Lived

August 27, 1908 – January 22, 1973

Home State

Texas

Party

Democratic

Vice President

Hubert H. Humphrey

Lyndon B. Johnson was a master legislator who became President upon Kennedy's death and enacted the most sweeping domestic reforms since the New Deal. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Fair Housing Act. But his escalation of the Vietnam War, based in part on the contested Gulf of Tonkin incident, drove him from office. His presidency remains a study in the inseparability of domestic triumph and foreign tragedy. Texas schoolteacher, congressional aide, U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader (the most powerful in the office's history), Vice President under Kennedy.

Southwest Texas State Teachers College, 1930.

Signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Appointed Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice. Declared the War on Poverty. Signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (Medicare and Medicaid), the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), the Higher Education Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968).

Escalated U.S. troop levels in Vietnam from 16,000 to over 500,000. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, secured on contested facts, became the template for open-ended executive war-making. Withdrew from the 1968 race amid the war's collapse in credibility.