandfather, Samuel Ealy Johnson, Sr., born in Georgia, had been taken by his parents to Texas in 1846. He became a cattle rancher in the Pedernales River valley, in the Hill Country west of Austin, and in 1867 married Eliza Bunton. Their son, Samuel Ealy Johnson, Jr., served five terms in the Texas legislature. In 1907, while serving in the legislature, he married Rebekah Baines, the daughter of another Hill Country ranching family. They had five children, of whom Lyndon was the eldest.

The Johnson family abandoned the family farm after failing to grow cotton on it and moved to the nearby town of Johnson City in 1913. Lyndon Johnson attended the local schools and graduated from Johnson City High School, one of six seniors in the class of 1924. His father managed to support his growing family through dealings in real estate, but his chief interests were always political, and young Lyndon came naturally to his passion for politics, as well as to his conviction that government exists to help the people.

Education

Johnson’s mother had long sought to impress on him the need for a college education, but it was not until 1927 that he decided to follow her advice. With a small sum borrowed from a local bank, he went to nearby San Marcos and enrolled in Southwest Texas State Teachers College. Many of his friends were already there, and it seemed the logical place to go to prepare for a schoolteaching career.

In September 1928 Johnson interrupted his education to take his first professional job, as principal of a school for Mexican children in the town of Cotulla. In this task he was energetic, aggressive, and highly successful. The following year he returned to San Marcos to complete his college work. He was confident of his ability to teach and to administer and had a strong respect for the Mexican-American people. Johnson graduated with a degree in history in August 1930 and took a position as teacher of public speaking at Sam Houston High School, in Houston, where his uncle was chairman of the history department. As a teacher, Johnson was self-confident and virtually tireless. He drove himself hard and was intensely demanding of his students. However, he had scarcely begun his second year of teaching at Houston when he accepted a political appointment.

Johnson’s first political position was that of private secretary to the newly elected Congressman Richard M. Kleberg of Corpus Christi. Although Johnson had not taken part in Kleberg’s campaign, he was a member of a politically powerful Hill Country family and had been recommended to Kleberg by mutual friends. Johnson arrived in Washington, D.C., to witness the last months of the administration of President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) and the return to national power of the Democratic Party under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945). Johnson’s drive and energy soon brought him to prominence among the many young people in Washington during the early days of the New Deal.

Marriage

In 1934 Johnson married Claudia Alta (“Lady Bird”) Taylor, a recent graduate of the University of Texas and a member of a prosperous eastern Texas family. The couple had two daughters, Lynda Bird, in 1944, and Luci Baines, in 1947.

Johnson left the service of Congressman Kleberg in 1935 to become Texas state director of the National Youth Administration, a newly established relief organization headed by Aubrey Williams, a controversial reformer with whom Johnson established a lasting friendship. In his new position, with headquarters in Austin, Texas, Johnson soon put an elaborate program into effect. He also built up a large number of important political friendships.

III

Political Career