President Lyndon Baines Johnson was born August 27, 1908. One of the most active, ambitious and controversial presidents, he competes with James Madison for the title of “best legislator” among presidents. Today is his 113th birthday.
Several groups in Texas and Washington celebrate LBJ’s birthday each year, an event he always liked to keep festive, partly because he had a huge ego, and partly because he just loved a good time with friends and cake.
More:
- In 2020 the Austin American-Statesman commemorated a quirky cookbook put together to honor LBJ’s birthday by close friends and students — some great recipes; it’s not a book sold in stores
- Best Presidential Biographies blog lists some of the best biographies on Johnson, a very complex and often enigmatic character whose life Shakespeare would have put on the stage
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
I think a lot of people remember Johnson for the Vietnam War — but Great Society was not abandoned by Johnson, nor Nixon, Ford and Carter. We just forget that Johnson was the genius who got them going.
When I worked during, with and in the Reagan administration, there were a lot of Reagan partisans who remembered Johnson’s Great Society is great detail, and who worked hard to derascinate it.
Unsuccessfully most of the time. Push to shove, Reagan himself agreed with Johnson on most of the Great Society.
Now, however, we need to work to save it from modern-day barbarians inside the gates. And more of them forget where the programs came from or, more importantly, why.
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It’s tragic how he had to abandon the Great Society he wanted for the Vietnam War he hated.
Without Vietnam, he would have gone down as a great president. Nobody remembers the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, or his deft handling of a recalcitrant Congress.
Just “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
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Oh, and this one.
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Colin Allred tweets:
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