On May 22, 1964, exactly half a year since Kennedy's tragic death in November of the previous year, Johnson launched the Great Society, a campaign of reforms meant to make American society fairer and more egalitarian. Considered the successor to Kennedy's similar New Frontier, the Great Society contained nearly a dozen brilliant policies that have drastically improved the United States. The most well-known of these reforms are Medicare and Medicaid, which are programs to provide free health insurance to the impoverished and elderly respectively. Medicare and Medicaid have heroically provided crucial medical coverage to millions of disadvantaged Americans and have inarguably saved lives.
But the Great Society entailed other significant and beneficial projects. For example, the campaign led to the creation of the Job Corps, a government agency that has decreased unemployment by teaching young Americans how to do certain common and important jobs. Similarly, Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which founded the Office of Economic Opportunity. This government agency works to tackle the various socioeconomic issues believed to cause poverty. Additionally, the Great Society saw the creation of Project Head Start, a summer camp for children between the ages of 3 and 8 that teaches them vital life skills that will help them make the most of their existence.
With the Great Society, Johnson set up networks to provide necessary economic aid to struggling communities and institutions across the US. For example, Johnson implemented a policy in which the federal government would send money to any school district where 50% of the students or more come from impoverished families. Johnson also gave much-needed funding to impoverished cities in exchange for said cities passing new housing regulations. In fact, Johnson was the first president in American history to provide federal funding to the arts and humanities.
More generally, the Great Society contained several new consumer protection laws. Aside from economic reform, the Great Society also was an environmentalist project, seeing the creation of numerous scenic trails in national landmarks. Furthermore, as part of the Great Society, Johnson added an additional 9,000,000 acres of land to conservation.
Even some of Johnson's most fierce critics, even the people denouncing the Great Society as a waste of resources benefitting nothing aside from Johnson's idealism, give him credit for a landmark aspect of his administration: The numerous advancements in civil rights. Johnson famously signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2 of that same year. This revolutionary policy, which still remains in effect and continues to drastically improve life for America's minorities, prohibits corporations from denying service to or separating customers on the basis of race. In other words, Johnson's policy ended segregation. The law also forbids companies from denying employment to people on the basis of their race and barred the government from funding racist organizations and programs.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn't even the beginning and end of Johnson's civil rights achievements. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Although the 15th Amendment had made it illegal to block someone from voting on the basis of their race or ethnicity, the south had continued to prevent black people from engaging in elections.
Since they couldn't outright pass laws denying voting rights to black people, they did require black voters to pay a "poll tax" to vote. Ostensibly, this was to raise funds for state projects, but it was obvious that this was merely a ploy to oppress black voters. Additionally, they would require black voters to pass "literacy tests" in order to cast a ballot. These tests were purposefully vague and confusing - sometimes using the Constitution as the text the voter is supposed to read, exploiting the document's nebulous and antiquated language - so that they would be nearly impossible to pass. The laws establishing these methods never specifically said only black people would be subjected to them. Instead, they said that anyone whose grandfather wouldn't have been allowed to vote prior to the civil war would have to take them. Obviously, this rule would exempt white people and constrict black people.
Johnson's 1965 law resolved this issue. The bill did 3 things. One, it outlawed the use of literacy tests in all elections. Two, it enforced the 24th Amendment - which prohibits poll taxes - by permitting the attorney general to launch investigations into the use of those duties. Three and lastly, it established federal supervision over the state of voting in all areas of the US where less than half of the non-white population was registered to vote; the goal of this supervision was to promote non-white voting. Because of the Voting Rights Act, black southerners finally obtained their long-desired and eternally-deserved ability to vote.
Calvin Coolidge, who was president from Warren G. Harding's death on August 2, 1923, to March 4, 1929, signed the Immigration Act of 1924. This law set up a specific limit on how many people born in each country could reside in the US at any given point in time. On October 3, 1965, Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which got rid of this restriction. On paper, the 1965 law technically maintained these limits. However, it allowed people to move to the US even if their country's limit had already been met provided that they either worked in a profession that was needed in the US or had relatives living in America.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, riots broke out across the entire US. To appease the protestors, Johnson, on April 11, 1968, signed the Equal Housing Act, which outlawed race-based discrimination in the housing industry. While Johnson did only do this in response to immense public pressure, he still instituted the policy in the end. Regardless of his reasons, he deserves credit for the honorable act.
However, all of this goes without mentioning Johnson's Waterloo: Vietnam. While the US government had been involved in the rivalry between Vietnam's socialist north and capitalist south ever since November of 1955 when Dwight D. Eisenhower began supporting the southern dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, said involvement was relatively minor until the advent of the Johnson Administration. In the late summer of 1964, Johnson falsely claimed that on August 2, 1964, the North Vietnamese military attacked an American ship off the coast of Southeast Asia. Using this supposed event, which Johnson called "the Gulf of Tonkin Incident", he launched a bombing campaign throughout Southeast Asia on March 2, 1965. This campaign, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, sought to destroy North Vietnam's supply lines. A few days later, on March 8, 1965, Johnson sent the first American combat troops to Vietnam. The Vietnam War had begun.
To many people, beginning the Vietnam War is an unforgivable sin. It is the atrocious shadow that stands like a deformed beast ready to devour a town of innocents, casting a miserable symbol of death and conflict over Johnson's many achievements. And of course, the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam was an awful act. Johnson lied to his citizens and used these lies to launch a brutal war of aggression in a pair of Southeast Asian countries that merely wanted to manage their own affairs. At the beginning of this piece, I said that if it weren't for "a few blunders", Johnson would be a top 5 president. Johnson's policies regarding Vietnam is one of those blunders, the other being his general increase of Washington DC's influence in Latin America.
But even with these evil decisions in mind, Johnson was still a great president. While he did launch one untenable war, that was a short-term tragedy. His domestic policies were glorious, liberating millions of Americans from appalling restrictions and discriminatory tendencies and lifting an uncountable number of US citizens out of poverty. And actually, even his role in the Vietnam War contains some significant nuance.
On January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese military launched the Tet Offensive, a campaign to attack and capture various cities, towns, and villages across South Vietnam. Technically, the effort was a failure. It was terminated in under 8 months - concluding on September 23, 1968 - and North Vietnamese troops were unable to maintain control over any settlement for more than 3 days. Optically, however, it was an astonishing success. In March of 1968, Johnson, humiliated by the American and South Vietnamese losses during the Tet Offensive, finally initiated peace talks in Paris, France. These conferences would, during the presidency of Richard Nixon, culminate in the end of the Vietnam War. In short, while Johnson started the Vietnam War, he also helped end it.
Ignoring the Vietnam War, Johnson also had an incredible foreign policy. For example, in 1968, Johnson brokered the Outer Space Treaty. This was a nuclear arms limitation deal between the Soviet and American governments that banned the storage of nuclear weapons from the two countries in Space. Moreover, while Johnson started one war - the Vietnam War - he also tried to prevent a different war.
Soviet spies, on May 13, 1967, sent faulty intelligence to the Egyptian government claiming that the Israeli military was planning to invade Syria. Infuriated, the Egyptian government sent troops to the Egyptian-Israeli border on May 15, 1967. One week later, on May 22, 1967, Cairo closed off the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships. Then, on May 29, 1967, Egyptian and Jordanian officials signed a defense pact. On June 5, 1967, in response to these actions, the Knesset - the Israeli parliament - sent troops to attack the Egyptian airforce, beginning the Six-Day War.
Johnson, observing these events as they unfolded, was extremely concerned. The Johnson Administration spent much of late May and early June 1967 urging Cairo and Jerusalem to meet and diplomatically resolve their differences. Unfortunately, neither government listened and the Egyptian state continued to act in a hawkish manner, with Israeli officials taking no steps to mitigate the crisis. But Johnson tried to prevent this conflict, and he deserves credit for these efforts.
Ultimately, Lyndon B. Johnson was a great president. He was one of the greatest presidents for civil rights, instituted numerous wonderful economic reforms, was a staunch conservationist, brokered an arms limitation treaty with Moscow, and nearly prevented a war. It is tragic that his cruelty in Vietnam, which is really just one blemish on a beautiful presidency, has been used to taunt his legacy ever since he left the White House. It is time to stop missing the forest for the trees and to finally celebrate all the good Johnson did for America and for the world.
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