Lyndon B. Johnson

Based on Wikipedia: Lyndon B. Johnson

The Man Who Stole an Election and Changed America

In 1948, Lyndon Baines Johnson won a United States Senate seat by eighty-seven votes. That margin came from Box 13 in Jim Wells County, Texas, where two hundred ballots appeared six days after the election—all in alphabetical order, all in the same handwriting, all with the same pen. The election judge later admitted he had certified fraudulent ballots. Some of the people listed as voters swore they hadn't voted at all.

This was the man who would sign the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

Johnson's story is American history at its most contradictory: a poverty-stricken Texas boy who clawed his way to the presidency, a Southern Democrat who voted against anti-lynching laws before engineering the Civil Rights Act, a master legislator whose foreign policy catastrophe in Vietnam would haunt the nation for decades. Understanding LBJ means understanding how a single human being can contain such multitudes—and how that complexity shaped the country we live in today.

Born in Hard Country

Johnson came into the world on August 27, 1908, in a small farmhouse along the Pedernales River near Stonewall, Texas. His parents couldn't agree on a name for three months. They finally settled on Lyndon, after a local lawyer named W.C. Linden—his mother insisted on the altered spelling.

The land was unforgiving. Johnson's biographer Robert Caro described him as raised "in a land without electricity, where the soil was so rocky that it was hard to earn a living from it." His father, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., lost substantial money, and the family knew genuine poverty. There was no romanticizing hardship—it was simply the texture of daily existence.

Johnson's religious background was eclectic in a way that tells you something about rural Texas at the time. His grandfather had been Baptist, then joined the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), then became a Christadelphian—a small sect that emerged in the nineteenth century emphasizing a literal reading of scripture. His father followed the same path toward the Christadelphians. This religious heritage, particularly his grandfather's teachings, shaped Johnson's unusually positive attitude toward Jews—a rarity among Southern politicians of his generation.

In school, young Lyndon talked. A lot. He was elected president of his eleventh-grade class and graduated from Johnson City High School in 1924 at just fifteen years old, the youngest in his class. He participated in public speaking, debate, and baseball—activities that would serve different purposes in his future. The speaking and debate honed his persuasive abilities. The baseball taught him how to read people, to anticipate what they'd do next.

The Education of a Politician

Johnson's parents pushed him toward college, but his path wasn't direct. He enrolled at a preparatory program at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1924, then abruptly left for California just weeks later. He worked odd jobs, including at his cousin's legal practice, before returning to Texas as a day laborer.

He finally committed to college in 1926, and those years transformed him. He worked his way through school, edited the student newspaper called The College Star, and immersed himself in campus politics. The college years, Caro noted, "refined his skills of persuasion and political organization."

But the most formative experience came when he took a break from his studies. For nine months in 1928 and 1929, Johnson taught Mexican-American children at the segregated Welhausen School in Cotulla, Texas, ninety miles south of San Antonio.

These were desperately poor kids in a segregated system designed to keep them that way. Decades later, after signing the Higher Education Act of 1965, Johnson returned to San Marcos and said:

I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.

Whether this memory was genuine conviction or retrospective myth-making—politicians excel at both—the legislation he eventually passed suggests the experience left some mark.

The Making of a Washington Creature

Johnson's formal entry into politics came in 1931, when Congressman Richard Kleberg won a special election to represent Texas and needed a legislative secretary. Johnson got the job on recommendations from his father and a state senator he'd campaigned for. He was twenty-three years old.

Kleberg had little interest in actually doing the job of a congressman. He delegated the day-to-day work to Johnson, who discovered he loved it. When Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, Johnson became a devoted New Dealer—the sweeping government programs designed to combat the Great Depression aligned perfectly with his ambitions.

Johnson got himself elected speaker of the "Little Congress," an organization of congressional aides. This sounds trivial. It wasn't. The position let him cultivate relationships with congressmen, journalists, and lobbyists. His circle soon included aides to President Roosevelt himself, as well as fellow Texans like Vice President John Nance Garner and Congressman Sam Rayburn—men who controlled enormous power in the Democratic Party.

In 1935, Johnson landed a bigger job: Texas state administrator of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program that put young people to work. He traveled the state finding sponsors for construction projects. Within six months, eighteen thousand young Texans were building roads, parks, schools, and public buildings.

He was a brutal boss. He demanded long days and weekend work. Friends, colleagues, and historians described him as driven by an almost pathological lust for power and control. Caro's assessment was blunt: "Johnson's ambition was uncommon—in the degree to which it was unencumbered by even the slightest excess weight of ideology, of philosophy, of principles, of beliefs."

This was a man who wanted power the way other people want air.

Congressman Johnson

In 1937, the congressman who held Texas's Tenth District died after thirteen terms. Johnson ran in the special election, campaigning on a New Deal platform with his wife as an effective aide. He won and served in the House from April 10, 1937, to January 3, 1949.

President Roosevelt recognized a useful ally. Johnson became a conduit for information about Texas politics, particularly the maneuvering of Vice President Garner and Speaker Rayburn. In return, Johnson got to deliver federal largesse to his district.

And deliver he did. He helped plan a huge naval air training base at Corpus Christi. He established shipbuilding sites in Houston and Orange, and a Navy Reserve station in Dallas. He secured approval for the Mansfield Dam on the Colorado River, bringing hydroelectric power to the region. He brought cheap electricity to farmers through the Rural Electrification Administration—transforming daily life in areas that had never known electric light.

He steered these projects to contractors he knew, particularly Herman and George Brown, who would finance much of his future political career. The relationship between Johnson and the Brown brothers illustrates how power actually works in American politics: mutual benefit, sustained over decades, never quite illegal but never quite clean.

During this period, Johnson voted like the Southern Democrat he was. He opposed anti-lynching legislation. He opposed anti-poll tax legislation. He voted against the Fair Employment Practice Committee, which was designed to prevent racial discrimination in war industries. These weren't passive votes—they were active participation in maintaining white supremacy.

The First Stolen Election

In April 1941, Texas Senator Morris Sheppard died, triggering a special election. Texas law allowed Johnson to run without giving up his House seat—a safety net that let him take the risk.

The special election had no primaries and no runoff, meaning multiple Democrats would split the vote. Johnson campaigned aggressively, emphasizing his relationship with Roosevelt, and appeared to be winning.

Then the late returns came in.

Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel won by 1,311 votes. Johnson's biographer Caro argues the results were manipulated by lobbyists from Texas's alcohol industry. Here's the logic: O'Daniel was a fervent prohibitionist who had proposed banning alcohol sales within ten miles of military bases. With World War Two bringing thousands of soldiers to Texas, this would devastate the alcohol business. The industry's solution was elegant—elect O'Daniel to the Senate, which would elevate the "wet" lieutenant governor Coke Stevenson to the governorship. So they rigged ballots in East Texas.

Johnson lost by just 0.23 percent of the vote.

He learned a lesson: next time, he wouldn't lose control of the count.

The War Hero Who Wasn't

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Johnson was a member of the Naval Reserve. Two days later, he requested active duty, becoming one of the first congressmen to volunteer for military service.

His first assignment was assessing production problems slowing the manufacture of ships and planes—important work, but desk work. In May 1942, he received a more glamorous assignment: President Roosevelt's personal representative to the Navy, sent to survey combat conditions in the Pacific.

On June 9, 1942, Johnson received the Silver Star from General Douglas MacArthur for gallantry in action during an aerial combat mission over New Guinea. The medal elevated him from politician to war hero.

Except the story doesn't hold up.

Johnson's aircraft, a B-26 bomber, reportedly turned back before reaching the target due to mechanical trouble. Caro said the weight of evidence suggests "the plane was attacked by Zeroes and that he was cool under fire." But he also noted a harder truth: "The fact is, LBJ never got within sight of Japanese forces. His combat experience was a myth."

MacArthur handed out medals liberally to visiting politicians—it was good for getting congressional support. Johnson wore the Silver Star ribbon for the rest of his life. No one who actually saw combat during the mission received any decoration.

Johnson served in the Pacific through July 1942, when Roosevelt recalled all active-duty legislators to Washington. His total military service: less than a year, with questionable combat credentials. But the Silver Star ribbon on his lapel told a different story to voters who didn't know better.

Box 13

In 1948, Johnson ran for Senate again, this time against former Governor Coke Stevenson—the same man who had benefited from the rigged 1941 election when O'Daniel was elevated out of his way.

Johnson campaigned with innovations that foreshadowed modern politics. He rented a Sikorsky S-51 helicopter, dubbed "The Johnson City Windmill," and used it to draw crowds at fairgrounds across Texas. He flooded the state with campaign literature. He wooed conservatives by casting doubt on Stevenson's commitment to the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited union power.

Stevenson won the primary but without a majority, forcing a runoff. Johnson campaigned relentlessly while Stevenson's effort faltered from lack of funds.

The runoff vote count took a week. When it ended, Johnson had won by eighty-seven votes out of 988,295 cast.

The margin came from Box 13 in Jim Wells County, deep in the territory of political boss George Parr. Six days after the election, two hundred new ballots appeared—"patently fraudulent," in the words of historians. The names were in alphabetical order, written in the same handwriting with the same pen, added at the end of the voter list. Some people on that list swore they hadn't voted.

In 1977, the election judge Luis Salas finally admitted what everyone suspected: he had certified 202 fraudulent ballots, 200 for Johnson and 2 for Stevenson.

Johnson won the general election and entered the Senate. He would later joke about the theft, calling himself "Landslide Lyndon." But the nickname stuck as a reminder of how he got there.

Master of the Senate

Johnson's rise in the Senate was meteoric by any standard. He became majority whip in 1951, Democratic leader in 1953, and majority leader in 1954. In just six years, he went from freshman senator to the second most powerful Democrat in Washington.

His method was simple and exhaustive: he learned everything about everyone. He knew which senators needed what, who owed whom, which pressure points would yield results. He worked the phones constantly. He cornered colleagues in hallways for what became known as "the Johnson Treatment"—standing too close, grabbing lapels, making arguments with his face inches from yours until resistance crumbled.

As majority leader, Johnson wielded power like few before him. He controlled committee assignments, floor schedules, and the flow of legislation. He could make or break careers. Senators who cooperated got what they needed; those who didn't found their priorities mysteriously stalled.

The Senate had always been a place where seniority mattered above all else. Johnson changed the culture, making loyalty to leadership—specifically, to him—the coin of the realm.

The Vice Presidency

Johnson wanted the presidency. In 1960, he ran for the Democratic nomination against Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy won, and then did something that surprised everyone: he offered Johnson the vice presidency.

Why would Kennedy want a rival who had just tried to take the nomination from him? The answer was electoral math. Kennedy was a Catholic from Massachusetts—problematic in the Protestant South. Johnson was a Protestant from Texas who could deliver Southern votes. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket won the general election, but barely—Kennedy's margin was just over 100,000 votes out of nearly 69 million cast.

The vice presidency was misery for Johnson. The office has almost no real power—the vice president presides over the Senate and waits for the president to die. For a man who had run the Senate like a personal fiefdom, it was torture. Kennedy's inner circle, the "best and brightest" from Harvard and the Eastern establishment, treated Johnson as a crude Southern politician to be tolerated, not respected.

Johnson later described the vice presidency as being "like a Texas steer—I had lost my power to do what I was best fitted to do."

November 22, 1963

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Johnson was two cars behind in the motorcade. Within hours, he took the oath of office aboard Air Force One, with Jackie Kennedy still wearing her blood-stained pink suit standing beside him.

Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

In his first address to Congress five days later, Johnson invoked Kennedy's memory to push for action: "Let us continue." He promised to pursue the civil rights legislation Kennedy had proposed, and the tax cuts designed to stimulate the economy. The nation was in shock; Johnson channeled that shock into momentum.

The Great Society

Johnson's domestic agenda was called the Great Society, and its scope was breathtaking. He sought to expand civil rights, public broadcasting, healthcare access, education aid, urban and rural development, consumer protection, environmental protection, and public services. Underlying it all was the "War on Poverty"—a coordinated assault on the conditions that kept millions of Americans in deprivation.

The legislation that passed was extraordinary:

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination.
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting, effectively enfranchising millions of Black Americans in the South who had been kept from the polls by literacy tests, poll taxes, and outright intimidation.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination in housing sales, rentals, and financing.
• The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare (health insurance for those sixty-five and older) and Medicaid (health coverage for low-income Americans).
• The Higher Education Act of 1965 established federally insured student loans, opening college to millions who couldn't have afforded it otherwise.
• The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national-origins quota system that had favored Western European immigration since the 1920s, fundamentally reshaping who could come to America.

Johnson also made the Apollo program a national priority, setting the stage for the moon landing in 1969. He signed legislation creating public broadcasting, Head Start for early childhood education, and food stamps for hungry families.

In 1964, Johnson won reelection in a landslide, capturing the largest share of the popular vote any Democratic candidate had ever received—and the highest for any candidate since popular elections became widespread in the 1820s. His opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, won only six states.

This was the peak of modern American liberalism. The federal government was expanding its role in American life at a pace not seen since the New Deal, and the public supported it overwhelmingly.

The Contradiction

How did the man who voted against anti-lynching legislation become the president who signed the Civil Rights Act?

There are several possible explanations, and they're not mutually exclusive.

The cynical view: Johnson's positions always matched his constituency. As a Texas congressman, he needed to keep white segregationists happy. As a national leader, he needed Black voters and Northern liberals. His principles were infinitely flexible because he had none—only ambition.

The evolution view: Johnson genuinely changed. His experience teaching Mexican-American children in Cotulla planted seeds that grew over time. His exposure to national politics showed him a broader world than rural Texas. By the 1960s, he believed in civil rights because he had seen both poverty's cruelty and government's potential to address it.

The strategic view: Johnson understood that civil rights was coming regardless. The question was whether Democrats would lead or be dragged. By championing civil rights, he could cement Black voters in the Democratic coalition for generations—which is exactly what happened.

The power view: Caro argues that Johnson's hunger for power was so absolute that, once he achieved the presidency, he wanted to be remembered as a great president. That required doing great things. Civil rights was the greatest thing available.

Johnson himself seemed to recognize the political cost. After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation." He was wrong only about the timeline—Democrats lost the white South for considerably longer than that.

Vietnam

If the Great Society represented Johnson's greatest achievements, Vietnam represented his greatest failure.

Johnson inherited a small American military presence in South Vietnam, supporting a government fighting Communist insurgents backed by North Vietnam. The Cold War logic was straightforward: if South Vietnam fell to Communism, neighboring countries would follow like dominoes. This "domino theory" drove American policy throughout Southeast Asia.

Johnson escalated. By 1968, more than half a million American troops were in Vietnam. The bombing campaigns against North Vietnam were among the most intensive in history. And yet victory remained elusive.

The problem was fundamental: this was a guerrilla war against an enemy that controlled the countryside, supported by a population tired of foreign interference, in terrain that negated American technological advantages. American forces could win any conventional battle but couldn't win the war.

Johnson kept escalating because withdrawal looked like defeat—and defeat would mean losing Vietnam to Communism, validating Republican attacks on Democratic weakness, and betraying the troops already committed. Each escalation required the next one to justify the last.

The human cost was staggering. Over 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. Vietnamese casualties numbered in the millions—soldiers and civilians on both sides. The war consumed resources that might have funded the Great Society programs. It divided the country in ways that hadn't healed decades later.

Johnson's credibility collapsed as the gap between his public statements and reality widened. The "credibility gap" became a defining phrase of the era. He promised progress while the war dragged on. He promised light at the end of the tunnel while casualties mounted. The press and the public grew skeptical of anything the administration said.

The End

By 1968, Johnson's approval ratings had cratered. The Vietnam War had become a quagmire. Cities burned in riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Robert Kennedy, the president's brother and a fierce critic of the war, announced his candidacy for president. Senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an anti-war platform, performed shockingly well in the New Hampshire primary.

On March 31, 1968, Johnson addressed the nation about Vietnam. At the end of the speech, he added something few expected:

I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.

The man who had spent his life pursuing power walked away from it.

Johnson retired to his Texas ranch after the election of Richard Nixon. He kept a low profile, growing his hair long and largely staying out of public life. He died of a heart attack on January 22, 1973—just days before the Paris Peace Accords ended American involvement in Vietnam.

The Legacy

Lyndon Johnson's legacy refuses to settle into simple categories.

On domestic policy, his achievements were transformative. Medicare and Medicaid provide health coverage to tens of millions of Americans. The civil rights laws dismantled legal segregation and expanded voting rights. Federal student loans opened higher education to the middle class. The Immigration Act of 1965 reshaped the country's demographics. Public broadcasting, Head Start, environmental protections—the list of programs that still exist and still matter is remarkable.

On foreign policy, Vietnam casts a shadow that has never lifted. The war killed Americans and Vietnamese in enormous numbers, divided the country, undermined faith in government, and accomplished none of its stated objectives. The domino theory proved wrong: Vietnam fell to Communism, but the dominoes didn't follow.

Johnson embodied American contradictions. He was a Southern segregationist who became the greatest civil rights president since Lincoln. He was a crude political operator who built programs to help the poor. He was a master of domestic policy who stumbled catastrophically in foreign affairs. He stole an election and then won the largest landslide in Democratic history.

Historians rank him in the upper tier of presidents for domestic achievements. They also hold him responsible for one of the worst foreign policy disasters in American history. Both assessments are correct.

Perhaps the truest thing about Lyndon Johnson is that he was, above all, American—in his ambition, his contradictions, his capacity for both cruelty and compassion, his belief that problems could be solved through force of will. He shaped the country in ways we still live with, for better and for worse.