When historians assess the greatest presidents of the 20th century, names like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan are often quick to come to mind. But in recent years, scholars have increasingly made the case that Lyndon B. Johnson belongs in the top tier of modern presidents, despite the controversies that marked his time in office. While Johnson‘s presidency was undoubtedly defined in part by his disastrous handling of the Vietnam War, his extraordinary domestic policy accomplishments have led some to argue that he was the most impactful president on domestic issues since FDR.
The Great Society
The centerpiece of Johnson‘s domestic agenda was his vision for a "Great Society" – a sweeping set of programs and policies aimed at reducing poverty, improving education, providing health care, and generally using the power of the federal government to build a more just and equitable America. As Johnson said in a famous 1964 speech announcing the initiative:
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents…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…It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
To carry out this sweeping vision, the Johnson administration and the 89th Congress embarked on a frenzy of legislative activity unmatched since the days of the New Deal. Over the course of just a few years in the mid-1960s, LBJ signed into law a staggering array of new programs and policies, fundamentally reshaping the role of the federal government in American life.
Some of the most notable Great Society achievements included:
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Medicare and Medicaid: The creation of America‘s public health insurance programs for the elderly and poor massively expanded access to health care. Within the first three years, over 19 million Americans enrolled in Medicare alone. Today, the two programs combine to cover nearly 140 million people.
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Federal education funding: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was a landmark bill that established the modern federal role in K-12 education, providing significant funding to public schools for the first time, with a focus on supporting low-income students. The Higher Education Act, passed the same year, created the federal student loan program.
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War on Poverty: LBJ created the Office of Economic Opportunity to administer a variety of anti-poverty programs, including Job Corps youth training, VISTA volunteers, and Community Action grants to empower local organizations. One notable initiative was the Head Start early childhood education program, which to this day provides comprehensive developmental services to nearly a million low-income children each year.
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Arts and Culture: The creation of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1965 represented an unprecedented federal investment in America‘s cultural infrastructure. Over the past half-century, the agencies have distributed billions of dollars in grants to artists, scholars, and organizations.
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Conservation: The Johnson administration greatly expanded the federal commitment to environmental protection with a number of landmark bills. The Wilderness Act of 1964 protected over 9 million acres of federal land from development. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and National Trails System Act passed in 1968. And the Land and Water Conservation Fund has helped acquire and improve parks, wildlife refuges, and recreation areas in all 50 states.
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Consumer Protection: LBJ signed a number of groundbreaking consumer protection measures, including the Truth in Lending Act requiring clearer disclosure of loan terms and interest rates, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act prohibiting deceptive marketing, and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act setting new car safety standards.
The cumulative effect of this legislative barrage was a dramatic expansion of the federal government‘s role in improving the lives of Americans. Historian Irving Bernstein described it as "the most comprehensive and coordinated attack on the nation‘s social problems since the early New Deal." And while many of the specific programs have been modified over the years, the core pillars of the Great Society – federal aid to education, health insurance for the elderly and poor, federal support for the arts and humanities, environmental protection, consumer rights – are now essentially politically untouchable, even for conservative Republicans.
The scale and enduring impact of the Great Society are what have led some to argue for LBJ‘s unique place in the presidential pantheon. Political scientist Stephen Skowronek has called the Johnson years a "forgotten revolution" that fundamentally reformed the American political order for a generation in the same way that FDR‘s New Deal did. In more recent works, historians like David Greenberg and Robert Dallek have made the case for LBJ as a president whose concrete policy achievements rank him near the top.
Civil Rights Champion
While the Great Society represented the largest expansion of the federal government‘s domestic role since the New Deal, it was in the area of civil rights where Johnson arguably made his most impactful contribution. Building on the groundwork laid by his predecessor John F. Kennedy, LBJ used his legendary political acumen to do what had eluded presidents for nearly a century: pass comprehensive federal civil rights legislation.
Johnson‘s first major success came with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – a landmark law that prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The act banned segregation in public accommodations like restaurants and hotels, outlawed employment discrimination, and empowered the federal government to sue to enforce school desegregation, among other provisions.
Passage of the bill was far from easy. It faced a 57-day filibuster from Southern Democrats in the Senate – still the longest in history. But Johnson, drawing on his decades of experience as a master of the legislative process, worked tirelessly behind the scenes to assemble a bipartisan coalition and break the logjam. He even reportedly told a reluctant Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the leader of the filibuster: "Dick, you‘ve got to get out of my way. I‘m going to run over you. I don‘t intend to cavil or compromise."
Johnson followed up the Civil Rights Act with an equally historic Voting Rights Act in 1965. The law outlawed discriminatory voting practices like literacy tests, empowered federal officials to oversee voter registration in areas with a history of discrimination, and laid the groundwork for a massive increase in African American voting and political representation, especially in the South.
Between these two landmark laws and other measures like the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banning discrimination in housing, Johnson decisively broke the back of the Jim Crow system of legal segregation in America. While much work remained, the LBJ years marked a transformative moment in the struggle for racial equality – a century after the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction.
As Johnson said in his famous "We Shall Overcome" speech to Congress while introducing the Voting Rights Act, in the aftermath of the violent attacks on civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama:
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans…Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.
While other 20th century presidents like Truman and Eisenhower took small steps toward racial progress, Johnson‘s forceful moral leadership and skillful legislative maneuvering made him arguably the most impactful president on civil rights since Lincoln. Historian Alan Brinkley has argued that the civil rights laws passed under LBJ "literally transformed the face of America and created a new country."
LBJ‘s Political Genius
One question that naturally arises when considering LBJ‘s domestic policy record is: how was he able to accomplish so much in such a short period of time? After all, many of the items on his agenda, from Medicare to voting rights, had languished in Congress for years under earlier presidents. What enabled Johnson to succeed where others had failed?
Part of the answer lies in the unique historical circumstances Johnson faced. He assumed the presidency in the wake of John F. Kennedy‘s assassination, giving him a brief window of opportunity to capitalize on the nation‘s grief and desire for unity. The landslide Democratic victory in the 1964 election, campaigning on finishing JFK‘s legacy, then gave Johnson massive majorities to work with in both houses of Congress – 295-140 in the House, and 68-32 in the Senate, just shy of a veto-proof supermajority.
But Johnson was also uniquely well-positioned to take advantage of those circumstances, thanks to his unparalleled mastery of the levers of power in Washington. Prior to his ascension to the presidency, LBJ had spent over two decades in Congress, including stints as both Senate Majority Leader and Minority Leader in the 1950s. In those roles, he developed a reputation as one of the most effective majority leaders in Senate history – a virtuoso of legislative deal-making who used a combination of flattery, arm-twisting, and keen understanding of individual senators‘ needs and desires to assemble coalitions and pass bills.
As Robert Caro describes in his multi-volume LBJ biography, Johnson would do things like have the Senate Dining Room rearranged so he could sit at a table in the middle where he could make eye contact with the senators whose votes he needed. He was known for his "Johnson Treatment" – an intensely personal lobbying style that involved leaning over and physically intimidating his targets – sometimes even grabbing their lapels or poking them in the chest.
Johnson used every ounce of that hard-earned political savvy as president to navigate the competing factions of his party and outmaneuver his opponents. On civil rights, for example, he exploited his longstanding relationships with powerful Southern committee chairmen like Richard Russell to prevent them from bottling up legislation, while also working to peel off just enough Republican votes to break filibusters.
He was also a master of using public pressure and symbolism to advance his agenda. After the "Bloody Sunday" violence against voting rights protesters in Selma in early 1965, LBJ went on national television to announce his support for what would become the Voting Rights Act, declaring in the starkest moral terms: "What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too, because it‘s not just Negroes but really it‘s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."
That kind of rhetorical leadership and political acumen enabled Johnson to succeed where his predecessors had long been stymied. Historian Robert Dallek has written that LBJ‘s legislative skills made him "the most talented political leader the country had seen since Lincoln." Even one of Johnson‘s great political foes, Richard Nixon, later called him "the ablest political operator to sit in the White House in this century."
The Legacy and the What-Ifs
Of course, no discussion of LBJ‘s presidency can ignore the albatross that hangs over it: Vietnam. Johnson inherited a mess in Southeast Asia from his predecessors, with the U.S. already deeply involved in supporting the shaky South Vietnamese government against the communist Viet Cong insurgency. But LBJ dramatically escalated the American role, sending hundreds of thousands of ground troops and authorizing a massive bombing campaign in what would become the most divisive war since the Civil War.
By 1968, with hundreds of Americans coming home in body bags every month, Vietnam had fractured the Democratic Party and incited a mass antiwar movement. The war overshadowed Johnson‘s domestic accomplishments, tanked his approval ratings, and ultimately led him to decide not to seek reelection. While LBJ was able to keep most of his Great Society programs funded even as Vietnam spending skyrocketed, the war sapped his political capital and ability to push for further reforms.
In the final analysis, LBJ‘s Vietnam failures make it difficult to place him alongside the undisputed greats like Lincoln and FDR in the overall presidential rankings. But if one looks narrowly at the sphere of domestic policy, his case is much stronger. The sheer volume of major legislation passed, the redefinition of the federal role in areas like health care, education, and poverty, the decisive action on civil rights – all make LBJ a plausible pick for the most consequential 20th century president on the home front after FDR.
It‘s interesting to imagine the What Ifs had Johnson not gotten so deeply enmeshed in Vietnam. Could the energy and resources poured into the war instead have been used to push the Great Society vision even further – perhaps a guaranteed basic income, universal child care, a more robust desegregation effort? We‘ll never know the lost possibilities.
But even with Vietnam limiting what LBJ could accomplish, the domestic policy legacy he left is as impressive as that of nearly any modern president. Today, with partisan gridlock often leaving Washington paralyzed, it‘s hard to imagine any president achieving a fraction of what LBJ did in his roughly five years in the White House. For better or worse, he expanded the size and scope of the federal government in ways that shape American life to this day.
As LBJ biographer Robert Dallek put it: "Although one may quibble about whether Johnson‘s commitment to black equality and an active federal government exceeded Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s, there is no question that his administration engineered an unprecedented advance in progressive reform…For all the unfinished work, Johnson fashioned a domestic record surpassing any since the New Deal. When he left office, millions of Americans were more hopeful about their future because they were better educated; had access to health care; could exercise their right to vote; were no longer relegated to back-of-the-bus status; were less likely to fall into poverty; and had a government committed to preserving the environment. Their lives had been changed for the better."
In the end, while LBJ‘s legacy will always be tainted by the tragedy of Vietnam, his herculean domestic policy achievements have rightly caused historians to reassess his place in the presidential pantheon. As more time passes and passions around Vietnam fade, Johnson‘s case for being considered the greatest president on domestic issues since FDR, if not before, only seems to grow. For all his flaws, he proved himself to be a colossus of 20th century American history.
