TANATA:

(Editor’s note:These are not the days that were. Forty-five years have passed since the unthinkable happened: a sitting president, young, handsome, a beautiful wife and children, a playboy, had part of his brain blown toward the back of his limousine, where it wedged between the trunk and the spare tire. Jackie Kennedy climbed out onto the trunk of the still moving car, grabbing what she could of her husband’s head and brain on the black metal, and said to the Secret Service man rushing up to help her, as Mrs. Kennedy handed him the bloody mess, “Will this help?”

Despite his weaknesses, John Kennedy cared deeply for humanity, especially the American people and doing on their behalf what he thought was best for the people he was elected to serve. He opposed secrecy, war, oppression and injustice. John F. Kennedy made mistakes, but none so grave that he should die for them. The biggest mistake that John Kennedy ever made was agreeing to put Lyndon Baines Johnson on the ticket, while Johnson supporters were twisting his arm. Caving, as he did, put the devil in the White House, in the view of many. These are not the days that were. Twenty years ago, ten years ago the Kennedy assassination, still being as it was an unsolved crime in the minds of many if not most Americans, spurred journalists, filmmakers and authors to do whatever it took to finger the person or people who had a motive to kill the 35th president of the United States and followed through with an act of public brutality which still sends chills up some of our spines. Now we know more.

Without a doubt the shock waves of this event still reverberate through history, its horror still shaping and defining us as a nation, as a species, as human beings, even as all of these things bring us to the present. We probably know who killed JFK. He may have been a Texan, he may have been someone who defied the good advice of a former president not to make war a business, he may have been ignorant, oafish, a lout, a crude pig of a man who, if he wanted, would eat off of the plates of the people sitting on either side of him. It sounds as if this man was a lot like the people who are in power today. And there are good reasons why this is so. It’s all part of the same movement, and we have awakened too late to do anything much about it. While so much has changed and these are not the days that were, there are similarities and parallels between now and then. But we may have grown too weak, too weary to care, surely, as we watch our government killing all of us and others around the world. It’s as if we’re bleeding to death, too incapacitated to rise up and demand justice, at least apologies from those who killed JFK and who are killing us. If we had known then what we know now … the American people would have torn Washington apart. Now that is being done for us. God help those people for whom life must be torment, as they look back, much older now, to see all of the destruction their hands have wrought. God help us all. God rid us of this still pervasive evil.

This is good reading below, very insightful, so much that it makes a person who lived through all of this and watched LBJ try to fill the shoes of the man he probably killed … want to puke.)

Transcript from the Film “LBJ”
Written by David Grubin

LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson — Texan, Democrat, political virtuoso. He rises up out of the 1960s like a Colossus, like something from Shakespeare, filling the stage — 10, 12 characters in one. He is admired and he is detested. Everybody who knew him had stories.

Yet Lyndon Johnson was hard for the country to know. He seemed so stiff and colorless on television, not at all himself. The real Lyndon Johnson was a mover, a driver, a charmer, a bully — six feet four inches tall with a size 7-3/8 Stetson hat. He loved food — chili and tapioca pudding. He loved attractive women. He was a good dancer, a brilliant mimic. He was funny, often hilarious. They all say that.

But the real measure of a leader is what he gets done, the size of the problems he faces. Before Lyndon Johnson, we were essentially a segregated society. Inequality among black Americans in the South was set in law. Before Lyndon Johnson, there was no Head Start program, no Medicare — so much that we take for granted — and before Lyndon Johnson, very few Americans had even heard of Vietnam. He is a story, a very American story and, in all, a tragedy in the real sense. He’s the central character in a struggle of moral importance ending in ruin.

[voice-over] He had been scorned as an unscrupulous politician, a vulgar, wheeler-dealer driven by ambition and a lust for power, but on January 20, 1965, the night of his inaugural gala, Lyndon Johnson was a happy man. Overwhelmingly elected, he promised to wipe out poverty and segregation, protect the old and educate the young — that was his dream. Few presidents would ever know more triumph, few suffer such a swift and tragic fall.

John Connally, LBJ Campaign Aide, LBJ Advisor: He was generous and he was selfish. He was kind. At other times, he was cruel. At times, he was an earthy, crude-acting fella. At other times, he was incredibly charming. He could be whatever he wanted to be, but he was a strange, complex, man who had basically almost a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. He was two different people.

George Reedy, U.S. Senate Staff, White House Press Secretary: What was it that would send him into those fantastic rages where he could be one of the nastiest, most insufferable, sadistic SOB’s that ever lived and a few minutes later really be a big, magnificent and inspiring leader?

Robert Dallek, LBJ Biographer: What you have is a thoroughly American president, who was American from day one: his birth in South Central Texas. This is a man who reflected American moods and attitudes and contradictions and trends. And when he failed, it was America’s failure.

George Reedy: Hubris, as the Greeks would put it. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Now, this was a man that was so big, that reached so far and made it and then let the whole thing crumble. I think it’s one of the great stories of history.

Part One: Beautiful Texas

Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson: [1964 Democratic Convention] My fellow Americans, I accept your nomination.

McCullough: [voice-over] The 1964 presidential campaign was all Lyndon Baines Johnson. After years of compromise and opportunism, he fired America with his vision of a great society.

Pres. Johnson: Our first objective is to free 30 million Americans from the prison of poverty. Can you help us free these Americans? And if you can, let me hear your voices!

McCullough: [voice-over] He reached out to the poor, the dispossessed, to Americans who were left behind.

Pres. Johnson: Do something we can be proud of. Help the weak and the meek and lift them up and help them dream and give them an education where they can make their own way.

McCullough: [voice-over] Campaigning with the energy of 10 men — “As if he had an extra pair of glands,” one aide said — he sounded the battle cries of his political youth, echoing his very first campaign a quarter of a century before.

In the spring of 1937, Johnson was 28 years old, campaigning as an ardent Roosevelt New Dealer, reaching out to the working men and poor dirt farmers of the Texas hill country. He ran for office as if his life depended on it. He spoke in every town in his district, lost 40 pounds in 42 days, made 200 speeches and collapsed with appendicitis just two days before the election.

From his hospital bed, with his wife Lady Bird, he learned that he’d been elected one of the youngest members of Congress. His political ideals would waver, but for the rest of his life, he would display the same nervous intensity, the same obsessive drive to succeed and a talent for attaching himself to power.

One month after Johnson’s election, the President paid a holiday visit to Galveston, Texas. Franklin Roosevelt was Lyndon Johnson’s political hero. Now, the ambitious new congressman seized the opportunity to meet him.

Lady Bird Johnson: The Governor was going down to pay his respects, so he called Lyndon and said, “I’d like to take you along because you ran so completely on Roosevelt’s platforms that I think he ought to meet you.” And Lyndon was there with his eyes out on stems, taking in every word and every gesture.

McCullough: [voice-over] They talked about fishing, about the Navy. Then, Johnson asked for an assignment to nothing less than the Appropriations Committee. The President said that would have to wait.

Robert Dallek: Here are the two great politicians in American history in this century, I believe, and they’re sizing each other up. And Roosevelt gives him the name of Tommy Corcoran, Tommy “The Cork,” the White House aide and the Washington fixer and he tells Johnson, “If you need anything when you get to Washington, you call up Mr. Corcoran.” Well Roosevelt himself gets back to Washington and he calls up Corcoran, the story goes, and he says to him, “Tommy, I just met the most extraordinary young man down in Texas.”

Eliot Janeway, Economist, Johnson Family Friend: “With any luck, if the chips go right and he hangs onto the friends he makes, this boy Lyndon Johnson one day can wind up being the President of the United States. He’s got it.” It was quite a call, wasn’t it?

McCullough: [voice-over] In the Texas hill country, they said that Lyndon was born to politics. His grandfather had run for state office and his father, Sam Ealy Johnson served six terms in the Texas legislature. Sam was an old-time reform politician who voted to tax big business and, like his father before him, supported the eight-hour day. “I loved going with my father to the legislature,” Lyndon said. “The only thing I loved more was going with him on the trail during his campaigns. Sometimes, I wished it would go on forever.”

Robert Dallek: There are state legislators who remember Lyndon. They said it was uncanny how much he looked like his father, how much his mannerisms were like his father’s and how they grabbed you by the lapels and pulled you toward them and were very physical. And there was a kind of warmth to it, a kind of very human quality. And he got the smell in his nose of politics and it just enthralled him.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson’s mother Rebecca was a college graduate, cultured and ambitious. It was said that Lyndon got his drive and ambition from her. Nothing had prepared Rebecca for the hardships of life in the rural backwaters of Texas with no electricity or indoor plumbing. “Life is real and earnest,” she wrote, “and not the charming fairy tale of which I had so long dreamed.”

“The first year of their marriage was the worst year of her life,” Johnson later said. “Then I came along and suddenly everything was all right again. I could do all the things she never did.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, LBJ Biographer: There was a certain depression that was in her which could only be relieved by putting all of her hopes and ambitions on this child. I mean, he would tell me that when his father was away at the state legislature, even when he was 11 or 12, that he was invited to stay in her bed at night to keep her company.

But then, when he came home with a bad report card, she would literally withdraw her love to the point where, he told me, that she wouldn’t even speak to him for days on end, that she would talk to her husband or the other children and pretend he didn’t exist. So that lack of consistent love, I think, was what made him feel always that he would only be loved if he performed.

McCullough: [voice-over] Fear of failure would haunt him all of his life. When Lyndon was in his teens, he watched his father go broke. Cotton prices plummeted. Sam was forced to sell the family farm. Neither Lyndon nor his mother ever wanted him to be like his failed father and it fired his drive to be successful.

The day Lyndon Johnson left for Washington to take his place in Congress, he bid his parents an emotional goodbye. His mother had told him his election was compensation for her own disappointments. “You have always justified my expectations, my hopes, my dreams. How dear to me you are you cannot know, my darling boy.”

Johnson never forgot his father’s parting words. “Now, you get up there, support FDR all the way, never shimmy and give ‘em hell.” Less than six months later, his father was dead.

As Johnson arrived in Washington, the excitement and promise of Roosevelt’s New Deal still animated the capital. The New Deal was the perfect climate for the young congressman and his wife, Lady Bird. He had proposed to her the day they met and she became the perfect political wife, rising at midnight to scramble eggs for his friends, running his congressional office, working as his business manager. Lady Bird never stopped serving her husband’s ambitions.

Assigned a room in the old House Office Building far from the corridors of power, the freshman congressman didn’t hesitate to turn to the President for help. With the support of the White House, Johnson secured loans and millions of dollars in federal grants for farmers, schools, housing for the poor, roads, public libraries; but helping complete the great dam on the lower Colorado River was his greatest achievement and the next step in the education of Lyndon Johnson. In 1938, rural Texans were still living without electricity.

E. Babe Smith, Pedernales Electric Co-op: It was a rather primitive life, you know — no running water and they had no refrigeration. Every meal had to be started from scratch. They used to say, you know, the man was a gentleman who could provide his wife with a sharp axe, you know, to cut the wood with.

McCullough: [voice-over] “Of all the things I’ve ever done,” Lyndon Johnson later wrote, “nothing has ever given me as much satisfaction as bringing power to the hill country of Texas.”

E. Babe Smith: And my daughter — she was about nine years old — she just couldn’t believe how the house was lit up. She said, “Momma, the house is on fire.”

McCullough: [voice-over] The dam was everything a young congressman could have hoped for. The hill country farmers thanked Johnson for the electricity and the men who built the dam thanked him for the government contracts: George and Herman Brown of the Brown and Root Construction Company. Johnson helped the Brown brothers build a billion-dollar construction empire. In turn, the Browns would fund Johnson’s political campaigns.

Ronnie Dugger, LBJ Biographer: Judgmentally, what I’d say is that they were a couple of guys who were making a lot of money out of the New Deal and they didn’t want to have to pay higher wage rates, so they were against the union. It wasn’t a matter of high principle. They wanted to get rich and they did get rich. Well, Lyndon sidled up to them or they sidled up to him and they made book.

I remember asking Johnson once in the White House, “Did you deal with cash?” And he said, “It was all cash.” I mean, there were no records, so under those circumstances, there were plenty of politicians who were selling out to business interests. I use a pejorative term. I don’t know what other term to use. I mean, in TV you have to use some shorthand. I mean, they were agreeing to be with those people in exchange for money which they used in their campaigns. That’s pretty close to selling out, isn’t it?

And everything is organized not like his father — around ideas and ideals — but like a sun, around himself and his own career; not to say that he is not, therefore doing a lot of good. He brings real electricity to people that don’t have it in his own district. Yeah, sure he’s really smart.

McCullough: [voice-over] On May 2, 1939, George Brown wrote Johnson a letter. “I hope you know, Lyndon, how I feel in reference to what you have done for me and I’m going to try to show you my appreciation through the years with actions rather than words.” Two years later, the Brown brothers made good on their promise.

In 1941, when Johnson made a run for the Senate, he needed all the money the Brown brothers could give him. He was just a young congressman reaching beyond his own small district in a race that was pure Texas politics — part campaign and part circus. Twenty-nine candidates took the field, but in the end, there was only one man to beat, the Governor of Texas, “Pappy” Lee O’Daniel.

Lewis Gould, Historian: Well, Pappy O’Daniel was a man who had come out of nowhere to be governor of Texas in the late 30’s. He was a radio personality and that’s what made him so popular. He had a band that played for him called The Light Crust Dough Boys and their theme song was “Pass the biscuits, Pappy.” And he became known as W. Lee “Pass the biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel. He was conservative, but he didn’t really believe in anything except getting elected and being popular.

Mrs. Johnson: He had been on radio for quite a long time with a very popular program of country music.

E. Babe Smith: Every day at noon, he had his Texas network, you know, and he played and he sang. The ladies just worshipped him, you know. You couldn’t find anybody who voted for him, but he always won the election, you know.

Homer Dean, LBJ Campaign Supporter: “Now, listen, everybody from near and far, we’re The Light Crust Dough Boys.” And then, he would sing the [sings] Beautiful, beautiful Texas / where the beautiful blue bonnets grow / We’re proud of our forefathers / Who fought at the Alamo / You can live on the plains or the mountains / Or down where the sea breezes blow / And you’re still in beautiful Texas / The most beautiful state that we know…

Rep. James Pickle, (D) Texas, LBJ Campaign Worker: And here was Johnson, an unknown young congressman, so to speak, but he also had the aura that he was going somewhere. He was going to do something and you could feel it. And he could have fun, but he was all business of dreaming and daring, imagining, attempting new things.

Robert Dallek: There was nobody who campaigned harder than a Lyndon Johnson. He worked night and day, speaking, walking, driving, just doing everything he conceivably could to get his name before the public and convince them of the fact that he would make a first class senator.

Homer Dean: I believe that you people are fed up on hired hands doing nothing but entertaining you. You are going to send Lyndon Johnson to the Senate next Saturday by the greatest vote you ever sent a senator there.

Mrs. Johnson: We went to every small hamlet, walked up and down the street, shook hands with all the merchants who had lined up all the friends that all your friends could summon, your mother and your kin folks.

McCullough: [voice-over] As the campaign drew to a close, Johnson remained the underdog, but once again, by lifting high the Roosevelt banner, Johnson closed the gap. On election night, he was confident. With 96 percent of the vote counted, he led O’Daniel by 5,000 votes. Congratulations were already pouring in from Washington.

Mrs. Johnson: We had been declared elected by the Texas Election Bureau on Saturday night, when the votes were counted. Banner headlines on Sunday morning, “Johnson elected to Senate.”

Rep. James Pickle: The Dallas News, the great Dallas News even ran a story on Sunday morning, “LBJ, Johnson United States Senator.” They declared him elected about like they had done with Dewey.

Mrs. Johnson: But the margin by which we were elected began to dwindle. It was about 5,000 to begin with and it began to dwindle.

McCullough: [voice-over] The 33-year-old contender was about to get a lesson in the dark side of politics that he would never forget. In the rough-and-tumble world of Texas elections, stuffing the ballot box was not unusual, especially in South and East Texas and no one understood this more than John Connally, Lyndon Johnson’s friend and campaign manager.

John Connally: A lot of those counties had political leaders. Sometimes it was the sheriff, sometimes a county judge. They basically carried the county the way they wanted it to go and this had been historically the case and we had the support of most of those political leaders.

Saturday night about midnight, they call me and say, “We’ve got the returns. What do you want us to do with them?” I said, “Well, tell me what they are, first, and then report them.” The opposition, then — Governor O’Daniel and his people — knew exactly how many votes they had to have to take the lead. They kept changing the results and changing the returns and our lead got smaller and smaller and smaller. Finally, Wednesday afternoon, we wound up on the short side of the stick and lost the election by 1,311 votes.

And I’m basically responsible for losing that ‘41 campaign. We let them know exactly how many votes they had to have. And I did it, no question about it.

Rep. James Pickle: It was a hard pill for Mr. Johnson to swallow because we’d gone out late Saturday to celebrate. I hadn’t done that in other campaigns. I always waited till the next day.

Robert Dallek: Lyndon is asked does he want to challenge Pappy’s victory because it is a stolen election, but Lyndon knows that his own folks and supporters have done some pretty untoward things as well, including the fact that they violate all campaign finance laws and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Johnson says, “No, we can’t challenge them.” He said, “I’ll wait my turn and when my turn comes, I’ll fix the ballots next time.”

John Connally: And we thought it was the better part of wisdom not to contest it, not indicate that we were guilty of just sour grapes and to go ahead and say, “We’ll meet again.”

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson was not prepared for defeat and he was never more miserable. “I felt terribly rejected and I began to think about leaving politics and going home to make money,” he said, but he couldn’t bring himself to quit. He bought a house and established the basis for his own personal fortune. Lady Bird bought a small Austin radio station. After nearly 10 years of marriage, their first daughter was born. Three years later, they would have another girl.

But politically, Johnson languished. The House of Representatives was too small a stage. Along with southern congressmen, he voted against civil rights and told his liberal friends, “You can’t be a statesman if you don’t get elected.” Finally, after seven restless years, Johnson seized a chance to run for the Senate. It would be a campaign that would haunt him for the rest of his political life.

Mrs. Johnson: And this time, his opponent was Coke Stevenson, also a governor and a very formidable man.

McCullough: [voice-over] Coke Stevenson was a self-made man, tight-fisted with the budget and immensely popular. His most ardent admirers called him “Mr. Texas.”

John Connally: Well, the polls clearly showed that Coke Stevenson, starting out, had almost a 2-1 lead over Johnson. It was an almost insurmountable lead and most people thought that Johnson couldn’t win it.

Homer Dean: He told us and John Connally told us and anybody that had been to a county fair and a goat-roping and knew anything about Texas politics knew that this was make-or-break for Lyndon Johnson.

Robert Dallek: By 1948, Johnson had become a master at Texas politics. They’d run these shows, these extravaganzas in these small towns and the band and the music and maybe giving a savings bond or a barbecue, beer and some kind of watermelons or something like that. Well, this was all part of traditional Texas hoopla and Johnson didn’t miss a beat there. He understood that was an essential part of it.

McCullough: [voice-over] Meanwhile, Coke Stevenson was so popular and so well known that he campaigned from small town to small town the old-fashioned way, but not Lyndon Johnson. In a headlong, five-week helicopter campaign, Johnson criss-crossed the state, made 370 landings and lost 27 pounds. In one day alone, he spoke to 15,000 people.

Rep. James Pickle: And I’ll tell you, if you’d go into a little town and say, “Lyndon Johnson’s coming to town and he’ll be here at 2 o’clock and he’ll land on his helicopter,” everybody in town would want to see that. they’d kind of laugh about it, but they didn’t want to miss it.

McCullough: [voice-over] They called him the “Johnson City Windmill.” Texans never saw anything like it.

Rep. James Pickle: But it was dramatic. Can you imagine, a little small town that never had a helicopter come or never seen one much? No television in those days, you see. They’d fly in over a little town and circle a couple of times and he’d get on the P.A. system and say, “This is Lyndon Johnson. I’m going to land in just a minute and I want to shake every hand down there.” People looked up there and they’d kind of laugh and giggle, but their mouth would be open and they’d say, “Is this really happening? Yeah.”

Ava Cox, LBJ’S Cousin: He would say, “This is Lyndon Johnson, your congressman. How do you think things are running? All right, Ed, what about the crop out there? Do you have a good crop this year?” And he’d come over here and he’d call one’s name. “Well, all right, Side Hyde, how’s the cattle business doing today?” “Olin, how’s the car business coming on?” Little Olin jumped and looked around. He wasn’t expecting that to be called out.

Rep. James Pickle: When he’d land, he’d bank the helicopter over and he’d circle around over the field and throw his Stetson hat out over the crowd. Now, that was dramatic and he had about a four-beaver hat, you know. That was a good one. And when he did it, those of us on the ground who were part of the crew, our job was to go get that hat. We had to reclaim that hat and if we didn’t get it, we’d catch “Hail, Columbia” from the boss then.

And he’d say, “Do you know how much that hat cost me? Do you know how much? Have you been in to buy a Stetson hat lately?” We’d say no, of course we wouldn’t ‘cause we didn’t dare wear a hat like it. He said, “That’s coming out of my pocket. You get that hat when we throw it out,” and we’d have to go get that hat.

Usually we could get it, but if you got it recovered by a little 10-year-old boy, it was pretty hard to run up and say, “Son, give me that hat,” and take it away from him. So it wasn’t always pleasant.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson had begun his political life as a Franklin Roosevelt liberal, but in 1948, he ran against the unions, supported big business and spoke out strongly against civil rights. The oil boom had made Texas wealthy and conservative and as Texas changed, so had Lyndon Johnson.

Ronnie Dugger:: Well, you had an authentic conservative — Stevenson — running against a New Deal liberal — Johnson — who has concealed his colors. Lyndon presented himself as more anti-union than Coke Stevenson. Now, what kind of sense does that make to you in terms of who Lyndon really was? None. There’s no sense to it except, of course, the absolutely unqualified opportunism of a successful politician of this particular mold. He out-righted the most conservative figure in Texas politics at that time.

Robert Dallek: Some people have tended to idealize Coke Stevenson and see him as a kind of old-fashioned Texas cowboy and man of great integrity. In fact, Coke Stevenson was a terribly reactionary man. First of all, on civil rights, in 1942, a black Texan was lynched in Texarkana and Stevenson gave very little public response against this. And when he was asked privately about it, his comment was — “You know,” he said, “these Negroes sometimes do things which provoke whites to such violence.”

And when the 1944 Supreme Court decision was handed down, asserting that blacks had the right to vote in Democratic primaries, Stevenson called it “a threat to our security and safety.” He was fiercely anti-civil rights and a racist and a segregationist of the first order.

McCullough: [voice-over] The race was so close there was no way to call it. The lead seesawed back and forth.

John Connally: I said, “I think you’re going to win it.” He said, “No, I think we’ve lost it.” And I said, “No, it’s going to be the reversal of 1941.”

McCullough: [voice-over] Three days after the polls closed, the votes were still coming in and Stevenson led by a handful. It looked as if Stevenson would be the new senator from Texas. But Johnson remembered 1941. He was not about to lose again. The election now hinged on the “Duke of Duval County,” George Parr, the man who controlled the votes in South Texas.

John Connally: George Parr controlled that county and those people voted the way he wanted them to vote, no question about that, none whatever. Now, the candidates had nothing to do with it.

Lewis Gould:: In the nature of things, you don’t write down, “Bought these votes yesterday afternoon at 4 o’clock,” but obviously, there was some understanding between the Johnson people and the political bosses in South Texas.

Robert Dallek: Earlier, when Coke Stevenson ran for governor, he had also been the recipient of the favor of the bosses because he had paid them. In one of his races, George Parr, the “Duke of Duval County,” had given Stevenson a vote of 3,310 to 17. Is it conceivable that such a lopsided margin would have been given to any candidate for any office?

McCullough: [voice-over] In the tiny South Texas town of Alice six days after the polls had closed, 202 additional votes were reported from Precinct Box 13. When they were counted, all but two were for Lyndon Johnson. When the signatures of the 202 new voters were examined, some say the names were all written in the same ink and listed in alphabetical order.

Homer Dean: I did not notice that they were in alphabetical order, although some of the people who saw it testified later that that had happened.

McCullough: [voice-over] Homer Dean was a 29-year-old attorney working in the Johnson campaign when Coke Stevenson arrived in Alice and demanded to see the voting list locked in the vault of the Texas State Bank. Dean is one of the few people who actually saw the disputed names.

Homer Dean: Well, it did look to me like there had been a change in ink and it looked like 200 or 202 or 203 names had been added to the poll list in a different ink by a different hand. Mr. Stevenson was an outraged man that felt like the election had been stolen from him and he felt like what he’d just seen was evidence of that.

McCullough: [voice-over] Stevenson challenged the election at the Texas State Democratic Convention. It was no use. The Johnson forces were too powerful. When it was all over Precinct Box Number 13 made the difference. Johnson was by 87 votes, but the question of a stolen election remained.

Ronnie Dugger:: You cannot make the statement, on the facts, that Johnson stole the election. I think you can say it was stolen for him — that’s true — but did he order it done? I never could find a John Connally down there doing it.

John Connally: I wasn’t within 200 miles of him. I was in Austin, Texas a battery of telephones, calling all over the State of Texas. I didn’t know anything about it and that’s the truth of the matter.

Ronnie Dugger:: If Homer Dean knew it was stolen, you don’t find Homer Dean saying he stole it.

Homer Dean: I didn’t then and don’t now think that Johnson directly participated in it. He received the benefit of it, but I don’t think he directed it or even knew about it when it was happening.

Ronnie Dugger:: You see, it just gets away from you.

McCullough: [voice-over] Nineteen years later, Ronnie Dugger met in the White House with President Lyndon Johnson and asked him about the election of 1948.

Ronnie Dugger:: One night, up in his bedroom, he started laughing and he seemed to wonder if he could find something and he said he was going back into Bird’s bedroom, which was next door. And he rummaged around in a closet. I think I could hear him rummaging around in the closet. And he came in with this photograph of these five guys in front of this old car with Box 13 balanced on the hood of it.

I looked at him and grinned and he grinned back, but he wouldn’t explain it to me. I asked him, well, who were these guys and why did they have Box 13 on the hood of this car? What did it mean? And he just — nothing. He wouldn’t say. As we’d say in Texas, he wouldn’t say nothin’. So there it is — history turning on a mystery.

McCullough: [voice-over] It was 1949 and Texas had a new freshman senator. They called him “Landslide Lyndon.”

Lewis Gould:: It cast a shadow of illegitimacy over the rest of his political career that he never escaped. — the idea of “Landslide Lyndon,” 87 votes, that there were skeletons in his closet, that he was a wheeler-dealer, that there was always something kind of flawed about his title both to being Senator and to being President.

McCullough: [voice-over] When an exuberant Johnson entered the Senate, he was a powerless freshman joining a select club run by insiders very much his senior. He turned for help to a man who knew just how the club was run, Bobby Baker. Baker had come to the Senate as a teenaged page in the 1940’s and knew, everyone said, where the bodies were buried.

Robert Baker, LBJ Senate Aide: And so he said, “Mr. Baker, I wanted to meet you.” He said, “My spies tell me you’re the smartest son of a bitch over there.” And I said, “That’s not true and the only reputation I have is that my word is my bond and I protect your privacy.” He said, “Well, you’re the kind of man I want to know.”

So he said, “I want you to know that the National Democratic Party is much more liberal than Texas.” He advised me in no uncertain terms that he was committed to the oil interests in Texas.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson always knew where the power was. In Texas, he cozied up to the oil barons. In the Senate, he attached himself to the southern conservatives and their influential leader, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia.

Robert Baker: Senator Russell was a lonely bachelor. He read probably 10 books a week. He was a loner. Well, Lyndon Johnson, at this time, knew where the power was and had Senator Russell been a woman, he would have married him because — or married her.

McCullough: [voice-over] Under Russell’s patronage, Johnson was given the job of Party Whip. He transformed what had been a minor post into a seat of power. Two years later, he was elected Democratic leader. “Landslide Lyndon” was now one of the most powerful men in the United States Senate.

In his third year in the Senate, Johnson had bought himself a piece of land along the Pedernales River. The consummate Washington politician soon took on the trappings of the mythical Texas rancher. But he never stopped working. The LBJ Ranch was more than a place of relaxation. It became part of the stuff of power.

John Connally: He had no interests, really, except politics. That was his whole life. He was totally committed to it. He never read anything except politics. He didn’t care about any sports. He didn’t read any books. I don’t know of one book he read in all the years I’ve known him.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:I think, for Lyndon Johnson’s temperament, the Senate could not have been more perfectly suited. For one thing, it was a small number of people. You’ve only got a limited number, all of whom can be subject to her personality. He could get up every day and learn what their fears, their desires, their wishes, their wants were and he could then manipulate, dominate, persuade, cajole them. And what really made things work in the Senate was personal relationships and Johnson was just strictly the best at that.

Ronnie Dugger:: And he was determined to recruit you or kill you and they used to call it “the Johnson treatment.”

George Reedy: It was an incredible blend of badgering, cajolery, reminders of past favors, promises of future favors, predictions of gloom if something doesn’t happen. When that man started to work on you, all of a sudden, you just felt that you were standing under a waterfall and the stuff was pouring on you.

Howard Schuman, U.S. Senate Aide: I’ve seen him. He used to get his — he would sit in front of a senator — face to face — and then he would take his head and; he would get it underneath and go up like this and talk to him.

Peter Roberts, Newsreel Commentator: The 1954 midterm election will go down as one of the most peculiar on record.

McCullough: [voice-over] In 1954, with the Republicans in control of the White House, the Democrats gained control of the Senate, making Lyndon Johnson the youngest Majority Leader ever. He was 46 years old.

Robert Dallek: There was no more powerful Majority Leader in American history. He understood the way the Senate worked. He understood what senators needed and what they wanted. He had biographies on each of them so that he knew what their tastes and intentions and aims and desires and wishes and hopes were.

Howard Schuman: He knew the womanizers, he knew the drunks. He knew people who wanted what committee assignments. He knew what rooms they wanted. He knew if they wanted a trip to Europe and take their wife.

Robert Baker: If we had a vote coming up and there’s someone that couldn’t vote with us, but we could send him on a NATO trip, we would do that, so you know, whereby he would not have to vote against us, but he would be off and his wife would be happy and he’d be attending a conference. And those conferences are very important.

Howard Schuman: His subordinate, Bobby Baker, who was the floor man for him — and people called “Little Lyndon” — said one time, “I have 10 senators in the palm of my hand.”

Robert Baker: It’s a “good ole boy” network. Well, you know, if you’ve been — if you’ve served in the Congress, either the House or the Senate, together for many years, you’ve done favors for each other and you say what you can do and can’t do and what’s possible.

Howard Schuman: And they controlled all the what I call “boodle,” the things that were given to people.

Robert Baker: Every senator wants a private office in the Capitol because it was a little hideaway. They could get away from the press, they could get away from their wife. They could have private luncheons. They can go get drunk, you know. They can be a human being.

Howard Schuman: But when he ran the Senate, incredible what he would do. I saw him, at one time, hold up a roll call vote, which usually takes 15 to 20 minutes — he held it up for more than an hour so they could extract Hubert Humphrey out of the air over the National Airport and they finally brought him in and voted it. And during this time, Johnson would be going like this to the clerk, telling him to slow down as he called the roll. And then, there were other times when he had the votes and he was winning by maybe one or two votes and he’d tell them to speed it up.

Harry McPherson, U.S. Senate Staff: In the Senate, he would pace the floor, pull out his inhaler, draw deep breaths into his nose, looking around the chamber, thinking all the time, nervous.

Eliot Janeway:: He never sat in a chair. He’d stand up and jitter. He’d bounce up and down, rattling silver dollars in his pocket.

John Connally: He ate in a hurry. He wolfed his food. Most of the time, he had no manners. He’d eat off of the plate of — either person on either side of him, if he ate something that he liked and they hadn’t finished theirs, he’d reach over with his fork and eat off of their plate.

Robert Baker: He would eat his dessert, Lady Bird’s, Lynda’s and daughters of mine, too. I’m telling you, he was a big man, but he could handle two fifths of Cutty Sark every night and that’s not good. And he smoked cigarettes like a crazy man till he had his heart attack.

Sen. Lyndon Johnson: I’m going home to get a long rest and if the doctors give me the OK, I’ll be back on the job in the Senate when the Senate reconvenes in January.

1st Reporter: In the meantime, no politics and onto the rocking chair?

Sen. Lyndon Johnson: Well, I wouldn’t say that you could take politics completely away from me, but we’ll have it at a minimum.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson had very nearly died. For the rest of his life, the image of a sudden death hung over him.

George Reedy: One of Lyndon Johnson’s real troubles was he was incapable of relaxation. Even when he tried to relax, it became terribly frenetic.

John Connally: He used to call me on Saturday mornings and say, “Let’s go to the game. I’ve got some tickets. We’d sit there during the whole ballgame and talk politics. He didn’t watch the football game, literally didn’t watch it. He was watching the crowd, he was looking around, waving to this one, waving to that one.

Howard Schuman: Johnson had an immense ego. He had on his shirts and on his sleeves his initials, LBJ. His wife’s name was Lady Bird, at least informally, so her name [sic] would be LBJ. His two children, his girls were both LBJ. His ranch was the LBJ Ranch. His dog was “Little Beagle Johnson.”

McCullough: [voice-over] As Johnson prepared to return to Washington, the liberals within his own party began to attack him. When he courted the popular Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, they accused him of selling out. They wanted stronger action on housing, jobs, and civil rights.

Joseph Rauh, Jr., Americans for Democratic Action: My opinion was that he was destroying the Democratic Party and not doing his job. His job was the opposition to the Eisenhower Administration and he didn’t do it. They were playing just hanky-panky with each other and there was really no Democratic opposition.

Howard Schuman: Well, one doesn’t know whether he was a liberal or a reactionary. Probably he was neither. He probably was just an extraordinarily skillful parliamentarian who was an opportunist and who sensed the wind and then went in that direction.

McCullough: [voice-over] No one knew what Johnson really stood for. In 1957, when a civil rights bill came before Congress, it looked as if he would be finally forced to take a stand.

Man at Rally: We are not going to permit the NAACP to take over your schools. We are not going to permit our little children to be used as pawns in a game of power politics to get the racial vote in northern cities.

Roger Wilkins, Attorney; Johnson Administration: We have to remember what the country was like for black people in 1957 and 1959 when Johnson was majority leader.

Ku Klux Klansmen: [KKK rally] They want to throw white children and colored children into the melting pot of integration, out of which will come a conglomerated mulatto mongrel class of people!

Mr. Wilkins: It was still a segregated country. Blacks still could expect random violence.

McCullough: [voice-over] Nobody knew what the Majority Leader of the Senate would do. Never in his life had Johnson voted for a civil rights bill, but now, determined to shake his southern image and become a truly national politician, Johnson confronted his old friend and mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia.

S. Douglass Cater, Washington D.C. Reporter; Special Assistant to the President: The very first thing he did was to meet with his old and closest advisers and say, “This time, we are going to get a bill and you might as well face up to it.” Richard Russell suffered a great deal because they really did feel that this was the beginning of the end of the South as they knew it.

McCullough: [voice-over] Behind the scenes in the Senate cloakroom, Johnson moved from one side to the other, first trying to assure the southern Democrats.

Robert Baker: He would just say, “If you don’t pass this moderate bill, you’re going to have a bill crammed down your throat because Richard Nixon is very smart politically and he is courting black people right now and you’re going to get something that you can’t live with.”

McCullough: [voice-over] And Johnson knew just what to tell the northern liberals.

Robert Baker: I heard him many times chew Hubert Humphrey’s ass out. “Hubert, it don’t take any genius to be for the civil rights from Minnesota.” He said, “How many black people you got in Minnesota?” And Hubert would say, “Well, we’ve got 12,000.” He says, “Well, you make me sick.”

McCullough: [voice-over] By the middle of the summer, the Johnson treatment was having its effect.

2nd Reporter: Senator, there is some talk of a compromise. Do you see any area for compromise?

Sen. Richard Russell, (D) Georgia: Well, I haven’t had any compromise presented to me yet, but I am a realist and a reasonable man.

McCullough: [voice-over] By skillful maneuvering, Johnson engineered a bill acceptable to all sides.

Sen. Johnson: A compromise has been negotiated. I am pleased that the bill was passed. It is a great step forward and a very important and delicate feat.

McCullough: [voice-over] On August 7th, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but Johnson had traded away the muscle in the law. In theory, the law protected the voting rights of blacks. In fact, it gave the federal government no real power of enforcement.

Howard Schuman: That bill had nothing in it. In fact, when it was finally passed, Mr. Douglas said that it reminded him of Lincoln’s old saying that it was like a soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.

Robert Baker: “Can you believe those bastards?” he said. “You know, I’m the first man in the history of this country to pass a civil rights bill, then they got to give me the shiv.”

McCullough: [voice-over] The bill was pure Johnson compromise, a masterpiece of Senate politicking, but it was the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. Johnson had freed himself from the shackles of his southern image and he was ready to move on. By 1960, Lyndon Johnson made public what everyone already knew. He wanted to be President of the United States.

Sen. Johnson: [1960 presidential campaign] The person you select as your president, the way he’s carried, the burdens he knows, the decision he makes may well determine whether you live as free men.

McCullough: [voice-over] But John Kennedy, the young, wealthy, glamorous senator whom Johnson had casually dismissed as inexperienced, had the nomination all but wrapped up. Johnson resentfully called Kennedy “sonny boy.”

Sen. John F. Kennedy: [1960 Democratic Convention] I have found it extremely beneficial serving in the Senate with Senator Johnson as leader. I think if I emerge successfully in this convention, it will be the result of watching Senator Johnson proceed around the Senate for the last eight years. I have learned the lesson well, Lyndon, and I hope it may benefit me in the next 24 hours.

McCullough: [voice-over] On the eve of the Democratic Convention, Johnson challenged Kennedy to a debate. Kennedy coolly brushed Johnson aside.

Sen. Kennedy: [I am] full of admiration for Senator Johnson, full of affection for him, strongly in support him for Majority Leader and I’m confident that in that position we’re all going to be able to work together. Thank you.

Convention Delegate: Mr. Chairman, Wyoming’s vote will make the majority for Senator Kennedy.

McCullough: [voice-over] Kennedy was nominated overwhelmingly on the first ballot. Now, all that was left was the vice presidency and no one was sure what Johnson would do if Kennedy offered it to him.

John Connally: He said, “Well, Jack Kennedy just called. He’s coming down to see me.” He said, “What do you think he wants?” And I said, “He’s going to offer you the vice presidency.” He said, “Oh no, he’s not. Oh, no. He wouldn’t do that.” He said, “He’s probably going to ask me to manage the campaign.” I said, “No, he’s going to ask you to be Vice President.” He said, “Well, what should I say to him?” I said, “Well, you don’t have any choice. You have to say yes.”

Robert Baker: And I said, “Mr. Leader, let me tell you — John Kennedy knows that no Catholic has ever been elected President in the history of this country. He knows the only chance in hell that he has to be President of the United States is if you run as Vice President.” And I said, “The vice presidency is the worst job in the country. It’s not worth a warm bucket of spit,” as John Nance Garner said, “But you’re one heartbeat away from the presidency.”

McCullough: [voice-over] When Kennedy offered Johnson the vice presidency, no one was happy. The conservatives didn’t want Johnson to run with the liberal Kennedy and the liberals wanted one of their own. Finally, the candidate’s brother, Robert Kennedy, paid Johnson a visit.

Eliot Janeway:: I was in the room, in Johnson’s bedroom with Johnson and John Connally, the three of us alone on the morning of the nomination for the vice presidency at about 10:30, when Bobby Kennedy stormed in and started screaming at Johnson that if he knew what was good for him, he’d get off that ticket.

Robert Baker: Well, Johnson did not like Bobby Kennedy and it was mutual. They hated each other. So what happened was that Mr. Rayburn and John Connally went in to meet with Bobby Kennedy.

John Connally: And Bobby Kennedy said that all hell had broken loose on the convention floor and that Johnson was going to have to withdraw, just change his mind and not accept the vice presidency. And Mr. Rayburn looked at him and he said, “Aw,” and uttered an expletive that I am not going to use.

Robert Baker: Old man Rayburn said, “Shit, sonny,” and kicked him out.

John Connally: I said, “Your brother came down here and offered him the vice presidency and Mr. Johnson accepted it. Now, if he doesn’t want him to have it, he’s going to have to call and ask him to withdraw.”

Sen. Kennedy: [1960 Democratic Convention] And I am grateful, finally, that I can rely in the coming months on many others, on a distinguished running mate who brings unity and strength to our platform and our ticket, Lyndon Johnson.

S. Douglas Cater: And that was a real transformation, in which this young pup, Jack Kennedy, suddenly is it and he, Lyndon Johnson — big ole clumsy Lyndon Johnson — is playing second fiddle. And you got to believe it that those vice presidential years were agony for him.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: It was a terrible sense of having lost that center of dominance and suddenly, I think, he felt like a little kid looking in a glass door at the candy display inside and he couldn’t quite reach it. It was devastating.

Robert Baker: Bobby never got over the fact that his brother overruled him and put Johnson on the ticket and that — there was a mutual dislike second to none in the history of the world.

S. Douglas Cater: It wasn’t the way the President treated him — I think Jack Kennedy treated him with due respect — but everybody around Kennedy kind of poked fun at him and made mockery of “Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?”

Robert Baker: And Kennedy, you know, named him the head of the Space Center, plus he sent him on every foreign trip in the history of the world to, you know, tried to give him something to do.

McCullough: [voice-over] Vice President Johnson made ceremonial visits to 26 countries, but he wasn’t the kind of man who could get the feel for another culture. Wherever he went, he took his own oversized bed, a special nozzle for his shower, dozens of cases of Cutty Sark and thousands of personally inscribed ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters as gifts. But, at least abroad, he was center stage. At home, there were still the Kennedys — urbane, charismatic, immensely popular.

Eliot Janeway:: He was consumed with this passion of inferiority towards the Kennedys and they gave him a very hard time when he was Vice President. They were going to dump him from their ticket. They made a buffoon of him, a laughingstock. When, as Vice President of the United States, he visited Scandinavia, Bobby Kennedy sent an uncoded telegram to the embassies — uncoded so that everyone could see it — saying that, “The Vice President in no way speaks for the government of the United States and is not to be received as if he were an emissary of the President.”

McCullough: [voice-over] In 1963, a chagrined and frustrated Vice President told an aide, “My future is behind me.” And then, Dallas.

Mrs. Johnson: It all began so hopefully, but the feeling in Texas was not good for Kennedy and so, of course, we were uptight. And we were going along and I was heaving a sigh of relief, “Thank the Lord, everything’s going to be all right,” and then came that shot. The Secret Serviceman suddenly vaulted over Lyndon and pushed him to the floor. And here we were, racing down at breakneck speed, not knowing what had taken over our lives.

This man came in and told Lyndon that President Kennedy was dead.

I guess we were all silent for a while and then Lyndon said, “We must get to Air Force One.” I don’t know how long we sat, but quite a while. He said, “Does anybody on this plane know the Oath of Office?” Nobody did, word for word, precisely. He said, “You’ll have to call the Attorney General and ask him.” What an excruciating call. The Attorney General was Bobby Kennedy.

Woman: “I do solemnly swear” —

Vice Pres. Johnson: I do solemnly swear —

Woman: — “that I will faithfully execute” —

Vice Pres. Johnson: — that I will faithfully execute —

Woman: — “the office of President of the United States” —

Vice Pres. Johnson: — the office of President of the United States.

McCullough: [voice-over] A beloved president was gone and in his place stood this big Texan with an unsavory past. The Kennedys distrusted him, the American people were suspicious, stunned and baffled. On November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson became the 36th president of the United States.

Part Two: My Fellow Americans

McCullough: [voice-over] “I took the oath,” Johnson said, “but for millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper. And then, there were the bigots and the dividers and the eastern intellectuals who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up. The whole thing was almost unbearable.”

Rumors of dark schemes and conspiracies were everywhere. Anxious Americans knew little about the new president. What they did know was that their beloved John F. Kennedy was gone.

“I always felt sorry for Harry Truman and the way he got the presidency,” Johnson told an aide, “but at least his man wasn’t murdered.”

Man: [Joint Congressional Session, November 27, 1963] Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States.

McCullough: [voice-over] President for only five days, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress. After decades in Washington, he knew them all and he knew what they were thinking — would he measure up?

Pres. Johnson: Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, members of the House, members of the Senate, my fellow Americans — all I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today. The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. Today, John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind.

McCullough: [voice-over] He was never very good at formal speeches, but in the most important speech of his life, he reassured a shocked and grieving nation.

Vice Pres. Johnson: John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished in the first 1,000 days nor in the life of this Administration, but he said, “Let us begin.” Today, in the moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, “Let us continue.”

McCullough: [voice-over] With a few simple words, he invoked the legacy of the dead president. The new president would carry on. “I knew it was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay,” Johnson later wrote. He convinced a reluctant and grieving Kennedy Cabinet to stay on, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

John Connally, LBJ Adviser: I said, “These are all Kennedy people. A lot of them are good people, but they are Kennedy people. They were committed to him and not to you.” I said, “I don’t know that these people will be disloyal, but they obviously can’t have the same feeling for you that they had for Jack Kennedy. You’re entitled, as President of the United States, to have your own Cabinet, people that you know, whom you trust.” “Well,” he said, “I just can’t change them now.” He said, “I promise you I’ll change them after the election in ‘64.”

McCullough: [voice-over] “I had to take the dead man’s program and turn into a martyr’s cause,” he said. “That way Kennedy would live on forever and so would I>” An accident of history had given him the power that he had reached for his entire life. Now, he was determined, as he said, to be “the greatest president of them all, the whole bunch of ‘em.”

His first test would be civil rights. Racial tensions could no longer be tempered by compromise. The civil rights movement was demanding freedom — now. Johnson’s abrupt assumption of the presidency had converged with the fierce struggle for black equality.

In 1964, racial segregation still ruled the South by both law and custom and Lyndon Johnson was a southerner burdened by a history of vacillation, compromise and a long string of votes that had kept segregation strong. Civil rights would measure the limits of Lyndon Johnson’s moral imagination.

Roger Wilkins: A southern accent went a long way to raise my defenses, so when Johnson became President, I was fearful [and] very, very unhappy.

McCullough: [voice-over] With civil rights activists confronting segregation all across the South, many Americans wondered how the new President would react.

James Farmer, Civil Rights Activist, CORE: Johnson did not approve of, he did not like — I can even use a stronger term — he hated the demonstrations of the movement in the street. He hated them.

Rep. James Pickle: But he had enough sensitivity that he knew that all hell was going to break loose if we didn’t do something about it.

McCullough: [voice-over] Civil rights workers laid siege to a segregated society. There were sit-ins at lunch counters, on trains and buses, in hotels and theaters, forcing Johnson to act. When some of Johnson’s aides advised him not to lay the prestige of the presidency on the line, he responded, “What’s it for if it’s not to be laid on the line?”

Roger Wilkins: He said over and over and over again in those days, “I’m going to be the president who finishes what Lincoln began.” He said it over and over again. Well, it was great rhetoric, but you also knew that it was a great reading of history, that if, in fact, he could accomplish that, he would belong up there on Mount Rushmore.

McCullough: [voice-over] A bill to prohibit the segregation of blacks and whites in public facilities had been put before Congress by John Kennedy, but it was stalled. Johnson determined to act.

Pres. Johnson: This bill is going to pass if it takes us all summer and this bill is going to be signed and enacted into law because justice and morality demand it.

Roger Wilkins: All of a sudden, there was a power and a force behind this kind of legislation that we hadn’t seen in the Kennedy time and with that, my view about him began to change.

McCullough: [voice-over] The full force of the Johnson treatment, perfected in the Senate, now became a weapon in the arsenal of the presidency.

James Farmer: He was on the phone with Republican senators and with Southern Democrats and he was bargaining with them. He was telling them about some bridge that they wanted back home or some dam that they wanted. And he would help them with that if they would help him with this and give him this thing that he wanted, that the whole nation wanted and the nation had to have. And he was also reminding them in not-too-subtle tones that if they didn’t support him, he would have ways of getting back at them.

Jack Valenti, Special Assistant to the President: So in those days, we played hardball. My catalogue included a number of southern congressmen where you had to say — they’d say, “Well now, Jack, there’s no way I can vote for that,” and I’d say, “Well, Mr. Congressman, I know you’ve got this, this and this that you want and I don’t think we’re prepared to deal with you on that unless you’re going to be responding to some of the entreaties from the President.” We let them know that for every negative vote, there would be a price to pay.

Rep. James Pickle: And he kept saying to his southern friends, “If I can advocate it, as President, you ought to be able to vote for it in your constituency. This may be the best chance we’ll ever have. I think we got to change our way of doing things.” It’s not like a Yankee from New York we got to do this. This was a southerner saying it ought to be done and that helped. It didn’t help a whole lot because the southern boys, they knew that they again were going to catch heck for it.

Roger Wilkins: That’s what he got from the southerners , that, “You’re killing us by loving up the niggers. You’re ripping the party apart here. You’re hurting us.” And Johnson’s answer was, “This is what we’ve got to do and this is what I’m going to do and this is what the Democratic Party is supposed to do.”

McCullough: [voice-over] Once again, the leader of the Southern Democrats, his old friend and mentor, Richard Russell, stood in his way.

Sen. Richard Russell: But we are not yet ready to surrender in our opposition to this bill which we feel is a perversion of the American way of life.

Jack Valenti: And he said to Dick Russell, “I want this Civil Rights Bill passed and you nor no one else is going to stand in my way.” And I remember Richard Russell said to him, he said, “Well, Mr. President, you may do it, but I’ll tell you what — it’s going to cost you the South and it will cost you an election.”

McCullough: [voice-over] Southern senators prepared to filibuster — to prevent the bill from ever coming to a vote by talking it to death — but Johnson was not to be denied.

Joseph Raul, Jr.: What the President did was to say, “They can filibuster till hell freezes over, I’m not going to put anything else on that floor,” so the filibuster couldn’t win. And that was Johnson’s great contribution to the Civil Rights Bill.

McCullough: [voice-over] The debate paralyzed the Senate for 83 days. It was the longest filibuster in Senate history. And then, the Senate voted to stop the talking. The bill passed. That same evening, at 2 in the morning, Johnson reached Congressman Jack Pickle, one of only six southerners to vote in its favor.

Rep. James Pickle: And he says, “No, Jake,” he says, “this is your President.” He said, “I know it’s late and I know where you’ve been.” I said, “Where have I been?” He said, “You’ve been out having a few drinks and trying to forget that vote you cast. You voted for the Civil Rights and you’re trying to forget it.” And I said, “I sure am.” And he said, “Cause you’re going to catch heck, aren’t you?” And I says, “Yes, I’m afraid I will.” He said, “Well, let me tell you — the reason I keep calling is I want you to know that your President is extremely proud of you.”

He said, “I had chances to do something like one year as a congressman,” he said, “and I didn’t.” And he said, “I’ve always regretted.” He said, “You did something I thought was basically right and I didn’t want this night to go by until I called on you personally to tell you how proud I am of you.” He said, “I am. Now,” he said, “go to sleep.” Well, of course, I couldn’t — between the vote and that call, it was hard to go to sleep then.

James Farmer: I remember that when I was in the White House talking with him, I asked him how he got to be the way he was. He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, here you are, calling senators, twisting their arms, threatening them, cajoling them, trying to line up votes for the Civil Rights Bill when your own record on civil rights was not a good one before you became Vice President. So what accounted for the change?”

Johnson thought for a moment and wrinkled his brow and then said, “Well, I’ll answer that by quoting a good friend of yours and you will recognize the quote instantly. ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.’”

Ed Herlihy, Newsreel Announcer: [1964] Congress passes the most sweeping Civil Rights Bill ever to be written into the law and thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men that began with Lincoln and the Civil War 100 years ago.

McCullough: [voice-over] When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill into law, a century of enforced segregation was finally over. Blacks and whites could ride the same buses, eat at the same restaurants, use the same washrooms, stay at the same hotels. A southern president had broken the southern system of segregation.

Andrew Young, Civil Rights Activist, Southern Christian Leadership Conference: There was something about this man — I mean, he had a pretty shoddy career and he’d done some pretty ruthless and awful things, but he knew poverty and he knew racism. And I really think that he decided that this was the way to assure his place in history. This was the way to really save the nation. And he knew it was not politically expedient, but I think he really knew it was right.

Eliot Janeway:: His attitude, going in, was that Kennedy couldn’t pass anything. “I will pass everything that Kennedy failed to do. Where Kennedy failed, I will succeed. I am Kennedy’s trustee. I will out-Kennedy Kennedy. I will perform what Kennedy promised, period,” especially Vietnam.

McCullough: [voice-over] Far across the world in a small country in Southeast Asia, there were ominous forebodings of a war that would one day consume Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

Larry Berman, Vietnam Historian: I believe Johnson wished he had never heard of Vietnam. He didn’t have an interest in Vietnam. He didn’t care about Southeast Asia when he first came to the White House, he wishes it had never come to him, but it had. He couldn’t pass the buck any longer. This was the great tragedy, really, of his presidency.

George Reedy: I can recall one night on a very long walk with him around the south grounds of the White House where he said that Vietnam was going to be his downfall, that Vietnam was going to give him a role in history that would be very, very negative.

Vietnam had not figured very prominently in the American press. Most Americans didn’t have the faintest idea where it was or why it was there. I know I myself, for instance, when I was a child, I had one of those children’s books, Children Around the World. I understood most of it — a little Dutch boy, a little Dutch girl, a little Chinese boy, a little Chinese girl — but one page had me baffled. There was a place called Indochina.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson didn’t start the war in Vietnam, he inherited it. Three presidents before him — Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy — had sent American “advisers” and weapons to help fight a nationalist uprising led by Communists. By 1963, 16,000 American advisers were already there.

Vietnam was divided in two. South Vietnam — weak, corrupt and dependent on American aid — was fighting the Vietcong, a guerrilla army that received support from the Communists in the North. In the North, Johnson would find adversaries with a will as powerful as his own. They wanted one Vietnam, not two. They had resisted the Japanese and defeated the French. They were not afraid of the Americans. Their leader was a man they called “Uncle Ho.”

Ho Chi Minh was a soldier, a politician and a dedicated Marxist — ruthless when necessary, ready to risk everything to unite his country. To the Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh was a patriot. To Lyndon Johnson, he was just another Communist.

Less than one month before Johnson became President, South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse.

William P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State: President Johnson inherited a Vietnam situation that was deteriorating. The political situation was deteriorating, the military situation was deteriorating. I remember vividly that it was about — oh, it was the Sunday after he was sworn in that he had a meeting in which he said, “We are going to carry on with this.” And that was the theme, continuity. “We are not changing things. We’re going to make it work.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin:His need to fight that war was out of a whole world view that he shared with a majority of the country, that what Vietnam really represented was a huge struggle in the cold war with the Communists and that if you gave an inch somewhere, somehow they would be taking advantage of that.

Announcer: [U.S. Defense Department Film] The aim of the Communists is to establish control over all of Vietnam and after that, over all of Southeast Asia.

James Thomson, Jr., National Security Council Staff: People got entranced by maps and great red lines sweeping southward and then westward. This great cartographic fallacy in fact seized the minds of men who should know better at the top.

McCullough: [voice-over] Just two days in office, Johnson told an aide, “The Chinese and the fellas in The Kremlin, they’ll be taking the measure of us. They’ll be wondering just how far they could go. They’ll think with Kennedy dead, we’ve lost heart. They’ll think we’re yellow and don’t mean what we say.

Clark Clifford, Presidential Adviser: President Johnson, in one of his more hyperbolic moods, said he felt we had rather face the threat of Communism in Southeast Asia than face it on the West Coast of the United States.

McCullough: [voice-over] The President turned to Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, “the most competent man I ever knew, the most objective man I ever met,” Johnson said. The President affectionately called him, “My lard hair man.”

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense: There’s no question in our minds but what the Communists have stepped up their of attack in recent weeks in South Vietnam.

McCullough: [voice-over] When McNamara proposed an increase in American advisers and covert commando raids against the North, Johnson agreed.

James Thomson: There was a strong sense that Americans were can-do people and that anything we put our mind to we could accomplish and the kind of rural jungle warfare that the Communists were inflicting on us in the Third World — we could adapt and we could win at it because we were smarter, we had more technology, we had billions of dollars and we would prevail.

Robert McNamara: The government and the people of my country, the United States, stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of yours.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson made it McNamara’s war. “I want them to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists,” he said,” and then I want them to leave me alone because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”

Pres. Johnson: And this Administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

McCullough: [voice-over] The war against poverty was the war that Johnson really wanted to fight. In his first State of the Union address, he reached back to the populism of his father and grandfather. He took a Kennedy anti-poverty proposal and made it his own.

Pres. Johnson: It will not be a short or easy struggle, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.

McCullough: [voice-over] When Lyndon Johnson became President, 35 million Americans were living below the poverty line in the most affluent country in the world.

S. Douglas Cater: And I said, “But they don’t vote. They don’t have any organized lobbies. How in the world are you going to get any substantial legislation on poverty? Jack Kennedy couldn’t. How are you going to do it?” He leaned back and he said — and these words are engraved on my memory. He said, “I don’t know whether I’ll pass a single law or get a single dollar appropriated, but before I’m through, no community in America is going to be able to ignore the poverty in its midst.”

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson now turned to the Director of the Peace Corps, Sergeant Shriver.

Sergeant Shriver, Peace Corps Director: One Saturday morning, he called me up and said that his radio show, which he had every Saturday, was going to go on in a couple of hours and he wanted to announce on that show that I was going to be the new head of the War Against Poverty or the head of the new War Against Poverty.

I said, “Well, Mr. President, really, you know, I haven’t had a chance to speak to my wife. I haven’t had a chance to talk to any of the people in my office. I don’t know what they’ll think about it in the Peace Corps. Couldn’t you just postpone that? Frankly, I would rather talk to you about it next week.” He said, “Well now, Sergeant,” he said, “you know, the truth is we’ve got to get on with that War Against Poverty, so please talk to Eunice now, just talk to her now and I’ll call you back.

So I put the phone down. I couldn’t believe my ears. The next thing you know, the phone rang again and there was the President on it. He said, “Well, what have you decided?” And i Had decided — I said, “Well, Mr. President, it would really be much better for me and my family if we could just talk about this next Monday or Tuesday and see what — I’ll have a better idea of what you want me to do and I’m afraid that if you announce that I’m the head of the War on Poverty, people will ask me what I’m going to do about it and I don’t know. And that would be a source of embarrassment to me and maybe not so good for you.”

He said, “Well, Sarge,” he said, “you know, I have this radio program. It’s going on in about an hour,” he said, “Let me call you back.” So he called me back about 20 minutes later and in a very low voice, a confidential-sounding voice, he said, “Now, listen,” he said, “I’m going to announce you and I can’t speak about it loud because I have the whole Cabinet here with me, but you just have to understand, Sergeant, this is your President speaking and I’m going to announce you as the head of the War Against Poverty.” Boom. I turned to my wife and I said, “Looks as if I may be the new head of the War Against Poverty.”

Sergeant Shriver: President Johnson’s program on poverty is distinguished in at least four ways.

McCullough: [voice-over] In six short weeks, Johnson had come up with his package, but he would let Shriver worry about the details.

Sergeant Shriver: He didn’t have to tell me what he desired. I knew what he desired. He wanted to get going big and he wanted to get going with success. He didn’t have to tell me that.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson criss-crossed the country, appealing for support for his anti-poverty legislation. Poverty in America had been invisible. Johnson put it on the front pages.

Pres. Johnson: Our first objective is to free 30 million Americans from the prison or poverty. Can you help us free these Americans? And if you can let me hear your voices!

McCullough: [voice-over] For Johnson, it was a return to his political past, the old battle cries of the New Deal coming alive again.

Donald Malafronte, Aide to Mayor of Newark: He was the last soldier in the New Deal war, the final expression of everything which had gone on with those boys — government as mother, father, smothering Lyndon Johnson’s big arms around you,”I love you, I want you to do better.”

Pres. Johnson: Do something we can be proud of. Help the weak and the meek and lift them up and help them dream and give them an education where they can make their own way instead of having to live off the bounty of our generosity.

Ronnie Dugger:: Most people don’t actively care about people they don’t know, people who are suffering. It’s hard for us to remember those people. Lyndon never really forgot them, I think. I really think he never did.

Robert Dallek: His vision was of helping the disadvantaged to help themselves. His hope was that you give them education, you give them opportunity, you give them the chance to come into the mainstream of American middle class economic life and that’s as thoroughly American as apple pie.

Pres. Johnson: We have a right to expect a job to provide food for our families, a roof over their head, clothes for their body and with your help and with God’s help, we will have it in America! Thank you.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson would make war on poverty and there would be no casualties. Everyone would be a winner, even big business.

Ronnie Dugger:: He would tell business people, “Listen, we’ve got a very abundant country. We’ve got the resources to help these people who are right at the bottom. For God’s sakes, don’t you understand that your interest,” in effect, he was arguing, “Your interest as a business leader is the welfare state, because you keep everything stable?”

It must have been a very appealing argument to a corporate executive who is not the right of Atilla the Hun that in a civilized country with such abundance as we have — astounding abundance compared to the rest of the world — you can afford to be liberal with the poor.

Sergeant Shriver: We were a generation of people who had been in World War II, so when a War Against Poverty was launched, it was typical of all of us at that time to think of this war, the War Against Poverty, in terms just like the war against Hitler. We were accustomed to thinking in terms of the United States being able to do big things. America bestrode the world like a Colossus. There was nothing in the world equal to the United States of America.

McCullough: [voice-over] The War on Poverty was just part of Johnson’s program for the country. Few anticipated that this coarse and abrasive Texan would propose a series of laws to enrich daily life for all Americans. He called his vision, “The Great Society.”

Pres. Johnson: The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talent. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

McCullough: [voice-over] It was an inflated rhetoric, the kind American leaders seldom use anymore. As one aide described it, “What he meant was a full stomach, yes, but a fuller life, too.”

Pres. Johnson: It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

McCullough: [voice-over] His aspirations were enormous. He wanted to do something for everyone. He wanted to be the best father Americans ever had.

But in 1964, Johnson still thought of himself as standing in John Kennedy’s shadow. He hated that he was merely an accidental president. He wanted to be elected President in his own right. The Republican Party was going to make it easy.

Sen. Barry Goldwater, ® Arizona: [Republican National Convention, 1964] I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

McCullough: [voice-over] In the middle of July at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, the right wing of the Republican Party triumphed. A Major General in the Air Force Reserve, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, was nominated for President. Goldwater’s campaign slogan was, “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right.” Some wag appended, “Far Right” and it stuck.

Sen. Goldwater: Thank you. I’ll say, so that all American people can hear, that the only enemy of peace in their world is Communism and I don’t care whether it’s Red Chinese Communism or Russian Communism or whose Communism it is, it’s Communism.

McCullough: [voice-over] Johnson watched Goldwater on television, then flicked off the set with a smile. Goldwater had accused the Democrats of being soft on Communism. If Johnson could prove he was a staunch as his Republican rival, he would have more than a victory. The 1964 presidential election would be a landslide.

Less than three weeks later, close to midnight, Johnson made a dramatic television appearance.

Pres. Johnson: As President, I’m Commander-in-Chief. It is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply. Our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting.

McCullough: [voice-over] American bombers striking deep into North Vietnam demonstrated that Johnson was a committed anti-Communist. Johnson would use this incident to acquire the power to make war in Vietnam whenever and however he would choose.

Johnson accused the North Vietnamese of an unprovoked attack, but in fact, for six months, the President had been running covert raids against North Vietnam. Finally, on August 2nd, North Vietnamese torpedo boats retaliated. They fired on the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Maddox returned the fire, sinking one Vietnamese and crippling two others.

Dean Rusk, Secretary of State: And we took the view, when that occurred, that that might have been the action of trigger-happy local commanders and did not represent a governmental policy on the part of North Vietnam and so we tended to disregard that attack.

McCullough: [voice-over] Two days after the first incident, fearing they were once again under attack, anxious sailors on the Maddox fired their weapons into a dark, moonless night. Their uneasy commander began sending cables back to the Pentagon.

Daniel Ellsberg, Defense Department Staff: On August 4th, I began reading the kind of cable that one very rarely saw in the Pentagon and that I don’t — I very rarely saw again. These were operational cables.

McCullough: [voice-over] Daniel Ellsberg, his second day on duty in the Pentagon, found himself reading this remarkable series of top secret messages from the Gulf of Tonkin.

Daniel Ellberg: These are operational cables coming in on a flash basis, very special handling, about an operation that was going on at that moment on the other side of the world. The cables said, “We are under attack at this moment. We have just successfully evaded one torpedo. I am taking evasive action now. Two torpedoes. Now” — another cable — “four torpedoes are in the water. Six torpedoes are