Accession to the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson

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In Dallas on November 22, 1963, during a political tour of Johnson’s home state, President Kennedy was assassinated. At 2:38 pm that day, Johnson took the oath of office aboard the presidential plane, Air Force One, as it stood on the tarmac at Love Field, Dallas, waiting to take Kennedy’s remains back to Washington. In one afternoon Johnson had been thrust into the most difficult—and most prized—role of his long political career. One of the new president’s first acts was to appoint a commission to investigate the assassination of Kennedy and the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, two days later. Chaired by Earl Warren, the chief justice of the United States, the Warren Commission concluded in September 1964 that there had been no conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.

In the tempestuous days after the assassination, Johnson helped to calm national hysteria and ensure continuity in the presidency. On November 27 he addressed a joint session of Congress and, invoking the memory of the martyred president, urged the passage of Kennedy’s legislative agenda, which had been stalled in congressional committees. He placed greatest importance on Kennedy’s civil rights bill, which became the focus of his efforts during the first months of his presidency. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory,” he said, “than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill.” In February 1964, after a series of amendments by civil rights supporters, the House passed a much stronger bill than the one that Kennedy had proposed, and the measure was finally passed by the Senate in June, after an 83-day filibuster by Southern opponents.

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The Civil Rights Act, which Johnson signed into law on July 2, 1964, was the most comprehensive and far-reaching legislation of its kind in American history. Among its provisions were a prohibition of racial segregation and discrimination in places of public accommodation, a prohibition of discrimination by race or sex in employment and union membership, and new guarantees of equal voting rights. The law also authorized the Department of Justice to bring suit against local school boards to end allegedly discriminatory practices, thereby speeding up school desegregation. The constitutionality of the law was immediately challenged but was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1964.

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Johnson outlined his domestic agenda in a commencement address at the University of Michigan in May 1964: “In your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.” The Great Society program, beginning with the Civil Rights Act and continuing with other important measures passed during Johnson’s second term, was the most impressive body of social legislation since the New Deal of the 1930s. It encompassed measures designed to fight the “war on poverty,” including legislation establishing the Job Corps for the unemployed and the Head Start program for preschool children; new civil rights legislation, such as the Voting Rights Act (1965), which outlawed the literacy tests and other devices used to prevent African Americans from voting; and Medicare and Medicaid, which provided health benefits for the elderly and the poor, respectively. Other legislation addressed problems in education, housing and urban development, transportation, environmental conservation, and immigration. Johnson saw these measures as building on and completing the New Deal vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt; with their adoption the United States joined the ranks of the welfare states of western Europe and Scandinavia. However, the effect of these undertakings was soon vitiated by increasing American military involvement in the war in Vietnam, which had begun during the Eisenhower administration and was accelerated by President Kennedy.