1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20502, United States
Photo portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office, leaning on a chair.
School period
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1924
In 1924 Lyndon studied at Johnson City High School.
College/University
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
601 University Dr, San Marcos, TX 78666, United States
From 1926 to 1930 Lyndon studied at Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University).
Career
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1964
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20502, United States
Meeting with civil rights leaders Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (left), Whitney Young, and James Farmer in the Oval Office.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1964
Illinois, United States
President Lyndon Johnson (left), alongside Illinois AFL-CIO President Reuben Soderstrom (center) and Vice President Stanley Johnson (right), speaks to the delegates of the Illinois AFL-CIO convention.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1964
United States
President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson pictured standing on the trunk of a Lincoln car, holding a microphone to address supporters and crowds on the presidential election campaign trail in the United States.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
LBJ is sworn in on Air Force One by Judge Sarah Hughes as Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Kennedy look on
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
President Johnson signs the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 as Sen. Edward Kennedy, Sen. Robert Kennedy, and others look on.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
Awarding a medal to a US soldier during a visit to Vietnam in 1966
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
Official White House portrait
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1962
President John F. Kennedy arrives at Cape Canaveral met by Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Col. John Glenn and family.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1962
Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States
Lanked by saluting soldiers, American President John F. Kennedy (right) walks with astronaut John Glenn (left) and Vice President (and later President) Lyndon Baines Johnson (center) shortly after his arrival on Air Force One.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1963
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20502, United States
President of the United States, Lyndon B Johnson sits at his desk in the Oval Office, posing for one of his first official photographs following the death of his predecessor John F Kennedy.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1961
Opening Day of baseball season. President Kennedy throws out the first ball at Griffith Stadium, the home field of the Washington Senators, as LBJ and Hubert Humphrey look on.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
Johnson as U.S. Senator from Texas.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1941
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor James Allred of Texas, and Johnson. Johnson later used an edited version of this photo, with Allred airbrushed out, in his 1941 senatorial campaign.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1941
Rally opening Lyndon B. Johnson's U.S. Senate campaign.
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1942
LCDR Johnson
Gallery of Lyndon Johnson
1948
Senate Campaign.
Achievements
Lyndon monument
Membership
Awards
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Lyndon received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor James Allred of Texas, and Johnson. Johnson later used an edited version of this photo, with Allred airbrushed out, in his 1941 senatorial campaign.
Opening Day of baseball season. President Kennedy throws out the first ball at Griffith Stadium, the home field of the Washington Senators, as LBJ and Hubert Humphrey look on.
Lanked by saluting soldiers, American President John F. Kennedy (right) walks with astronaut John Glenn (left) and Vice President (and later President) Lyndon Baines Johnson (center) shortly after his arrival on Air Force One.
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20502, United States
President of the United States, Lyndon B Johnson sits at his desk in the Oval Office, posing for one of his first official photographs following the death of his predecessor John F Kennedy.
President Lyndon Johnson (left), alongside Illinois AFL-CIO President Reuben Soderstrom (center) and Vice President Stanley Johnson (right), speaks to the delegates of the Illinois AFL-CIO convention.
President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson pictured waving to supporters and crowds of spectators from the door of a limousine during the presidential election campaign trail of the United States.
President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson pictured standing on the trunk of a Lincoln car, holding a microphone to address supporters and crowds on the presidential election campaign trail in the United States.
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20502, United States
President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law in a White House ceremony. The tallest man directly behind Johnson is Maine Senator Edmund Muskie.
From December 19 through 24, LBJ made his "Round-the-World Trip" to Australia, Pakistan, and Italy. He visited U.S. forces in South Vietnam and Thailand en route. He is pictured here with President Ayub Khan in Karachi, Pakistan.
Astronaut Alan Shepard and wife riding in a celebratory motorcade with Vice President Lyndon Johnson (seated, center, back seat) after his successful sub-orbital space flight aboard Freedom 7.
As the thirty-sixth president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson created new programs in health, education, human rights, and conservation and attacked the crushing 20th-century problems of urban blight and poverty with what he called the "War on Poverty."
Background
Ethnicity:
Johnson had English, German, and Ulster Scots ancestry.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, near Stonewall, Texas, in a small farmhouse on the Pedernales River. He was the oldest of five children born to Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines. Johnson had one brother, Sam Houston Johnson, and three sisters; Rebekah, Josefa, and Lucia.
Education
He graduated from Johnson City High School in 1924 at the age of 15.
He did a series of odd jobs for three years after his high school graduation and finally enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos. He started working as a teacher while pursuing his studies. During this time, the acute poverty of some of his students deeply impacted his mind. He graduated from college in 1930.
In 1935 he became Texas director of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency, and began building a campaign organization for his political career. Meanwhile, Johnson's wife bought an Austin radio station and gradually accumulated a large fortune that made the family financially secure.
Johnson was elected to Congress in a special election in 1937 as a New Deal Democrat, and remained in the House until 1949. In 1941 he was defeated in a special election for the U.S. Senate. He was the first member of Congress to go into active duty during World War II, winning a Silver Star for gallantry in action when his plane was fired upon in the South Pacific.
In July 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all legislators in active service to report back to Congress, and Johnson returned to the House.
In 1948, after winning a runoff Democratic senatorial primary against Texas governor Coke Stevenson by only 87 votes out of a million cast, Johnson won the general election against his Republican opponent by a 2-to-1 margin. Because of the likelihood that some of his votes in the primary were obtained fraudulently, he became known to his enemies as “landslide Lyndon.”
Johnson quickly moved up the ladder in the Senate. He became the Democratic party whip in 1951, chaired the Preparedness Committee, which investigated government contracts during the Korean War, was elected minority leader in 1953, and ran the Senate as majority leader after the 1954 election returned it to Democratic control. He instituted the Johnson Rule, giving every Democratic senator, no matter how junior, at least one good committee assignment.
As majority leader, Johnson established a remarkable record of legislation, including passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1960. In doing so, Johnson became identified as a Westerner rather than a Southerner in order to advance his Presidential ambitions—no Southern officeholder had been elected President for more than a century.
In 1960 Johnson ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination but lost to Senator John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy offered Johnson the Vice Presidency, he accepted, to the astonishment of many of Kennedy's aides. Johnson helped Kennedy win several Southern and Western states that were decisive in the Democratic victory. As Vice President, Johnson headed the space council, which decided to put the headquarters for manned space flight in Houston, Texas. He also chaired the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and the Peace Corps Advisory Council.
On November 22, 1963, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Johnson had been in the President's motorcade, and he took the oath of office on Air Force One, which flew the new President, along with Jacqueline Kennedy and her slain husband, back to Washington. “Let us continue,” he told the nation, announcing that he would keep Kennedy's cabinet and top aides.
Johnson continued with Kennedy's domestic programs, expanding them and labeling them the Great Society. He won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended racial discrimination in public accommodations, and passage of a set of programs to reduce poverty, which led to the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964.
In the summer of 1964, Johnson was nominated by the Democrats by acclamation. He crushed his Republican opponent, conservative Barry Goldwater, winning more than 61 percent of the popular vote. In the next two years Congress passed a federal aid to education act, health care reimbursement programs for the aged and the poor, new urban programs (including the Department of Urban Affairs), a tax cut that sparked economic growth, and a foreign trade bill that spurred U.S. exports. In 1967 Congress approved a new Department of Transportation.
Perhaps the most significant law Johnson won from Congress was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a measure to protect the voting rights of blacks in the South; it tripled the number of black registered voters within three years, and within a decade changed the Democratic party from a party of white conservative segregationists into a biracial coalition of moderates.
Johnson's domestic achievements were soon obscured by foreign affairs, however. The August, 1964, incident leading Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf resolution gave Johnson the authority to take any action necessary to protect American troops in Vietnam. Convinced that South Vietnam was about to fall to Communist forces, Johnson began (Feb., 1965) the bombing of North Vietnam. Within three years he increased American forces in South Vietnam from 20,000 to over 500,000 (see Vietnam War). Johnson's actions eventually aroused widespread opposition in Congress and among the public, and a vigorous antiwar movement developed.
U.S. troops in Vietnam increased to 100,000 by the fall, and more than half a million by the end of 1966.
Antiwar sentiment in the United States led to demonstrations against the war on college campuses and in Washington. With no end to the war in sight and American casualties growing rapidly, Johnson's popularity slid. By late 1966 his ability to get Congress to pass his programs had diminished.
Johnson made progress in arms control talks with the Soviet Union, though in January 1967 he signed the Outer Space Treaty with Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin, which banned placement of nuclear weapons in earth orbit, on the moon or other planets, or in deep space. In 1968 the United States became a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which prohibited the transfer of nuclear weapons to other nations and prohibited assistance to nonnuclear nations in the making or acquisition of nuclear arms.
In January 1968 the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive in Saigon and other cities. Americans watched television images of the American embassy under siege, and public opposition to the war increased. In March Johnson barely defeated an antiwar Democratic challenger, Eugene McCarthy, in the New Hampshire primary. Knowing that with the Democrats so divided his renomination would be worthless, Johnson withdrew from the race on March 31. He also announced a reduction in the bombings of North Vietnam in an attempt to seek peace. But the war continued with no letup on the ground, and American casualties passed the 40,000 mark. Johnson helped his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, secure the Democratic nomination, but his war policies hurt Humphrey, who lost the election to Richard Nixon.
In giving up his office after one elected term, Johnson followed the pattern set by other Vice Presidents who took office after the death of an incumbent. Although Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman were subsequently elected in their own right, none of them ran immediately for a second elected term.
In January 1969, an exhausted and emotionally spent Johnson retired to his ranch near Johnson City, Texas. He worked on his memoirs and helped organize his Presidential library at the University of Texas in Austin.
He died of a heart attack on his beloved ranch, just one day before the Paris Peace Accord, which ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, was concluded.
President Johnson was baptized in 1923, in the Pedernales River at a site approximately seven miles downstream from the LBJ Ranch, while attending a summertime revival meeting service of the First Christian Church of Johnson City. Johnson had been exposed to the preaching and teaching of his mother's Baptist congregation; however, he independently decided that the beliefs of the Disciples were in accord with his own views, and, on that basis, he became, and remained, a member of the Disciples of Christ. The President considered the First Christian Church in Johnson City as his "home church." In Washington, D.C., he regarded the National City Christian Church as his "home church," and he frequently worshipped there.
President Johnson would frequently attend services at churches of different denominations. He would accompany Mrs. Johnson who is Episcopalian, often worshiping at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. He would also attend the Mass at Catholic churches with his daughter Luci. While often going to his own church in Texas, the First Christian Church, he also attended Trinity Lutheran Church and Saint Francis Xavier Church, both in Stonewall, Texas.
President Johnson frequently quoted the Bible to illustrate points that he wanted to make. His favorite quotation was from Isaiah 1:18, "Come now, and let us reason together."
Politics
Lyndon Johnson was a member of the Democratic Party.
He created new programs in health, education, human rights, and conservation and attacked the crushing 20th-century problems of urban blight and poverty with what he called the "War on Poverty."
Historians argue that Johnson's presidency marked the peak of modern liberalism in the United States after the New Deal era.
Views
Quotations:
"I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years."
"Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact."
"Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose."
Personality
By all accounts Johnson was a complex personality, fiercely competitive, “always in a rush,” said his wife, a man who relished power, a master manipulator ho harnessed his finely tuned political instincts to achieve lofty goals. Journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak said of him during his term, “He can be as gentle and solicitous as a nurse, but as ruthless and deceptive as a riverboat gambler.” The president’s brother Sam Houston Johnson and others described him as secretive ans stubborn. First Lady Lady Bird Johnson regrets that the public did not get to see the soft side of the president. “He was a warm and mellow man in so many ways, gentle, extremely loving,” she said in an interview for U.S News and World Report (December 24, 1973). “But he was not eager to get up in front of thousands or millions of people and act that way. He was that way with his neighbors, his friends and in his home.”
Physical Characteristics:
Johnson stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 210 pounds on becoming president. He had brown eyes and black hair, mixed with gray, which he combed straight back. His long, lined face was dominated by a rather large nose, a strong cleft chin, and oversized protruding ears. He wore reading glasses. In 1955 he suffered a severe heart attack but after six months’ convalescence recovered to resume a full work schedule. He suffered periodically from kidney stones. While president he underwent surgery to repair a scar that had not healed properly from a previous gall bladder operation and had a polyp removed from his throat. Otherwise his health generally was sound. Johnson dressed fashionably but preferred western clothing while on the ranch in Texas.
Quotes from others about the person
"Johnson was a dirty fighter. Any campaign with him in it would involve a lot of innuendo and lies. Johnson was a wheeler-dealer. Neither he nor anyone else could change that. That's what he was. And Johnson was a treacherous boot. He'd slap you on the back today and stab you in the back tomorrow. Moreover, LBJ was dull. He was a lousy public speaker. The man didn't believe half of what he said. He was a hypocrite, and it came through in the hollowness of his speech. LBJ made me sick."
Barry M. Goldwater, Goldwater (1988), co-written with Jack Casserly, p. 151.
"Like Dr. King, like Abraham Lincoln, like countless citizens who have driven this country inexorably forward, President Johnson knew that ours in the end is a story of optimism, a story of achievement and constant striving that is unique upon this Earth. He knew because he had lived that story. He believed that together we can build an America that is more fair, more equal, and more free than the one we inherited. He believed we make our own destiny. And in part because of him, we must believe it as well."
Barack Obama, in remarks by the President at LBJ Presidential Library Civil Rights Summit at Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas (10 April 2014).
"I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President. For I know he lives and thinks and works to make sure that for all America and indeed, the growing body of the free world, the morning shall always come."
Jack Valenti, special assistant to the president, address before the Advertising Federation of America convention, Boston, Massachusetts (June 28, 1965), Congressional Record (July 7, 1965), vol. 111, Appendix, p. A3583.
Interests
Fishing, hunting, riding
Connections
He married Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor in November 1934. The couple had two daughters. His wife was a smart woman and supported him well throughout his political career.