Lyndon B. Johnson was the 36th president of the United States and was sworn into office following the November assassination of President John F. Many of the programs he championed—Medicare, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act—had a profound and lasting impact in health, education and civil rights. He declined to run for a second term in office, and retired to his Texas ranch in January Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, , near the central Texas community of Johnson City, which was named for his relatives.
He was the first of five children of Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. To help pay for his education, he taught at a school for disadvantaged Mexican-American students in south Texas. His first-hand look at the effects of poverty and discrimination on his students made a deep impression on Johnson and sparked in him a lifelong desire to find solutions to these problems.
In , Johnson moved to Washington , D. Representative Richard Kleberg of Texas. Energetic and capable, Johnson began to meet influential people and learn about the national political process.
House of Representatives as a Democrat. Quickly earning respect as a smart and hardworking legislator, he was re-elected five times. After an unsuccessful run for a U. Senate seat in , Johnson became the first member of Congress to volunteer for active duty in the military when the United States entered World War II. Johnson reported for active duty in December and served in the U.
Navy as a lieutenant commander until all members of Congress in the military were recalled to Washington in the summer of In , Johnson was elected to the U. Senate following a bruising Democratic primary. After crisscrossing Texas by helicopter, Johnson managed to eke out a victory in the primary by just 87 votes.
Once he reached the Senate, Johnson showed a deft political touch. In , at age 44, he became the youngest person ever to serve as minority leader of the Senate. Two years later, when Democrats won control of Congress, Johnson became the Senate majority leader. His ability to work productively with Republican President Dwight D.
Eisenhower and unite his party behind important legislation made him a powerful figure in Washington. In , John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. The event thrust Lyndon Johnson into the presidency. A man widely considered to be one of the most expert and brilliant politicians of his time, Johnson would leave office a little more than five years later as one of the least popular Presidents in American history.
The man who had risen from the poor Hill Country of Texas to become the acknowledged leader of the United States Senate and occupant of the Oval Office would return to Texas demoralized and discredited. He died four years later, a few hundred feet from the place of his birth. Kent Germany is an associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of South Carolina and a nonresident research fellow at the Miller Center.
Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Governor George Wallace of Alabama drops out of the presidential race despite strong showings in several Democratic primaries. Three civil rights workers are found dead in Mississippi; the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were discovered in an earthen dam two months after having been abducted and shot at close range.
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had all been participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer efforts to register black voters in the state. Several members of the local KKK were involved in the murder, though only one perpetrator was ever convicted, 41 years later, before the case was closed. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the President power to pursue military action in Vietnam.
Johnson receives the Democratic nomination for President. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey D-MN is nominated as the vice-presidential candidate. The Warren Commission releases its report, rejecting the notion that Kennedy was assassinated as part of a conspiracy.
Nikita Khrushchev is forced to resign as leader of the Soviet Union and is replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. Nine American soldiers are killed in an attack on U. Johnson begins the bombing of North Vietnam. Tensions between X and NOI leadership led to his suspension from the group and subsequent assassination. On March 15, , President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to introduce voting rights legislation.
In a moving oration, Johnson called on white Americans to make the cause of African Americans their cause too. After winning reelection in , President Johnson realized the need for significant voting rights legislation, but, as he explained to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Still King and other civil rights leaders sought ways to bring the issue of voting rights to the attention of the American people. The city of Selma had 15, African Americans of voting age but only were registered to vote. Furthermore, the city's board of registers used blatantly racist tactics to keep African Americans off the voting rolls. On March 7, , more than marchers attempted to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge, when state troopers confronted them and demanded that they turn around.
The marchers halted facing the troopers, and the troopers advanced on the marchers, attacking them with nightsticks and tear gas.
When police confronted them, however, they knelt in prayer and turned around. In his address to Congress on March 15, President Johnson used stirring oratory to create support for voting rights legislation.
The Voting Rights Act passed both houses of Congress with bipartisan support. The act outlawed practices, such as literacy tests, that had been used to keep African Americans from registering to vote.
The Justice Department gained the power to intervene where discriminatory practices had kept less than 50 percent of eligible voters from registering to vote. If this intervention failed to fix the situation, federal registers could take over the local voting systems.
President Johnson, the master legislator, pushed for the passage of a strong bill to end the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South. Led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Johnson sends U. The U. Supreme Court finds a Connecticut law banning the use of contraceptives unconstitutional.
Martin Luther King Jr. Johnson increases the number of troops sent to Vietnam, indicating his determination to engage in a ground war. James Meredith, known for integrating the University of Mississippi as its first black student, is shot on his solo march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. While Meredith was hospitalized, other civil activists organized to complete his march, which Meredith rejoined along with 15, other marchers.
In Miranda v. Arizona, the U. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, providing rules of succession upon the death or incapacitation of the President, and enabling the President to appoint a new vice-president in the case of a vacancy.
He is best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place. He was one of the lawyers who argued before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education , which was decided in and ruled that segregated education for blacks and whites was inherently unequal.
In , at the request of President Johnson, Marshall resigned his judgeship to become the first black Solicitor General of the United States.
In this position, Marshall argued before the Supreme Court. The President viewed this position as a way of bolstering Marshall's legal reputation before he appointed him to the Supreme Court. If Marshall was compared to the radical groups emerging from the Civil Rights Movement in the late s, he appeared quite conservative.
As a lawyer, he valued upholding the law, and while he appreciated the attention that the protests of Martin Luther King, Jr. Marshall was also a firm integrationist, believing that equality was best achieved by integrating society.
Still, among white southerners the man who had argued the Brown case was too radical and had no place on the Supreme Court. President Johnson realized that this sentiment would make Marshall's confirmation difficult. After significant delays, Marshall finally received a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee and faced a barrage of hostile questions from southern senators.
Some tried to paint him as a radical or a Communist, while Strom Thurmond of South Carolina tested Marshall with obscure legal and historical queries. Despite this opposition, the Judiciary Committee voted Marshall's nomination to the full floor of the Senate. In the floor vote, Johnson used his influence to convince twenty southern senators not to vote on the matter. Their absence assured Marshall's confirmation. On October 2, , Marshall became the ninety-sixth justice of the Supreme Court.
He was the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court. Marshall remained on the court for twenty-four years, providing an increasingly unaccompanied liberal voice on the law.
Marshall's appointment to the court was a symbolic and significant action in moving the nation toward racial equality. Riots break out in Newark, New Jersey, after racial tensions in the city were escalated by the police beating of a cab driver. The riots lasted 5 days leaving 26 dead and hundreds injured. Racial tensions in the city of Detroit came to a head after a police raid of an unlicensed bar led to confrontations between police and patrons and escalated to 5 days of riots; the Michigan Army National Guard and two airborne divisions were sent in, 7, arrests were made, 43 people died and 1, were injured.
North Korea refuses to release the crew of the ship until December. More than 80, troops and guerrillas attacked 44 provincial capitals, 64 district capitals, and 5 of South Vietnam's major cities. While the South Vietnamese and United States troops reversed most of the offensive's gains in the following two weeks, some intense fighting continued for months after the attack.
In the end, the Tet Offensive failed to deliver a military victory for the North Vietnamese, but it did create a crisis for the administration of President Lyndon B. For ten days before the attack, the U. American officers feared that this siege would turn into another Diem Bien Phu, the final siege before the French abandoned Vietnam in To protect Khe Sanh, U.
This move left cities and capitals vulnerable to the attacks of the offensive. After the Tet Offensive began, the North Vietnamese halted their siege of Khe Sanh, but managed to take other targets in the region like the ancient imperial capital of Hue.
It took American and South Vietnamese troops almost a month to recapture Hue. Still, the United States managed to turn the Tet Offensive into a military victory. While loses were high on both sides, the actions of the American military saved the South Vietnamese regime from collapse.
Back in the United States, however, the American public had a very negative reaction. President Johnson, his administration, and U. After the offensive, they quickly lost their credibility. Prominent journalists, such as Walter Cronkite, began to doubt that the United States could win the war and voiced these fears in newspapers and on television.
On February 3, days after the attack, millions of Americans watched on their televisions as a Saigon police officer summarily shot a Viet Cong guerilla in the head on a Saigon city street.
More than ever before, many Americans began to have doubts about the war. One public opinion survey conducted after Tet found that 78 percent of the American public thought that the United States was not making progress in the war.
The reaction of the American public to the Tet Offensive had serious consequences for the Johnson administration. Militarily, it forced the administration to reconsider its strategy in Vietnam, leading to a partial halt in the bombing of the North. Politically, the Tet Offensive shattered the President's political future.
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