Lyndon B. Johnson

Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. lost the family money speculating in cotton, and his oldest son grew up in a Hill Country house without electricity, in a town where everyone knew precisely what the Johnsons had come down from. Lyndon finished at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1930, having broken off his studies to spend the 1928 school year at the Welhausen School in Cotulla, teaching Mexican American children who came to class hungry. He talked about that year for the rest of his life. He went to Washington in 1931 as a congressman's secretary, ran the National Youth Administration in Texas at 26, took a House seat in 1937, and lost a Senate race in 1941 by 1,311 votes after reporting his totals too early.

Five years and two months. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, public broadcasting, an immigration law that scrapped the national-origins quotas, and a margin in 1964 wider than any before it. Also 536,000 American troops in Vietnam by the end of it. That program and that war are set out in order on BriefHistory. The question here is what the two of them together did to the man.

He knew. On a White House tape from May 1964 he told Senator Richard Russell that he did not think Vietnam was worth fighting for and did not believe the country could get out of it, and then he sent the men anyway — 16,000 advisers when he took the oath, 536,000 troops when he handed the office on. More than 30,000 Americans were dead before he left, and roughly 20,000 more died after. Protesters stood outside the windows chanting a body count at him by name. The phrase credibility gap entered the language to describe the distance between what his government said about the war and what was true. He had already survived a heart attack at 46, in July 1955. He was 59 when he told the country, on March 31, 1968, that he would not run again.

He went home to the ranch, started smoking again after 16 years off, put on weight, let his hair grow past his collar, and had more heart attacks. His last public appearance was a civil rights symposium at his own library in December 1972, where he took nitroglycerin at the podium and told the room the country had not done nearly enough. He died of a heart attack at the ranch on January 22, 1973, at 64, a day before the Paris accords were announced, and lies in the family plot on the Pedernales. The rankings split him and have stayed split: near the top for the legislation, dragged hard by the war, with no agreement on which cancels which.

Lyndon B. Johnson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Civil Rights Act of 1964 law
  Signed July 2 after the longest filibuster in Senate history to that point 1964
• Social Security Amendments of 1965 law
  Medicare and Medicaid, signed in Independence, Missouri, with Harry Truman watching 1965
• Voting Rights Act of 1965 law
  Federal examiners sent into the counties that had kept Black citizens off the rolls 1965
• Immigration and Nationality Act law
  Ended the national-origins quota system written in 1924 1965
• Fair Housing Act law
  Signed a week after King was killed 1968
• The Vantage Point book
  His memoir of the presidency, finished at the ranch 1971

• August 27, 1908 aged 0 Born in a farmhouse on the Pedernales near Stonewall, Texas
• 1928 aged ~20 Teaches Mexican American children at the Welhausen School in Cotulla Nine months, 90 miles south of San Antonio.
• November 17, 1934 aged 26 Marries Claudia Taylor, called Lady Bird, in San Antonio He had proposed on their first date.
• August 28, 1948 aged 40 Wins the Senate primary runoff by 87 votes Two hundred ballots turned up in Jim Wells County six days late, in one handwriting. He was Landslide Lyndon ever after.
• July 2, 1955 aged 46 Has a severe heart attack at 46 while Senate majority leader
• November 22, 1963 aged 55 Takes the oath aboard Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas
• August 6, 1965 aged 56 Signs the Voting Rights Act
• March 31, 1968 aged 59 Tells the country he will not seek another term The same broadcast announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.
• January 22, 1973 aged 64 Dies of a heart attack at his ranch at 64 The Paris accords ending American involvement in Vietnam were announced the next day and signed on January 27.

• Sam Rayburn 1882–1961
  Longest-serving Speaker of the House who steered New Deal and postwar legislation through Congress. mentor
• Barry Goldwater 1909–1998
  Senator and presidential nominee whose 1964 campaign helped create the modern conservative movement. defeated
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. pressured by
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. appointed
• Robert McNamara 1916–2009
  Secretary of Defense who applied systems analysis to the Pentagon and escalated the Vietnam War. kept on
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. rival
• William Westmoreland 1914–2005
  Commander in Vietnam whose attrition strategy and optimistic troop estimates collided with the Tet Offensive. commanded his war