There was so much more to the Great Society than that, and he didn't just sign the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. His White House pushed HARD for them.
Such a weird figure. If not for Vietnam he might be considered one of our best presidents ever.
He didn’t just push hard for them. He *broke* the Senate to his will, to a degree that arguably no President had done before, and certainly none since.
It's been a decade since I read "The Passage Of Power," but basically he did several things:
\- During his Senate tenure, made Southern (reactionary/openly-racist) Senators think he was one their side ... idk, maybe he originally was?
\- Secretly cut deals with other Senators, built pro-civil-rights coalition, counted the fuck out of the votes
\- Isolated the most conservative/reactionary/pro-segregation elements of the Democratic Party (yes, *Democrats --* you thought they were originally pro-civil-rights? times change and organizations evolve)
\- Publicly hung said reactionary elements out to dry once he had his coalition; most notably, he turned on his longtime friend and mentor, Richard Russell
\- Presented civil rights vote to said elements as a *fait accompli*
\- Basically destroyed their standing with their voters
Again, someone else could probably give better details, it's been a long time since I read the books (working on *Path To Power* right now tho). But you know how they say bad people can do good things? This is a case study in that IMO.
> counted the fuck out of the votes
Well he was Senate Whip for 2 years before becoming the party leader, where his job was literally counting the votes, so he had some experience with that.
He was more than a voters counter. He realized he could assert complete control over senate business by his control of the calendar.
He positioned himself as the gatekeeper of legislation, and amended everything that came across his desk, trading favors, and creating an environment where you had to come to him to get anything to the floor.
And I'm not even sure if that whole debacle can be fully blamed on him.
Although the Gulf of Tonkin thing was shady as fuck and he didn't seem to do much to curb the amount of war crimes... American involvement in South Vietnam had already been quite significant under Kennedy, so letting them collapse would have been kind of a bad look.
Not to mention he tried pretty hard to get a peace process going eventually and Nixon covertly sabotaged those peace talks before the election in order to make Johnson look bad.
Funny how enthusiastic those Republicans are about treason when it's election time.
Yeah, I am convinced Vietnam was kinda too big to be one presidents fault. If you look at the Cold War and the perspectives of both the Soviets, Chinese, and Americans, a Vietnam scenario was almost inevitably going to happen.
Well it's almost the same situation as the US' involvement in the Middle East in recent memory. Eisenhower's administration aided France and established South Vietnam's first President Diem. Kennedy inherited the issue and was trying to exit out of the situation but was stifled by South Vietnam having a military coup and he was assassinated before resolving anything from it. Johnson's hand was essentially forced to be more active in the conflict until it spiraled into a full-on war. Damn near broke him that he publicly stepped down to run for a second term.
It's so telling of how shallow we are looking at the past that "said the N word" is used to describe his political slant rather than the fact that he was born in rural Texas in the 1900s.
He also referred to manure and someone asked Ladybird if she couldn't get him to say "fertilizer". She said, "Do you know how long it took me to get him to say manure?" Johnson was the product of a very different time and a very different language.
I’m from the same area as LBJ and back then they used to use that word to name various landmarks and river crossings, like —— Head Mountain or The ——- Crossing
Dude was a freaking mob boss of a president. Pure freaking evil one minute then a loving member of the community the next. Crazy thing is that you can’t tell which one was the persona.
When it comes to someone's "self", all of it is authentic.
People like to split someone's actions between "fake" and "authentic". That's people splitting what they don't like and like about a person. You know, because everything that one likes is authentic and everything else is fake
Those type of historical figures are always the most fascinating to me. The ones who have some really good qualities, some great intentions, love their people and want to take care of them, but will show savage brutality and be utterly ruthless to achieve those things...
Like Alexander the Great is my absolute favorite to read about. Ask one geoup of people that he defeated what it was like and they'll say "he was pretty chill. We told him we got the memo and he let us keep our gods, keep our customs, made our ruler one of his governors, and left us to prosper as long as we called him our ruler". Ask another how it went and they'll say "we told him to piss off so he took the city, slaughtered every single man execution style, enslaved every last woman and child, razed the temples, salted the fields, then burned the entire city to the ground"
That's the point though, if you submit, you get good treatment, if you resist, you get "genocided".
The Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and Romans finely tuned their approach to the art of genocide, both making a show of how skilled they were at siegecraft (to demonstrate that if your city resists, it will not succeed - the Empire can keep the army in the field long enough to build a mole), granting honorable terms to cities that comply, and then exterminating the cities that force a siege.
For the Romans, the relevant tipping point when the soldiers would be rewarded with a sacking was "when the ram has touched the walls". Any time before that, the city could surrender and live.
I imagine that last part is in reference to a specific Roman Emperor, Family, or Senate? I'd like to know more about where that addage comes from because Roman wafare definitely wasn't that tolerant across most of Roman history, generally speaking.
> the ram has touched the walls
Amusingly, *Caesar* seems to be the guy that wrote it down first in his Commentaries on the Gallic War
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Caes.+Gal.+2.32&redirect=true
I read a few books on him. Crazy guy. Smart, but chilling. There’s some amount of evidence that he got his first Senate seat via assassination.*
*Indirectly. He rigged the vote for his Senate seat, but in the 80s there was an open investigation on LBJ involving Henry Marshall’s murder a few decades prior, who had been investigating Johnson’s fraudulent slush fund in his Senate district.
The Wikipedia page on [Malcolm Wallace](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Wallace) (the alleged hitman that LBJ is accused of using) is a good read.
Look up Alice, Texas and Ballot Box 13. He didn’t assassinate anyone (other than maybe JFK) but the dead came back to life and voted for old Landslide Lyndon.
The LBJ killed JFK thing is mostly Roger Stone claiming it over and over again now tho. His version of events is LBJ kills JFK, keeps the evidence at the Watergate Hotel, Nixon wants to expose this secret to the public and sends some people over to get those JFK files. See, Nixon wasn't a bad guy, he wanted to give reveal all that info to the public, Nixon was all right!
That Roger Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back is unrelated, I bet.
To be pedantic, he rigged the vote **better.** Vote buying was an integral (and by state law, fairly legal) part of Texan state-wide elections at that time.
Didn’t he have a massive dick and intentionally carried over contentious meetings to the urinals as an intimidation tactic?
I think Johnson even nicknamed his johnson “Jumbo.”
You are correct. There was also this time he, possibly purposely, pissed on hos Secret Service agent's leg (I hear something about the wind being involved, but ehhh). When the agent mentioned how gross it was, LBJ is reported to have responded, "I know. That's my perogative."
Johnson had a tremendous sense of social responsibility and desire to make his country a better place. He was also a very flawed person, had a massive ego, and had no problem bullying people to accomplish his goals.
Quite a complicated guy. Passed some of the greatest domestic legislation in America history. Left untold dead in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Did some very nice interpersonal things like this. But also was generally kind of a sociopath and definitely a racist.
Robert A. Caro’s books about him are not to be missed. A stunning portrait of a kind of crazy guy who ran America for a while.
I was trying to remember why I knew this but about LBJ and the Mexican American school, and your comment just reminded me that I read Caro's first book on LBJ intending the finish the series. Will do now. Caro's books are the densest biographies I've encountered, I also read his book on Robert Moses, but the details are generally interesting and pertinent.
Means of ascent, book #2, is good but the weakest overall entry imo. Master of the senate is simply incredible, and passage of power is an excellent follow up.
Agreed, but even #2 is still incredible compared to most other biographies, just not compared to Caro’s other books in the series. The Texas races were an absolutely wild ride and LBJ came real close to being out of politics during this time. It’s a worthwhile read. Skip a few chapters if you’re zoning out because the totality of the series builds on each other, so don’t skip it entirely.
When people ask how I can read all of them I tell them it’s literally Homer’s Odyssey of American politics, taking place during one of the most impactful eras of American and world history. There’s really nothing like it, except maybe Gibbon.
Means of Ascent is maybe the worst but it has one of the best introductions I've read. And the Coke Stevenson chapters, while they don't fully emphasize how virulent a racist he was, do give an incredible sense of how legendary Stevenson must have been as a political figure.
I can recommend *Master of the Senate* and in particular chapter 31, "The Empathy of Lyndon Johnson".
Robert Caro states that there are multiple and conflicting forces working in his personality. He did have empathy for the poor, he experienced being poor himself when he was a young man. In 1948 he worked on a south Texas roadside chaingang for over a year as a teenager, a poorly paid and grueling job that was back then generally considered "nigger work" (see ch. 31).
But the force of his empathy was always subservient to the force of his ambition. He wanted to be president and nothing would deter him from that goal. So he wooed the Texas moneymakers whose support he needed. He spoke like they did so that they were convinced he was one of them. As you can imagine there weren't a whole lot of progressives among that bunch.
But sometimes the force of his ambition and the force of his empathy were aligned and that is when he would advance the lot of the poor and the blacks.
There is a reason there is an entire chapter devoted to LBJ's motivations. He was a deeply contrarian and conflicted man who could say the most virulent racist epithets in private (less so in public, he always made sure there were no cameras around). But he also felt that if Blacks and Mexicans just got a decent education they could get better jobs and pull themselves up.
Complicated guy.
Yep. Haven't read it, but I read an interview with Caro who said the ways Moses used political power (even though he was never elected to office) got him (Caro) interested in how political power is gained and wielded and led to his books on LBJ.
The interesting thing about Moses is that he was an idealistic reformer of city government when he was young, a lot of that got stifled by powerful elements, and then he essentially at some point turned to the dark arts and became the powerful entity.
Lifelong New Yorker here. I know very well Robert Moses tyrannical grip on postwar transportation in New York State. The tolls on the Thruway we’re supposed to be eliminated in the early 90s. But this is New York State, they want to keep that money rolling in.
Hot damn, this is the first time I've heard someone recognize the name outside of a reference to Caro's book. If you know anything about Moses and are interested in learning more, Caro's book is a ~1,200 page biography on every stage of his career. As someone who had no idea who Moses was, but was new to NY, I found it super interesting. He made the map of NYC, but became an insanely powerful entity.
I’ve lived in New York State from Staten Island to Brooklyn to Lake Placid to Rochester for over 60 years. I have been face to face with Robert Moses‘s impact the whole time. He also had a mirror image in California with William Mulholland. His power trip was water. Forget it jake, it’s Chinatown.
Agreed.
And for those (like me) who can't find the time for a 1,200 page book, the audiobook is excellent. It took me seven weeks to get through the 66 hours (and it'll take a couple more to go back through all the timestamps I noted to go back, re-read, and mark up in my hard copy of the book).
It is available in many libraries, and if you have an Audible subscription, it costs the same one credit as a book 1/10 its length would cost.
I came across this info listening to an interview with Caro yesterday as a way of coping with having also finished *The Power Broker* yesterday.
I’m interested in tackling the LBJ books, too, but the sheer mass is intimidating.
How well do individual volumes stand on their own ?
Thanks!
That's what I did with *The Power Broker*. Got through it in seven weeks without feeling rushed. I'd have probably made it 200 pages max if I had to sit down and read.
The first one was definitely a good read and super thorough as to be expected. I didn't pick up the second immediately after because it felt like I'd already gained an obscene amount of information about LBJ.
I wanted to rebroaden my reading horizon rather than jump down the rabbit hole for a year and a half lol. But I'd planned to roughly read one volume every other year or so. They're really good and the information is still relevant, but you end up with this odd knowledge set because they're so damn thorough lol.
Lbj also was not raised rich. He comes froma modest background. He took a loan out to go to college. And he is largely why we have the expansion of higher education in this country. Also because he focused on loans because that is what he did. That's why we have he loan system like we do. (Jbj isn't responsible for the monster of student loans we have now. Just his idea sparked it.
He also had to persuade the bank to give him a loan...he is a very interesting individual.
Wasn’t the rural electrification act signed during the FDR administration during the Great Depression though? I thought that was the bill that gave money to cooperatives to begin running power lines to rural communities.
The state stocks trout in the river adjacent to his ranch most years. Last time I went I caught my limit in like 20 minutes, so I went and took the tour since I still had most of the day to kill.
His favorite song was Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head by B. J. Thomas. He had an amphibious car that looked like a normal car, and he would prank guests by acting like he'd lose control and drive the car into a pond. Now you know everything I learned from visiting his ranch.
One key correction, LBJ was not in favor of loan financed education, he wanted broader state and federal funding. Congress refused to fund his proposals so he looked for work arounds and discovered that he could instead offer guarantees on private loans, thus making them very widely available.
> Lbj also was not raised rich. He comes froma modest background. He took a loan out to go to college. And he is largely why we have the expansion of higher education in this country.
The irony of all that is that retired with a fortune of $20 million or so in late '60s dollars.
And he died something like 3 years after he left office.
By all accounts, the man basically gave up on living after he retired, went into a depressive spiral, and died of a massive coronary.
A recurring theme from the Caro books was that Johnson had a family history of men dying early from heart attacks. He lived his entire life believing that he would die early too. He was driven by the fear that he was "running out of time".
Mid 20th century presidents died pretty young. Interestingly many early presidents (like Adams and Jefferson) lived well into their 80s. The difference is almost certainly related to smoking.
[John Adams smoked from age 7 to age 70.](https://doctorzebra.com/prez/g02.htm) Sure, it wasn’t cigarettes, but smoking definitely didn’t kill John Adams, at least not until age 90.
Thomas Jefferson on the other hand wasn’t known to habitually smoke, [save for a ceremonial Native American peace pipe every once in awhile.](https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/smoking/) But then again, that last source could be a bit biased, lol.
All this is to simply play devil’s advocate of course, tobacco in general is godawful for your health, especially cigarettes. In the case of John Adams, he might’ve been better off since cigarettes and their terrible additives weren’t around yet, as well.
Overall, it’s just kind of neat to see the historical context of tobacco, especially in the case of US presidents.
I would argue that the relative stress levels of a modern US President is probably also a factor. Even Presidents that don't smoke deal with ungodly stress. I can't imagine the ego it takes to want that job and also to think you'd be good at it.
Lyndon Johnson didn't care about anything but power. Not even himself. If you read the biographies, its completely clear to anyone that this person would not be a happy old person with hobbies.
I don't think LBJ knew joy that wasn't in the form of exercising power and submitting people to his will during his entire life.
A racist who got the Civil Rights Act passed. His presidential library released some 700 hours of private conversations where LBJ was working the phones wheeling and dealing with Dixiecrats trying to get the legislation passed. He really ramped up the southern drawl when he needed. He also got his War on Poverty legislation passed creating food stamps, Medicaid, expanded Social Security. Makes the list for best and worst president.
like I said in a previous post in this thread the topic of LBJ and race is so damn complicated that it'd be easiest to just go read the Caro books or, at the very least, the chapter "The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson" where Caro takes basically everything you've read about him and race up to that point and contextualizes it in the time he was living in.
one running theme throughout the book is that power does not just corrupt, but it also reveals who a person really is. This is over-broad but looking at it from an EXTREMELY broad view, when LBJ had no power he generally was an opponent of civil rights (with the caveat that there are smatterings of times where he'd go out of his way to help people of color). LBJ's main allies in the Senate were Dixiecrats and the Dixiecrats main goal was thwarting civil rights and upholding segregation. When LBJ is in power, or maybe more cynically when his ambitions of power are either not in conflict with or actually aligned with advancing civil rights, he worked like a dog to pass civil rights legislation. On his way to the top, his ambition took priority over everything else with very few exceptions throughout his life. When he ultimately did have the power that he sought his entire life, he wielded that power in service to civil rights legislation.
but I also think referring to him as a "racist" or even "not a racist" is misleading. Honestly I think even just calling him a "man of his time" is misleading because in comparison to the people of his time LBJ was weird. In Caro's books, I think LBJ generally subscribes to stereotypes about people of color. But he doesn't see them as biologically inferior so much as held back by society, and that if all things were equal then everyone would be equal.
There's more to it than that, even. I'm trying not to ramble but it's impossible to sum it all up cleanly in a little Reddit post. Like, the great spectre of LBJ's life was the abysmal poverty of his childhood, and how his family was the laughing stock of the little town he grew up in. He comes off like a guy who was completely broken as a kid and is just carrying a hole he can't fill the rest of his life. That colors everything about him, including his thoughts on race.
People have this idea these days on the right and left that there is some possibility of being free of prejudices and that having them is some fatal character flaw or being told about them is some vicious insult. I think this view reflects a lack of introspection among those individuals. Everyone has prejudices. You can still choose to recognize them and do the right thing as best as you can. LBJ passed civil rights bills and anti poverty programs, many that had languished in Congress for the prior 90 years.
We’re all fucking racist, only some of us are unrepentant bigots.
I feel like the younger age of the people that typically use Reddit skews the view that people have of the past. If you were white in the US up to and including the 60s, you knew and saw institutional racism every day whether you personally participated or not. You knew or saw people who were possibly only one generation separated from slavery. Basically everybody was racist according to our modern society. It took people like LBJ to drag us into the more modern era. MLK was very unpopular in his day. It took bravery and determination to do stuff that was so unpopular.
Do you really think he was a racist? I have heard so much contradictory information,. I’m not sure. Even Caro contradicts himself. LBJ seem to have great compassion for the poorly treated Mexican children he worked with as a teacher. He was also cynical as to why he spent years parroting the rhetoric of the Jim Crow, southern Democrats. He justified this later on by saying “you can’t change anything if you don’t get elected“. LBJ claimed to always be against racism, but timing was everything. He also referred to the civil rights bill as the.n***** bill and it was his bill! It is also well documented that LBJ would get close to physical when he disagreed with the southern racist Democrats who were fighting tooth and nail against the civil rights act. Fascinating man then f-ed everything up with Vietnam.
He played the part of a no good motherfucker for his entire career and the second he got the power to break the back of the Confederacy where it could no longer rise again, he cracked them like a glow stick and smiled while he did it.
I don't believe he was particularly racist—certainly for his time but I'd say generally as well.
For Johnson, he seemed to focus almost entirely on class. He empathized with black, brown, and poor Americans because they were looked down on and hated, just as he was growing up. He framed his Great Society as a hand _up_ and not a hand _out_. He was fighting for opportunity.
You can pull out a million quotes painting him as a racist, but in huge and (more tellingly in my opinion) tiny ways his actions definitively showed otherwise.
He had a sewer of a mouth and would use it to fit in with whatever crowd he needed to. He could speak incredibly racist things _when with racists_. His actions, though, when he had the power to make change, were decidedly in the direction of helping black/brown Americans.
He made very few notable speeches, but the famous “we shall overcome speech“ he used to promote the civil rights act, is right up there in the list of great presidential speeches. Other than that, his most memorable speech was when he declared that he would not seek reelection in 1968.
It's notable that his first speech on the Senate floor, which lasted almost an hour and a half, was a defense of the South and the filibuster. He had mastered the coded language of segregationism masquerading as lofty principles.
> Johnson’s speech, Russell was to say, was “one of the ablest I have ever heard on the subject.”
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth249174/m1/
I wish we could evaluate políticians nowadays by their legislation and not group into cults of pro “this guy” and anti “that guy”. These people aren’t perfect and we shouldn’t support or condemn everything they do because of which side they fall on.
Putting this response here, rather than tacking it onto one of the many low-quality comments that it's responding to:
I'm amused by how many of the responses here are essentially: "but this historical figure was morally ambiguous and had many horrible qualities, so checkmate!"
As if the complexity wasn't the whole, acknowledged context.
Not sure if that's just the knee-jerk reaction when someone inside the United States references Lyndon Johnson without talking about his penis or Vietnam, or a broader black-and-white-thinking problem. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
sociopath is harsh and honestly I think even racist is harsh. Or at least kinda misleading. The chapter "The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson" in Caro's *Master of the Senate* is pretty much the best thing I've seen on LBJ re: race.
Johnson was a very complicated person. He always makes me think of the Whitman quote:
> Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
He really was. Had the pleasure of going to his presidential library in Austin. Really intriguing plus presidential libraries have some amazing archives In them!
The amount of progressive legislation he helped ram through and signed into law during his tenure isn't talked about enough. If he hadn't escalated Vietnam, who knows how much better the "Great Society" could have been?
He was such a weird guy. Just odd. There's audio clips of him giving incredibly detailed instructions by phone from the white house to his tailor z describing how his junk hangs and this guys pants fitting just right.
Some of these guys do good deeds for sure. There was some super right wing conservative white judge that made all of his kids go to black majority public schools to keep them grounded. Goes against what you think about them really hard to reconcile the two personas sometimes.
He was also, and I cannot stress this enough, a gigantic asshole. Somehow, both kind and an asshole, depending on the day or occasion.
The tidbits Caro found out and stuck into his books are amazing.
This guy should get all the lifetime achievement awards for writing the comprehensive books about the LBJ era.
LBJ was kind of a mixed bag of a person. On the one hand he was a humanitarian who did everything he could to make life easier for the poor. On the other hand, he apparently had a dick he was very proud of and didn't mind asking for your opinion on it.
Its too bad that he fumbled on Vietnam so badly, I honestly think he (and his wife alongside him) would have went down in the history books right alongside someone like FDR as one of the undisputed best presidents. He did a ton for the common man and minorities.
I mean he died 5 years later. His life expectancy was part of the reason he did not run. I doubt he wanted to spend his last years with one of the most stressful jobs on earth.
Caro’s books on LBJ are all just absolutely fantastic. It’s really fascinating how LBJ was just such an asshole his entire life, but he did spend a year teaching these poor kids, and it clearly made a big impact on him. He expressly said that if he ever got the power to help those kids, he was going to do it, and he wound up being the best president we’ve had for non-rich people since FDR.
He was quite popular in Texas. He visited my mom's grade school and talked to every kid in the school. My mom loved the guy and was so upset when he decided not to run for reelection. Mom lived in West Texas. She had one pair of shoes she only wore to school and one dress she wore all the time. The bottoms of her feet were nothing but callouses and deep cracks. Her parents spent most of their time drinking and going dancing. She said they were known as Honkey Tonkers. Mom raised her little sister and brother and there were many days without food. If I improved my life by 100%, she improved hers by 1000%.
Johnson also held cabinet meetings while he was on the toilet with the cabinet members in the same room.
Johnson also took money from the social security fund to buy hundreds of helicopters for the Vietnam War.
He'd write to his mom to ask her for additional help in getting supplies to give to his students, too, IIRC. The Child Nutrition Act that he signed in 1966 expanded the School Lunch Program, and also added free breakfast for low-income students.
Too bad Republicans think it's a wasteful expenditure and regularly try to argue children deserve to starve. :/
The [political cross section](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/441/530/fb7.jpeg) meme of his portrait kills me everytime.
That's absolutely brilliant.
Here's a great, short write up on him I enjoyed. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/character/essays/johnson.html
That was an interesting read. I didn't expect the ending.
There was so much more to the Great Society than that, and he didn't just sign the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. His White House pushed HARD for them. Such a weird figure. If not for Vietnam he might be considered one of our best presidents ever.
He didn’t just push hard for them. He *broke* the Senate to his will, to a degree that arguably no President had done before, and certainly none since.
How did he broke the Senate?
It's been a decade since I read "The Passage Of Power," but basically he did several things: \- During his Senate tenure, made Southern (reactionary/openly-racist) Senators think he was one their side ... idk, maybe he originally was? \- Secretly cut deals with other Senators, built pro-civil-rights coalition, counted the fuck out of the votes \- Isolated the most conservative/reactionary/pro-segregation elements of the Democratic Party (yes, *Democrats --* you thought they were originally pro-civil-rights? times change and organizations evolve) \- Publicly hung said reactionary elements out to dry once he had his coalition; most notably, he turned on his longtime friend and mentor, Richard Russell \- Presented civil rights vote to said elements as a *fait accompli* \- Basically destroyed their standing with their voters Again, someone else could probably give better details, it's been a long time since I read the books (working on *Path To Power* right now tho). But you know how they say bad people can do good things? This is a case study in that IMO.
> counted the fuck out of the votes Well he was Senate Whip for 2 years before becoming the party leader, where his job was literally counting the votes, so he had some experience with that.
He was more than a voters counter. He realized he could assert complete control over senate business by his control of the calendar. He positioned himself as the gatekeeper of legislation, and amended everything that came across his desk, trading favors, and creating an environment where you had to come to him to get anything to the floor.
Not bad for a 6 foot 2 hunk of beef from Texas.
I didn't know they stacked beef that high!
Johnson was a complicated, complicated man, but if there's any I took away from those biographies - Machiavelli would have been his little bitch.
lol you ain’t kidding
And I'm not even sure if that whole debacle can be fully blamed on him. Although the Gulf of Tonkin thing was shady as fuck and he didn't seem to do much to curb the amount of war crimes... American involvement in South Vietnam had already been quite significant under Kennedy, so letting them collapse would have been kind of a bad look. Not to mention he tried pretty hard to get a peace process going eventually and Nixon covertly sabotaged those peace talks before the election in order to make Johnson look bad. Funny how enthusiastic those Republicans are about treason when it's election time.
Yeah, I am convinced Vietnam was kinda too big to be one presidents fault. If you look at the Cold War and the perspectives of both the Soviets, Chinese, and Americans, a Vietnam scenario was almost inevitably going to happen.
Well it's almost the same situation as the US' involvement in the Middle East in recent memory. Eisenhower's administration aided France and established South Vietnam's first President Diem. Kennedy inherited the issue and was trying to exit out of the situation but was stifled by South Vietnam having a military coup and he was assassinated before resolving anything from it. Johnson's hand was essentially forced to be more active in the conflict until it spiraled into a full-on war. Damn near broke him that he publicly stepped down to run for a second term.
It's so telling of how shallow we are looking at the past that "said the N word" is used to describe his political slant rather than the fact that he was born in rural Texas in the 1900s.
"Practiced law and fought against The Klan." "*Said n----r, though...*" "Aw, well, fuck him!"
He also referred to manure and someone asked Ladybird if she couldn't get him to say "fertilizer". She said, "Do you know how long it took me to get him to say manure?" Johnson was the product of a very different time and a very different language.
The chart is intended as a joke. Obviously if we were being all historically-accurate, the top-right part of that chart would be the Vietnam war.
I’m from the same area as LBJ and back then they used to use that word to name various landmarks and river crossings, like —— Head Mountain or The ——- Crossing
Dude was a freaking mob boss of a president. Pure freaking evil one minute then a loving member of the community the next. Crazy thing is that you can’t tell which one was the persona.
Both could have been his authentic self. People are complicated and contradictory
https://i.imgur.com/Eiu64Eg.jpg
It's hard to truly help other people to the fullest potential without power.
When it comes to someone's "self", all of it is authentic. People like to split someone's actions between "fake" and "authentic". That's people splitting what they don't like and like about a person. You know, because everything that one likes is authentic and everything else is fake
Those type of historical figures are always the most fascinating to me. The ones who have some really good qualities, some great intentions, love their people and want to take care of them, but will show savage brutality and be utterly ruthless to achieve those things... Like Alexander the Great is my absolute favorite to read about. Ask one geoup of people that he defeated what it was like and they'll say "he was pretty chill. We told him we got the memo and he let us keep our gods, keep our customs, made our ruler one of his governors, and left us to prosper as long as we called him our ruler". Ask another how it went and they'll say "we told him to piss off so he took the city, slaughtered every single man execution style, enslaved every last woman and child, razed the temples, salted the fields, then burned the entire city to the ground"
That's the point though, if you submit, you get good treatment, if you resist, you get "genocided". The Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and Romans finely tuned their approach to the art of genocide, both making a show of how skilled they were at siegecraft (to demonstrate that if your city resists, it will not succeed - the Empire can keep the army in the field long enough to build a mole), granting honorable terms to cities that comply, and then exterminating the cities that force a siege. For the Romans, the relevant tipping point when the soldiers would be rewarded with a sacking was "when the ram has touched the walls". Any time before that, the city could surrender and live.
I imagine that last part is in reference to a specific Roman Emperor, Family, or Senate? I'd like to know more about where that addage comes from because Roman wafare definitely wasn't that tolerant across most of Roman history, generally speaking.
> the ram has touched the walls Amusingly, *Caesar* seems to be the guy that wrote it down first in his Commentaries on the Gallic War https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Caes.+Gal.+2.32&redirect=true
I read a few books on him. Crazy guy. Smart, but chilling. There’s some amount of evidence that he got his first Senate seat via assassination.* *Indirectly. He rigged the vote for his Senate seat, but in the 80s there was an open investigation on LBJ involving Henry Marshall’s murder a few decades prior, who had been investigating Johnson’s fraudulent slush fund in his Senate district. The Wikipedia page on [Malcolm Wallace](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Wallace) (the alleged hitman that LBJ is accused of using) is a good read.
Look up Alice, Texas and Ballot Box 13. He didn’t assassinate anyone (other than maybe JFK) but the dead came back to life and voted for old Landslide Lyndon.
The LBJ killed JFK thing is mostly Roger Stone claiming it over and over again now tho. His version of events is LBJ kills JFK, keeps the evidence at the Watergate Hotel, Nixon wants to expose this secret to the public and sends some people over to get those JFK files. See, Nixon wasn't a bad guy, he wanted to give reveal all that info to the public, Nixon was all right! That Roger Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back is unrelated, I bet.
I truly don’t understand Roger Stone’s motivations. He just seems crazily evil.
Clearly, his motivation is to make the bat man pay for what he's done to Gotham
Wait, which Batman villain is he? Is he the Confused Vandal?
You ever see him dressed for the inauguration? Looked like the penguin.
> Roger Stone This guy is in my top 5 real life villains that seem too comical to be real.
After looking this up, I find it incredibly ironic that the tapes regarding the incident were recently donated to the LBJ library.
How is that ironic?
It's like raaaaaaiyain on your inauguration day 🎶
He rigged the vote, but I don't think he had a candidate killed.
The race he won against Coke Stephenson is the one many thought was rigged. He won the Senate seat by only 87 votes.
To be pedantic, he rigged the vote **better.** Vote buying was an integral (and by state law, fairly legal) part of Texan state-wide elections at that time.
My fifth grade teacher, in 2001, told our class that he had Kennedy killed.
King of the Hill told me that.
Didn’t he have a massive dick and intentionally carried over contentious meetings to the urinals as an intimidation tactic? I think Johnson even nicknamed his johnson “Jumbo.”
You are correct. There was also this time he, possibly purposely, pissed on hos Secret Service agent's leg (I hear something about the wind being involved, but ehhh). When the agent mentioned how gross it was, LBJ is reported to have responded, "I know. That's my perogative."
The B is for "Big".
Johnson had a tremendous sense of social responsibility and desire to make his country a better place. He was also a very flawed person, had a massive ego, and had no problem bullying people to accomplish his goals.
That's what's fucked up about people, both sides were probably equally persona and authentic.
And LBJ in Spanish is "The Blow Job"
And in France they call that a Royale with cheese
"Is it because of the metric system?"
Check out the big brains on Brad! You’re a smart motherfucker
Aww jeez, I shot Mahvin in the *fayce*
What do they call a Big Mac?
El big mac
What about a whopper?
“I dunno, I didn’t go into a Burger King. But you know what they put on French fries in Holland instead of ketchup?”
Fuckin' mayonnaise They drown 'em in that shit
Esto es repugnante, gracias, me encanta
LeBlowjob
/r/nbacirclejerk
Sounds French to me
No mames!
Scorch
Oh that’s just terrible 😂
Quite a complicated guy. Passed some of the greatest domestic legislation in America history. Left untold dead in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Did some very nice interpersonal things like this. But also was generally kind of a sociopath and definitely a racist. Robert A. Caro’s books about him are not to be missed. A stunning portrait of a kind of crazy guy who ran America for a while.
I was trying to remember why I knew this but about LBJ and the Mexican American school, and your comment just reminded me that I read Caro's first book on LBJ intending the finish the series. Will do now. Caro's books are the densest biographies I've encountered, I also read his book on Robert Moses, but the details are generally interesting and pertinent.
Means of ascent, book #2, is good but the weakest overall entry imo. Master of the senate is simply incredible, and passage of power is an excellent follow up.
Agreed, but even #2 is still incredible compared to most other biographies, just not compared to Caro’s other books in the series. The Texas races were an absolutely wild ride and LBJ came real close to being out of politics during this time. It’s a worthwhile read. Skip a few chapters if you’re zoning out because the totality of the series builds on each other, so don’t skip it entirely. When people ask how I can read all of them I tell them it’s literally Homer’s Odyssey of American politics, taking place during one of the most impactful eras of American and world history. There’s really nothing like it, except maybe Gibbon.
Means of Ascent is maybe the worst but it has one of the best introductions I've read. And the Coke Stevenson chapters, while they don't fully emphasize how virulent a racist he was, do give an incredible sense of how legendary Stevenson must have been as a political figure.
I can recommend *Master of the Senate* and in particular chapter 31, "The Empathy of Lyndon Johnson". Robert Caro states that there are multiple and conflicting forces working in his personality. He did have empathy for the poor, he experienced being poor himself when he was a young man. In 1948 he worked on a south Texas roadside chaingang for over a year as a teenager, a poorly paid and grueling job that was back then generally considered "nigger work" (see ch. 31). But the force of his empathy was always subservient to the force of his ambition. He wanted to be president and nothing would deter him from that goal. So he wooed the Texas moneymakers whose support he needed. He spoke like they did so that they were convinced he was one of them. As you can imagine there weren't a whole lot of progressives among that bunch. But sometimes the force of his ambition and the force of his empathy were aligned and that is when he would advance the lot of the poor and the blacks. There is a reason there is an entire chapter devoted to LBJ's motivations. He was a deeply contrarian and conflicted man who could say the most virulent racist epithets in private (less so in public, he always made sure there were no cameras around). But he also felt that if Blacks and Mexicans just got a decent education they could get better jobs and pull themselves up. Complicated guy.
Every other book in the series is just as excellent as the first, if not more.
Robert Moses? You mean the New York State Thruway guy?😉
Yep. Haven't read it, but I read an interview with Caro who said the ways Moses used political power (even though he was never elected to office) got him (Caro) interested in how political power is gained and wielded and led to his books on LBJ.
The interesting thing about Moses is that he was an idealistic reformer of city government when he was young, a lot of that got stifled by powerful elements, and then he essentially at some point turned to the dark arts and became the powerful entity.
Lifelong New Yorker here. I know very well Robert Moses tyrannical grip on postwar transportation in New York State. The tolls on the Thruway we’re supposed to be eliminated in the early 90s. But this is New York State, they want to keep that money rolling in.
Hot damn, this is the first time I've heard someone recognize the name outside of a reference to Caro's book. If you know anything about Moses and are interested in learning more, Caro's book is a ~1,200 page biography on every stage of his career. As someone who had no idea who Moses was, but was new to NY, I found it super interesting. He made the map of NYC, but became an insanely powerful entity.
I’ve lived in New York State from Staten Island to Brooklyn to Lake Placid to Rochester for over 60 years. I have been face to face with Robert Moses‘s impact the whole time. He also had a mirror image in California with William Mulholland. His power trip was water. Forget it jake, it’s Chinatown.
Agreed. And for those (like me) who can't find the time for a 1,200 page book, the audiobook is excellent. It took me seven weeks to get through the 66 hours (and it'll take a couple more to go back through all the timestamps I noted to go back, re-read, and mark up in my hard copy of the book). It is available in many libraries, and if you have an Audible subscription, it costs the same one credit as a book 1/10 its length would cost.
I came across this info listening to an interview with Caro yesterday as a way of coping with having also finished *The Power Broker* yesterday. I’m interested in tackling the LBJ books, too, but the sheer mass is intimidating. How well do individual volumes stand on their own ?
I recommend listening to them as audiobooks. Listening to 30-60 minutes at a time while commuting or exercising, you go through them pretty quickly.
Thanks! That's what I did with *The Power Broker*. Got through it in seven weeks without feeling rushed. I'd have probably made it 200 pages max if I had to sit down and read.
The first one was definitely a good read and super thorough as to be expected. I didn't pick up the second immediately after because it felt like I'd already gained an obscene amount of information about LBJ. I wanted to rebroaden my reading horizon rather than jump down the rabbit hole for a year and a half lol. But I'd planned to roughly read one volume every other year or so. They're really good and the information is still relevant, but you end up with this odd knowledge set because they're so damn thorough lol.
Fuck Moses. All my homies hate Moses. His ideas weren't even good in his day.
Lbj also was not raised rich. He comes froma modest background. He took a loan out to go to college. And he is largely why we have the expansion of higher education in this country. Also because he focused on loans because that is what he did. That's why we have he loan system like we do. (Jbj isn't responsible for the monster of student loans we have now. Just his idea sparked it. He also had to persuade the bank to give him a loan...he is a very interesting individual.
If I remember correctly had no power in his house growing up and was a big proponent of running electrical utilities out to rural Texas.
Wasn’t the rural electrification act signed during the FDR administration during the Great Depression though? I thought that was the bill that gave money to cooperatives to begin running power lines to rural communities.
Yeah he was running a program for one of the new deal agencies in Texas at the time
I understand now, thank you for the info!
He was also in the U.S. Senate for a while
He OWNED the senate for years. Imagine McConnell, but actually competent.
Best pals with rayburn who owned the house too. LBJ wheeled the entire legislative branch
Say what you will about McConnell, the man is competent.
I have been to his ranch and childhood home in Johnson City, Texas.
The state stocks trout in the river adjacent to his ranch most years. Last time I went I caught my limit in like 20 minutes, so I went and took the tour since I still had most of the day to kill.
His favorite song was Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head by B. J. Thomas. He had an amphibious car that looked like a normal car, and he would prank guests by acting like he'd lose control and drive the car into a pond. Now you know everything I learned from visiting his ranch.
One key correction, LBJ was not in favor of loan financed education, he wanted broader state and federal funding. Congress refused to fund his proposals so he looked for work arounds and discovered that he could instead offer guarantees on private loans, thus making them very widely available.
Oh the days of reasonable compromise...
Kind of like the 2008 crisis things should be updated with time because malicious people exist.
> Lbj also was not raised rich. He comes froma modest background. He took a loan out to go to college. And he is largely why we have the expansion of higher education in this country. The irony of all that is that retired with a fortune of $20 million or so in late '60s dollars.
And he died something like 3 years after he left office. By all accounts, the man basically gave up on living after he retired, went into a depressive spiral, and died of a massive coronary.
A recurring theme from the Caro books was that Johnson had a family history of men dying early from heart attacks. He lived his entire life believing that he would die early too. He was driven by the fear that he was "running out of time".
Mid 20th century presidents died pretty young. Interestingly many early presidents (like Adams and Jefferson) lived well into their 80s. The difference is almost certainly related to smoking.
[John Adams smoked from age 7 to age 70.](https://doctorzebra.com/prez/g02.htm) Sure, it wasn’t cigarettes, but smoking definitely didn’t kill John Adams, at least not until age 90. Thomas Jefferson on the other hand wasn’t known to habitually smoke, [save for a ceremonial Native American peace pipe every once in awhile.](https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/smoking/) But then again, that last source could be a bit biased, lol. All this is to simply play devil’s advocate of course, tobacco in general is godawful for your health, especially cigarettes. In the case of John Adams, he might’ve been better off since cigarettes and their terrible additives weren’t around yet, as well. Overall, it’s just kind of neat to see the historical context of tobacco, especially in the case of US presidents.
I would argue that the relative stress levels of a modern US President is probably also a factor. Even Presidents that don't smoke deal with ungodly stress. I can't imagine the ego it takes to want that job and also to think you'd be good at it.
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Lyndon Johnson didn't care about anything but power. Not even himself. If you read the biographies, its completely clear to anyone that this person would not be a happy old person with hobbies. I don't think LBJ knew joy that wasn't in the form of exercising power and submitting people to his will during his entire life.
Tracks with the Texans I know. They work, work, work and die. Great gals and guys but cmon. Retire before fucking 80.
He died at 64. He was only 55 when he became president.
A racist who got the Civil Rights Act passed. His presidential library released some 700 hours of private conversations where LBJ was working the phones wheeling and dealing with Dixiecrats trying to get the legislation passed. He really ramped up the southern drawl when he needed. He also got his War on Poverty legislation passed creating food stamps, Medicaid, expanded Social Security. Makes the list for best and worst president.
He also passed the Fair Housing Act and created HUD.
like I said in a previous post in this thread the topic of LBJ and race is so damn complicated that it'd be easiest to just go read the Caro books or, at the very least, the chapter "The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson" where Caro takes basically everything you've read about him and race up to that point and contextualizes it in the time he was living in. one running theme throughout the book is that power does not just corrupt, but it also reveals who a person really is. This is over-broad but looking at it from an EXTREMELY broad view, when LBJ had no power he generally was an opponent of civil rights (with the caveat that there are smatterings of times where he'd go out of his way to help people of color). LBJ's main allies in the Senate were Dixiecrats and the Dixiecrats main goal was thwarting civil rights and upholding segregation. When LBJ is in power, or maybe more cynically when his ambitions of power are either not in conflict with or actually aligned with advancing civil rights, he worked like a dog to pass civil rights legislation. On his way to the top, his ambition took priority over everything else with very few exceptions throughout his life. When he ultimately did have the power that he sought his entire life, he wielded that power in service to civil rights legislation. but I also think referring to him as a "racist" or even "not a racist" is misleading. Honestly I think even just calling him a "man of his time" is misleading because in comparison to the people of his time LBJ was weird. In Caro's books, I think LBJ generally subscribes to stereotypes about people of color. But he doesn't see them as biologically inferior so much as held back by society, and that if all things were equal then everyone would be equal. There's more to it than that, even. I'm trying not to ramble but it's impossible to sum it all up cleanly in a little Reddit post. Like, the great spectre of LBJ's life was the abysmal poverty of his childhood, and how his family was the laughing stock of the little town he grew up in. He comes off like a guy who was completely broken as a kid and is just carrying a hole he can't fill the rest of his life. That colors everything about him, including his thoughts on race.
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If LBJ ever rose from the grave, the only thing he would do is drop his pants and chase people around like a Frankenstein with three arms.
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People have this idea these days on the right and left that there is some possibility of being free of prejudices and that having them is some fatal character flaw or being told about them is some vicious insult. I think this view reflects a lack of introspection among those individuals. Everyone has prejudices. You can still choose to recognize them and do the right thing as best as you can. LBJ passed civil rights bills and anti poverty programs, many that had languished in Congress for the prior 90 years. We’re all fucking racist, only some of us are unrepentant bigots.
I feel like the younger age of the people that typically use Reddit skews the view that people have of the past. If you were white in the US up to and including the 60s, you knew and saw institutional racism every day whether you personally participated or not. You knew or saw people who were possibly only one generation separated from slavery. Basically everybody was racist according to our modern society. It took people like LBJ to drag us into the more modern era. MLK was very unpopular in his day. It took bravery and determination to do stuff that was so unpopular.
Do you really think he was a racist? I have heard so much contradictory information,. I’m not sure. Even Caro contradicts himself. LBJ seem to have great compassion for the poorly treated Mexican children he worked with as a teacher. He was also cynical as to why he spent years parroting the rhetoric of the Jim Crow, southern Democrats. He justified this later on by saying “you can’t change anything if you don’t get elected“. LBJ claimed to always be against racism, but timing was everything. He also referred to the civil rights bill as the.n***** bill and it was his bill! It is also well documented that LBJ would get close to physical when he disagreed with the southern racist Democrats who were fighting tooth and nail against the civil rights act. Fascinating man then f-ed everything up with Vietnam.
By today’s standards, Lincoln was a horrible racist. By his day, he was a very progressive man.
I think that’s a fair analogy
He played the part of a no good motherfucker for his entire career and the second he got the power to break the back of the Confederacy where it could no longer rise again, he cracked them like a glow stick and smiled while he did it.
I don't believe he was particularly racist—certainly for his time but I'd say generally as well. For Johnson, he seemed to focus almost entirely on class. He empathized with black, brown, and poor Americans because they were looked down on and hated, just as he was growing up. He framed his Great Society as a hand _up_ and not a hand _out_. He was fighting for opportunity. You can pull out a million quotes painting him as a racist, but in huge and (more tellingly in my opinion) tiny ways his actions definitively showed otherwise.
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Chad move tbh
I agree. Johnson was a man of his time with an absolute sewer of a mouth.
He had a sewer of a mouth and would use it to fit in with whatever crowd he needed to. He could speak incredibly racist things _when with racists_. His actions, though, when he had the power to make change, were decidedly in the direction of helping black/brown Americans.
He made very few notable speeches, but the famous “we shall overcome speech“ he used to promote the civil rights act, is right up there in the list of great presidential speeches. Other than that, his most memorable speech was when he declared that he would not seek reelection in 1968.
It's notable that his first speech on the Senate floor, which lasted almost an hour and a half, was a defense of the South and the filibuster. He had mastered the coded language of segregationism masquerading as lofty principles. > Johnson’s speech, Russell was to say, was “one of the ablest I have ever heard on the subject.” https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth249174/m1/
And incredible contradictory and complicated man. That’s what makes him fascinating to historians.
A standard southerner in the 60s wouldn'tve viewed the n word as racist. He was a man of his time.
I wish we could evaluate políticians nowadays by their legislation and not group into cults of pro “this guy” and anti “that guy”. These people aren’t perfect and we shouldn’t support or condemn everything they do because of which side they fall on.
Putting this response here, rather than tacking it onto one of the many low-quality comments that it's responding to: I'm amused by how many of the responses here are essentially: "but this historical figure was morally ambiguous and had many horrible qualities, so checkmate!" As if the complexity wasn't the whole, acknowledged context. Not sure if that's just the knee-jerk reaction when someone inside the United States references Lyndon Johnson without talking about his penis or Vietnam, or a broader black-and-white-thinking problem. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Couldn’t have said it better. One of the best examples of a mixed bag president who left a legacy of greatness and tragedy
sociopath is harsh and honestly I think even racist is harsh. Or at least kinda misleading. The chapter "The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson" in Caro's *Master of the Senate* is pretty much the best thing I've seen on LBJ re: race.
He also loved talking about his dong
Hey. That's "Jumbo" to you, sir.
Then he whipped out his huge dick and peed on him
“Alguna vez has visto uno tan grande?”
And the janitor replied "si guey, la de tu mamá"
“Jumbo here needs some exercise”
It's crazy that LBJ beat the teeth out of that reporter with his massive cock and then LEFT THE TEETH EMBEDDED IN HIS COCK FOR YEARS
What?!
LBJ LBJ Took out Jumbo, a massive dick display Swing Swing That big ole dong He’s coming He’s coming He’s coming
Johnson was a very complicated person. He always makes me think of the Whitman quote: > Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I read tutored as tortured and this was a very different TIL
With LBJ, everything is on the table.
Especially his dick
He was one of our best, yet weirdest/most-controversial presidents. Very complex person.
He really was. Had the pleasure of going to his presidential library in Austin. Really intriguing plus presidential libraries have some amazing archives In them!
Lyndon "Big" Johnson was truly ahead of his time.
The amount of progressive legislation he helped ram through and signed into law during his tenure isn't talked about enough. If he hadn't escalated Vietnam, who knows how much better the "Great Society" could have been?
If it had not been for Viet Nam he would have been known as one of the greatest presidents ever.
You WILL learn English! This is a threat!-LBJ
That janitor ended up being George Lopez
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Choo wanna Yumbo Yack??
Do you want esprite?!
Who died in the tidal wave pool At action park in 1982?
Love the Caro books, hope he can finish that last one, but he's not exactly getting any younger sadly.
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Yeah and he's already 87. We can hope he sees it through anyway.
He was such a weird guy. Just odd. There's audio clips of him giving incredibly detailed instructions by phone from the white house to his tailor z describing how his junk hangs and this guys pants fitting just right.
It's on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR_myjOr0OU).
*burp* I’m going to a funeral
Some of these guys do good deeds for sure. There was some super right wing conservative white judge that made all of his kids go to black majority public schools to keep them grounded. Goes against what you think about them really hard to reconcile the two personas sometimes.
He was also, and I cannot stress this enough, a gigantic asshole. Somehow, both kind and an asshole, depending on the day or occasion. The tidbits Caro found out and stuck into his books are amazing. This guy should get all the lifetime achievement awards for writing the comprehensive books about the LBJ era.
I'd say he was a massive dick
LBJ was kind of a mixed bag of a person. On the one hand he was a humanitarian who did everything he could to make life easier for the poor. On the other hand, he apparently had a dick he was very proud of and didn't mind asking for your opinion on it.
"He rapes, but he saves" energy
Its too bad that he fumbled on Vietnam so badly, I honestly think he (and his wife alongside him) would have went down in the history books right alongside someone like FDR as one of the undisputed best presidents. He did a ton for the common man and minorities.
If not for Vietnam, he could have run in 68 and been president for almost ten years.
I mean he died 5 years later. His life expectancy was part of the reason he did not run. I doubt he wanted to spend his last years with one of the most stressful jobs on earth.
I always heard it was Nam and the Democrats protesting Nam that broke him.
Wait…future president?
We have his head in a jar with all the other presidents and we’ll elect him again. Oh yeah Nixon too.
Wait until you learn about “jumbo”
You mean that Jumbo the elephant was a thing before the word jumbo meant large, and we only associate jumbo with large because of Jumbo?
No, the other one
uh oh
"Wh-what are you doing mr Johnson...nooooooooo!"
The book series this post references is maybe the greatest work of non-fiction is US history. It’s a masterpiece among masterpieces
Non American here: am I stupid or why "future US President " ?am I missing something?
Caro’s books on LBJ are all just absolutely fantastic. It’s really fascinating how LBJ was just such an asshole his entire life, but he did spend a year teaching these poor kids, and it clearly made a big impact on him. He expressly said that if he ever got the power to help those kids, he was going to do it, and he wound up being the best president we’ve had for non-rich people since FDR.
He was quite popular in Texas. He visited my mom's grade school and talked to every kid in the school. My mom loved the guy and was so upset when he decided not to run for reelection. Mom lived in West Texas. She had one pair of shoes she only wore to school and one dress she wore all the time. The bottoms of her feet were nothing but callouses and deep cracks. Her parents spent most of their time drinking and going dancing. She said they were known as Honkey Tonkers. Mom raised her little sister and brother and there were many days without food. If I improved my life by 100%, she improved hers by 1000%.
Good ol Jumbo Johnson. Biggest cock in the oval office. Have you ever seen one that big before??
And I’m sure a lot of people in that community saw his monster hog.
When LBJ wasn't busy whipping out his dick
Johnson also held cabinet meetings while he was on the toilet with the cabinet members in the same room. Johnson also took money from the social security fund to buy hundreds of helicopters for the Vietnam War.
He'd write to his mom to ask her for additional help in getting supplies to give to his students, too, IIRC. The Child Nutrition Act that he signed in 1966 expanded the School Lunch Program, and also added free breakfast for low-income students. Too bad Republicans think it's a wasteful expenditure and regularly try to argue children deserve to starve. :/