biography
| name: |
Johnson, Lyndon Baines
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also known as LBJ
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1908–73)
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| biography:
| US statesman and 36th president (1963–9), born near Stonewall, Texas, USA. The son of schoolteachers, he taught briefly after graduating from Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Southwest Texas State University) (1930), then gravitated to Democratic politics. After serving as President Franklin D Roosevelt's administrator of the National Youth Administration in Texas, he went on to the US House of Representatives (1937–49) and was quickly marked by his strong support of New Deal programmes. A member of the Naval Reserve, he enlisted for active duty within hours after Pearl Harbor, the first Congressman to do so, and served in the Pacific until President Roosevelt ordered all Congressmen back to their elective office in July 1942. He won a narrow race for the US Senate (1948) and served two terms (1949–61). As Democratic whip and then majority leader (1955–61), and as the consummate arm-twisting deal-maker, he helped pass some of the most progressive social legislation of the century, including the civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960. Elected John F Kennedy's vice-president (1960), he became president on Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, and in 1964 he was returned to office by a landslide. He proclaimed a ‘Great Society’ programme to fight poverty and racism, achieving passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), plus a slate of social-welfare programmes including Medicare. At the same time, he led the USA into an increasingly bloody and unpopular war in Vietnam. Declining support from his own high-level appointees and increasing divisiveness around the country led to his decision not to run in 1968. He retired to his Texas ranch and to writing his memoirs. Larger than life in his public behaviour but more than vulgar in his private speech, sensitive to the plight of many less-fortunate Americans but insecure in his dealings with the Eastern Democratic Establishment, he ended as something of a tragic figure because of his overreaching ways. |
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