Lyndon Baines Johnson was the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He assumed the presidency following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Johnson also served as a United States Representative and as the Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate. He is one of only four people who have served in all four federal elected positions.
About Lyndon B. Johnson in brief
Lyndon Baines Johnson was the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He assumed the presidency following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Johnson also served as a United States Representative and as the Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate. He is one of only four people who have served in all four federal elected positions. Johnson is ranked favorably by many historians because of his domestic policies and the passage of many major laws that affected civil rights, gun control, wilderness preservation, and Social Security. He has also drawn substantial criticism for his escalation of the Vietnam War. He died of a heart attack four years later at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, where he had lived since 1937. He was the eldest of five children born to Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines. Johnson was raised as a Baptist and later became a member of the Christadelian Church. His grandfather was the grandfather of Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s grandfather, who was also the president of Baylor University during the American Civil War. Johnson’s father moved from Georgia to Texas after LBJ’s father was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1937. His father was a German-Irish, German, English, and Ulster Scots ancestry pastored in eight churches as well as others in Arkansas and Louisiana. Johnson had one brother, Sam Houston Johnson, and three sisters,Rebekah, Josefa, and Lucia. The nearby small town of Johnson City, was named after his father’s cousin, James Polk Johnson, whose forebears had moved west from Georgia, west to Texas.
Johnson won election to the US Senate from Texas in 1948 after narrowly winning the Democratic Party’s nomination. He was appointed to the position of Senate Majority Whip in 1951. He became the Senate leader of the Democrats in 1953. Johnson ran for the Democratic nomination in the 1960 presidential election. Although unsuccessful, he became the running mate of the nominee Senator John Kennedy and they went on to win a close election. In 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted Johnson the power to use military force in Southeast Asia without having to ask for an official declaration of war. The number of American military personnel in Vietnam increased dramatically, from 16,000 advisors in non-combat roles in 1963 to 525,000 in 1967, many in combat roles. In 1968, he ended his bid for renomination after a disappointing result in the New Hampshire primary. In 1969, he was succeeded by Richard Nixon in January 1969, and returned to his Texas ranch to live on his ranch. He later became the chairman of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a position he held until his death in 1994. He also served in the United Nations as a diplomat and ambassador to the European Union. He served as chairman of NATO from 1967 to 1971. He had a son, Sam Johnson, who became the first African-American to serve as the chairman and vice-president of the International Monetary Fund.
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