Lyndon B. Johnson And The Art Of Power

Power rarely looks like a speech. Sometimes it looks like a phone call, a vote count, and a president who knows exactly how the Senate works. We’re joined by LBJ Foundation Chairman and CEO Mark Updgrove for a clear-eyed conversation about Lyndon B. Johnson, the skills that made him so effective, and why his story still belongs in every serious discussion of American civic education.

We dig into the Johnson Treatment, LBJ’s legendary ability to persuade, and how his command of the legislative process turned relationships into results. From the pivotal 1964 election to the fleeting nature of political capital, we track how Johnson used a historic mandate to push a progressive agenda at breathtaking speed. The Great Society comes into focus not as a slogan, but as the foundation of modern America: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, major education funding, immigration reform, environmental protections, and more.

Then we confront the shadow that shaped how many Americans remember him: the Vietnam War, the draft, and a country pulling apart. Mark also explains why Johnson’s 1968 decision not to run again still matters, including the personal reality of his health. We close with a defense of presidential libraries as repositories of the public record and as public squares for debate, plus a listener-friendly path into the LBJ telephone tapes that let you hear history unfold in real time.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Civic City Year. I am honored to have chairman and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, Mark Updogrove, with us today to talk about President Lyndon Baines Johnson. And I have yet to go to the LBJ Library, but my husband has been there and told me how amazing it is. And I'm also excited, Mark, to have you on because presidential libraries are so important in how we understand civic learning. So thank you so much for being on our podcast today.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Delighted to be with you, Liz.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

So my first question: what made President Johnson such an effective political figure?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Boy, that's a complicated question because he's a complicated

Welcome And Why LBJ Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:46

man. But I'd say it's it's four things in no particular order. Number one, the power to influence. He had this singular ability to get people to see his way on things. It was legendarily known in Washington as the Johnson treatment, and you can see photographs of this, and you can hear LBJ plying that brand of influence in the telephone tapes that are the crown jewel of the LBJ Presidential Library Archive. I think he also had this uncanny understanding of the legislative process. He knew how it worked, and

What Made LBJ So Effective

SPEAKER_01 1:22

I think he outworked his colleagues, which explains a lot, explains why he was able to outmaneuver them. It also explains why he was able to work his way up the ranks as quickly as he did. Gaining favor of the Franklin Roosevelt when he was a congressman, becoming a senator in 1948, working his way up the ranks to minority whip, minority leader, and then perhaps the most powerful majority leader in the history of the United States Senate. And then, of course, vice president-president. And the last thing, though, is his passion for progressive reform. And you see that in particular in his presidency. I know we'll talk about the Great Society, but LBJ saw the flaws in America. He understood how difficult some people had it in this country, and he wanted to use his administration not so much to finish the presidency of John F. Kennedy, which he took over after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, but to finish the New Deal that he had seen developing when he was a congressman and Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House. So those are those are among the things that I think made him very effective.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

So you bring up the assassination. Why then is the election in 1964 such a pivotal moment in American politics?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Well, you know, he takes over for Kennedy, and I think the balance of that term, the Kennedy's term, which LBJ finished out after succeeding the presidency, is vitally important because LBJ advances the cause of civil rights. John F. Kennedy had proposed the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1963, but he didn't put a lot of legislative might, he didn't put the weight of the presidency behind it. It was politically risky for Kennedy. He shied away from that. But he did elevate civil rights to a moral cause and introduced this legislation

1964 Election And Civil Rights Gamble

SPEAKER_01 3:27

that was really going nowhere. And LBJ knew he could use the martyrdom of Kennedy to get the Civil Rights Act through. His advisors tell him he shouldn't do it, he should wait until he gets the presidency in his own right before pushing it. And he famously says, What the hell is the presidency for? He gets it through, but the the election of 1964 becomes important for Lyndon Johnson because he wanted to be president in his own right, you know, not an accidental president. And he does so in 1964 with the what is still the largest popular electoral mandate in history. A very conservative and at the time controversial figure. But I think it's important to America that Lyndon Johnson wins that uh election because, as I mentioned, there was so much that that uh progressive so much of LBJ's progressive agenda that he could lay out with his own presidency. And he doesn't hesitate to do so when he gets the presidency in his own right and knows 1965 is going to be an incredibly important year for him because he understands the ephemeral nature of political capital. He says when a president is first elected, he's a giraffe. Six months later, he's a worm. He knows that this political capital is going to fade. So he wants to get as much of his very progressive uh agenda through as long as he has that power. And he does so in 1965, principally with remarkable effectiveness.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

So you're talking, you know, we talk about how Lyndon Johnson won in kind of his own presidency, and Kennedy had the new frontier, and Johnson has the Great Society. What made the Great Society so significant?

SPEAKER_01 5:30

I think it's sheer audacity. You know, he liked a lot of what Kennedy was doing, but he said, you know, he thought, scale it up, let's let's make it bigger. So LBJ, you know, he also has, again, this uncanny ability to not only understand the legislative process, but to get people on his side of the issue. So with that, and also has this tidal wave of support, as I mentioned, this the largest electoral mandate in history. He has these outsized majorities in both the House and the Senate, but it should be noted, has to run over members of his own party in the South in order to get his very progressive civil rights agenda

Great Society Laws Built Modern America

SPEAKER_01 6:12

through. So in 1965 alone, you have LBJ putting in place the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Head Start Vista Job Corps, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Highway Beautification Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Immigration Act, the most sweeping immigration reform in the history of our country, and the Voting Rights Act. And I probably missed one or two. Oh, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act. I mean, that is there is nothing in American history that even comes close to rivaling that, with the possible exception of 1933 and FDR's first year in the New Deal, particularly those first hundred days, when there's this alphabet soup of legislation helped to get Americans through the ravages of the Great Depression. But the difference is that a lot of those laws went away when the Great Depression subsided. With Lyndon Johnson, again, until this, I think, very rogue administration started eradicating these laws, this was the foundation for modern America. This is an astounding leap forward in so many areas. And we're seeing today that that all of those things, almost without exception, are under siege in the current administration.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

That I mean, as you are listing that, and just in four years, it's so much to get through and to really, I mean, change a lot of things for Americans.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

So, actually, I would note, Liz, that that is just 1965. And the balance of the administration, you have, you know, in 1966, 67, 68, you have the Fair Housing Act, you have the Public Broadcasting Act, you have mandatory safety belts, you have other environmental legislation going through, you have all these different the public broadcasting, I think I mentioned, freedom of information, all that stuff happens in the balancing, Mr. So that's just one year. It's an astounding legislative record.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

That is incredible. So then in 1968, he decides not to run again. Can you tell us a little bit about what stands out about that address?

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Well, I think the one thing we haven't mentioned, we we we mentioned the progressive reform and the domestic policy of this administration. We haven't mentioned the LBJ legacy albatross, which is the war in Vietnam, which we now know was a quagmire. We lost 58,000 American troops to the war in Vietnam. 42,000 were lost under Lyndon Johnson's tenure as commander-in-chief as he escalated the war, which was, uh again, we now know ill-fated. That was less clear at the

Vietnam And The 1968 Withdrawal Speech

SPEAKER_01 9:24

time. But it was enormously controversial. We had a draft in place at the time. It was not an all-volunteer army. So there were a lot of young men who were enlisted in the military to fight in Vietnam who didn't believe in the cause. So that made it enormously controversial. And LBJ sees an increasingly divided electorate. And I think that's one of the reasons that he he opted to step aside in 1968 in a very famous address he made on March 31st, in which he said, I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party as another term as your president. Those are his words. And I think most people believe that he didn't think that he would get elected again because of the controversy in Vietnam. He believed he could. I believe he probably could have as well. But he would have, he knew that he would have full further torn the country apart. I think the other thing that that people may not realize, Liz, is that he had a very weak heart. He almost died of a heart attack during his years in the Senate when he was minority leader in 1955 at the age of 47. He had a nearly fatal heart attack. And he was very conscious of not only his own weak heart, but of a uh a history of heart disease in his family. His father died at 62 of a heart ailment. So did his grandfather at the same age, 62. As it happens, LBJ died of a heart attack at 64. So he was he was prescient. So all things being equal, had he been re-elected, he would have died two years after serving his next term as president. He died on January 22nd, 1969. So I think those were the reasons that he opted to step aside. But it in you know it it shows his, I think, humility and his foresight to do so.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

So when we talk about, you know, presidents and presidential libraries, why do presidential libraries and things like these conversations matter for civic education and for public understanding?

SPEAKER_01 11:42

Well, I think for two reasons. Number one, these are repositories of the record. So scholars like you and members of the general public, you don't have to be a scholar to go into the reading rooms of these presidential libraries and access the record which belongs to the American people. At least it did before this administration's Department of Justice decided that the President's Presidential Records Act should not stand, something that's been in place since 1981 and was signed into law in 1978. So that's one thing.

Why Presidential Libraries Matter

SPEAKER_01 12:15

I mean, this is the place of study for these presidents, and you can access these records. That transparency should be one of the hallmarks of our singular Democratic Republic. I think the other thing is their access points for people, young people in particular, to understand not only the history of a president, but our history of the presidency in general. And their public squares where we can have plat uh have a platform not only to talk about that president's and his legacy, but to talk about our history at large and to talk in general about the the issues that continue to be relevant to Americans today and into our future.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

And my last question is for our younger listeners. If you were to pick something, and this might be an impossible question, what is your favorite thing about LBJ? Or what is something that maybe people don't know about him?

SPEAKER_01 13:18

You know, I think that there's so much that people don't know about LBJ. He's largely underappreciated in American history. He's a really fascinating guy, and I think that litany of laws that I enumerate is is just an astounding reflection of what he was able to do during a very crucial time in our history. But I think that it ultimately I think his the biggest part of his legacy, this might

LBJ Tapes Reveal Power And Empathy

SPEAKER_01 13:48

be, this might answer your question, Liz, is civil rights. And if your listeners are to do anything, I would strongly recommend them accessing the telephone conversations that I referred to earlier. LBJ surreptitiously recorded his telephone convers, many of his telephone conversations during his course in the White House. We don't know why. We just know that these tape recordings existed. And he he he he taped them without the people on the other end of the line knowing he was doing so. I think it was so he had a record of what was transpiring in a conversation, particularly as it related to legislation. So if you and I were making a negotiation and I taped the conversation, I would know what you said. So I could go back to you and say, hold on, Liz, you know, I thought you guaranteed that I would get this if I gave you this, right? And and I think that's probably why he did it. But if you listen to those conversations, you not only understand LBJ's presidency better, including all the things I mentioned, the massive domestic reform and crucial decisions around the Vietnam War, but you also understand the presidency better and the kinds of challenges a president has to reconcile with on any given day of his presidency. If he's always wrestling with the mate the most major issues in our country, because if those issues were resolved at a at a another stage in the process, they wouldn't reach a president's desk, right? So you can get a sense not only of him, but of the presidency writ large.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

And listeners, I will make sure to link the LBJ tapes. They are readily available online. And I I appreciate that you say that because I think that often, you know, students especially think like, oh, LBJ, that was so long ago. But you can hear his voice. And I think that was one of my favorite things when I was studying him was just the way he talked.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

It was so commanding. But there was also sometimes just this little spark of humor that made him a person. That made him, you know, he's not just a president, he is a person.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

He was a great storyteller, too. And I think that came from his rural upbringing in the Hill Country of Texas, where he didn't have radio or television. People stood around and they told stories. And so I think that was a big part of how he got things done. He would tell a story that related to what he was trying to get from you. But but I think what, again, what you hear in those tapes, Liz, and what I really admire from President Johnson is he humanizes the reform that he's trying to get through. For instance, when he's talking about why the elementary and secondary education is so important, he talks about the fact that it will benefit schools for people of color, particularly in the South, where you had you still had segregated schools in the South, despite the Civil Rights Act being passed in the first full year of his presidency. But he talks about that black worker at a gas station who has to understand how to read and write in order to write out receipts and work the cash register, all those things. He's humanizing all this stuff. And he's thinking about the person for whom that legislation will be especially beneficial.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

That is amazing. Mark, thank you so much. I mean, I can talk about LBJ all day long because I think he's such an interesting person. And now, I mean, that much legislation in one year is almost unheard of now. But that, like, what an incredible accomplishment. So thank you so much for your expertise and your time. It is so greatly appreciated.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Great to be with you, Liz. Thanks so much.