President Johnson

7 Key excerpts on "President Johnson"

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  America in the World

  The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

  • Mark Atwood Lawrence(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  Lyndon Johnson’s World

  FROM THE OUTSET of his presidency, Lyndon Baines Johnson made abundantly clear where his priorities lay. Behind closed doors and in the public spotlight, the new president urged passage of an array of ambitious social and economic reforms, including a major tax cut, meaningful civil rights legislation, and a raft of antipoverty measures. LBJ invoked the need to honor John F. Kennedy, who had backed all of these initiatives, but Johnson also left no doubt of his desire to go beyond what his predecessor had proposed. LBJ’s rhetoric soared as he described his sweeping vision of social change. In his State of the Union speech just six weeks into his presidency, Johnson called for nothing less than an “unconditional war on poverty in America” and vowed not just to ameliorate the problem but to “cure it.” In the realm of civil rights, he promised to “abolish not some, but all racial discrimination.”1 Thus dawned the era of the Great Society, the remarkable years of domestic innovation that saw Congress destroy Jim Crow, extend voting rights, establish Medicare and Medicaid, pump federal resources into education, revamp U.S. immigration laws, and much else. For all of these accomplishments, historians have little difficulty judging Johnson one of the most—if not the most—transformative presidents in the second half of the twentieth century.

  LBJ had no such ambitions in the realm of foreign affairs, as the 1965 State of the Union address also made clear. The president turned to the international scene in the closing sections of the speech and made headlines only with assurances that he would keep going with efforts to lower tensions with the Eastern bloc. All in all, as the New York Times editorial page put it, LBJ’s foreign policy “continues as expected, along familiar lines.”2

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  The President and His Inner Circle

  Leadership Style and the Advisory Process in Foreign Policy Making

  • Thomas Preston(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  In foreign affairs, he was heavily dependent upon his staff of foreign policy experts, most of whom he had inherited from his predecessor John Kennedy. While still supremely self-confident and willing to take on the big problems if he believed it was the right thing to do, Johnson was least prepared as president to handle a foreign policy crisis of the magnitude of Vietnam. The great tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is that by choosing a policy path blazed by his predecessors, recommended by his advisers, and dictated by the cold war logic of Containment, he soon found himself neck-deep in the quagmire of Vietnam and politically trapped in a continually escalating spiral of involvement in a war he did not want. 4 At the same time, his cherished Great Society domestic programs, which for Johnson represented his true policy interests and reason for wanting to be president, were left largely unimplemented and drained of resources by the conflict in Indochina (Johnson 1971; McPherson 1972). By 1968, as a result of the stalemated nature of the conflict and the war’s rising unpopularity at home, Johnson decided not to seek a second term in the White House. Instead, until his death in 1971, Johnson watched from his ranch in Texas as the war in Vietnam continued unabated and the Nixon administration scrapped most of what he had intended to be his lasting contribution to the American people and nation—the Great Society Program

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  The Presidential Difference

  Leadership Style from FDR to Barack Obama - Third Edition

  • Fred I. Greenstein(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  TATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS ,JANUARY 8, 1964

  I have today ordered to Vietnam the Airmobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later and they will be sent as requested.

  – LYNDON B. JOHNSON, NEWS CONFERENCE, JULY 28, 1965

  With American sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

  – LYNDON B. JOHNSON ,ADDRESS, MARCH 31, 1968

     

  I f a president’s ability to fulfill his responsibilities depended only on his command of the rules of Washington politics and ability to use them to good effect, the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson would have been an unqualified success. Yet by almost any standard, Johnson’s tenure in the White House was marked by phenomenal failures as well as towering achievements.

  Lyndon Johnson was one of the most gifted practitioners in American history of the art of coaxing decisions out of a political system that makes it easier to block policy initiatives than bring them to fruition. In 1965, Johnson initiated an open-ended military intervention in Vietnam while presiding over the enactment of a sweeping program of domestic policy innovation. Doing so was a short-run tour de force, but he undertook the intervention without carefully assessing its likely costs and consequences. In the longer run it crippled his presidency and left lasting scars on the body politic.

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  A Progressive History of American Democracy Since 1945

  American Dreams, Hard Realities

  • Chris J. Magoc(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Because of the carnage wrought by the death of Cold War liberalism and the generally gloomy narrative of the sixties that quickly took hold in the country, Democratic politicians for decades consistently avoided association with the legacy of LBJ. Americans in the twenty-first century could be forgiven, then, for not knowing they live in a nation transformed by Lyndon Johnson and a congress dominated by liberal Democrats from 1964–1966. In that very short window Lyndon Johnson sent to Capitol Hill nearly 200 legislative proposals, 95 percent of which passed in some form. Beyond the goal of a society that “rests on abundance and liberty for all,” and “an end to poverty and racial injustice,” LBJ’s grand vision of a Great Society reached higher, to “a place where the city of man serves not only … the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature.” In a Great Society, citizens would be “more concerned with the quality of their goals … [than the] quantity of their goods.” 49 High-flown as the west Texas sky, it was rhetoric that reflected the spirit of the emerging counterculture. Yet Johnson’s program was grounded in a pragmatic vision of improving the lives of not just the poor, but all Americans. The consummate politician, LBJ knew time was not on his side; he needed to move quickly before the deep well of support in the country he enjoyed evaporated. Fecund economic conditions made the mid-1960s the absolute optimum time of the twentieth century to launch an ambitious program of expanded government action. Even after passage of a long-debated tax cut, government revenues continued to expand, owing partly to a growing workforce. Average mean family income grew across all income groups by more than three percent throughout the decade. 50 Twenty years into a mostly uninterrupted postwar boom, white middle-class Americans possessed an unprecedented degree of economic confidence

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  Remembering America

  A Voice from the Sixties

  • Richard N. Goodwin(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  For much of the time, certainly during 1965, Johnson retained a large measure of control over his immense political skills. Congress, despite increasing dissent, never cast a single vote against the war or the money to fight it. Johnson not only defeated efforts to roll back the Great Society, but succeeded in enacting a dwindling flow of legislation. In Vietnam he could, at first, truthfully assert his consistency with the commitments of Kennedy and Eisenhower.

  When, in 1964, Johnson took the presidential oath, behind him — securely lodged in the memory of a man who had first come to Washington during the administration of Herbert Hoover — was a century of American involvement with Asia, three Pacific wars, two decades of Cold War, and a belief, rapidly becoming a dogma, that the arena of confrontation was shifting to the “third world.” He inherited and adopted a world view that included criteria for American responsibility, principles of action, established standards for determining threats to American freedom. In Vietnam he had, at first, the support — and more than support, the persuasive advocacy — of that foreign-policy establishment which he secretly despised — thinking that they regarded him with contempt as the ignorant boy from a small Texas town accidentally come to power — but on whom he relied, believing their approval was a warranty that he was doing the right thing. And even as those who had guided and urged him on from the beginning reconsidered and fled, Johnson, finally almost alone among the powerful, never departed from the conviction that he was acting in fulfillment of his obligations to the country and the future of its freedom.

  Yet the growth of dissent was not, as Johnson thought, “betrayal” or “cowardice,” but a recognition that our actions in Vietnam had taken a giant stride toward irrationality. One could justify assistance to a beleaguered ally without acquiescing in actions that would thrust the United States into a major war, kill and maim hundreds of thousands, and tear the fabric of American society — dooming the poor to their poverty, leaving the black man immobilized along the still-untraveled path to justice, undermine the moral strength of an entire nation.

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  A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson

  • Mitchell B. Lerner, Mitchell B. Lerner(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  JFK and LBJ: The Influence of Personality Upon Politics . William Morrow.

  Passage contains an image Chapter Three The Vice Presidency Marc J. Selverstone

  Having spent nearly forty years in government, Lyndon Johnson offers scholars an extraordinarily rich life to recount. Rising from congressional secretary to president of the United States, Johnson was present at the emergence of the welfare state in the 1930s and responsible for its flowering in the 1960s. Between those bookends of his political career, LBJ held some of the key electoral posts in the federal government, including membership in both houses of Congress, as well as Majority Leader of the United States Senate.

  Yet the thousand days that Johnson spent as vice president, beginning in January 1961, have received comparatively less scrutiny in the writing on his life. Historians have chronicled that period, to be sure, but almost always in the context of broader studies of the man and his presidency. The questions they have asked, moreover, have centered largely around the beliefs and behavior Johnson held and exhibited during his time in Congress and in the White House. Did LBJ, for instance, have firm ideological convictions? Did his rise to power, his “means of ascent,” reveal truths about his political core? Was he a New Deal liberal with an unshakeable commitment to progressive reform? Or was he merely a political pragmatist, a master manipulator who, at worst, sought power for its own sake and at best shed his liberal garb as he saw fit? Answers to these questions have given rise to various interpretive schemes focusing on Johnson's personality, his relentless ambition and yearning for power, and his desire for social justice. But do these perspectives still hold for Johnson's time as vice president? And how might the questions often asked about LBJ shed light on his relationship while in that post with his chief political rival-allies, John and Robert Kennedy?

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  The American President

  A Complete History

  • Kathryn Moore, Kathryn Moore(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Union Square & Co.

    (Publisher)

  28

  Ebullient by the passage and signing of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, Johnson’s happiness soon evaporated with news of bloody riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. The president could not believe what was happening, and his aide Joseph Califano later said, “He refused to look at the cable from Los Angeles describing the situation. He refused to take the calls from the generals who were requesting government planes to fly in the National Guard.”29 More riots and more violence spread throughout the country, and the president was powerless to stop it.

  The Great Society initiatives began winding down in 1966, and although a few small reforms were achieved, the one major change was the creation of the Department of Transportation, which combined a score of government agencies under one umbrella. Along with this, Johnson pushed for laws to research and improve highway safety, and two were passed.

  Determined to attain Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, NASA moved the space program forward, and in 1965, the United States watched five Gemini flights safely orbit the world with their two-man crews. The Soviets, however, had three-men missions and beat the Americans by three months with the first spacewalk. Five more Gemini flights successfully flew in 1966, leading the way to the testing of the Saturn rocket, which would ultimately launch crews to the moon. Then tragedy shook the nation when fire broke out on board the Apollo I capsule where astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were running through a test as it sat on top of the Saturn rocket on Pad-34 at Cape Kennedy. Engulfed in a flash fire, the astronauts died immediately. The future of the space program hung in the balance while Congress and NASA investigated and worked to correct the myriad problems that were exposed under the scrutiny. By November 1967, the redesigned Saturn V rocket flew successfully in an unmanned mission; two more in the coming year led to the first manned Apollo mission—Apollo 7, launched on October 11, 1968.

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