![]() Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and the Food Stamp Act – all fundamental parts of LBJ’s Great Society legislation - serve tens of millions of eligible Americans to this day. ![]() These are not forgotten, discarded relics. LBJ had been a congressman, a senator, a Senate minority and majority leader and vice-president before ascending to the presidency, and he transformed the scope of the federal government, pushing through social security acts that created Medicare and Medicaid, the first civil rights acts since reconstruction, the 1965 Voting Rights Act that tackled racial discrimination in southern polling centres, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the Higher Education Act of 1965. This narrative can be tempting, but it ignores the fact that Johnson had been planning for this job his entire life. Johnson can be portrayed as an accident – the rootin’ tootin’ southerner who fell into the presidency at the worst possible time, was in office during the disastrous war in Vietnam and resigned to let in the most corrupt president of all time (pre-2017, at least). As a result, Johnson’s legacy is hazy: is he the patronising face of white America stopping progress in the civil rights movement? Is he a warmonger desperate for American dominance around the world? Is he the man who killed Kennedy with the help of the CIA because he didn’t like how JFK and Bobby made fun of his accent as vice-president (an upsettingly genuine conspiracy theory)? From the fallout of JF Kennedy’s assassination to the passage of the Civil Rights Act to Vietnam, the subsequent protests and the Watts riots in LA – it was like the news fell asleep during the 1950s and was trying to make up for lost time. The first thing to appreciate about LBJ’s presidency is the sheer amount of stuff that happened during it.
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