♪ ♪ (crowd cheering) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: He had been scorned as an unscrupulous politician, a vulgar wheeler-dealer driven by ambition and a lust for power.

But on January 20, 1965, the night of his inaugural gala, Lyndon Johnson was a happy man.

Overwhelmingly elected, he promised to wipe out poverty and segregation, protect the old, and educate the young.

That was his dream.

Few presidents would ever know more triumph; few suffer such a swift and tragic fall.

CROWD: Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

Hey, hey, LBJ... JOHN CONNALLY: He was generous and he was selfish.

He was kind.

At other times, he was cruel.

At times, he was a earthy, crude-acting fellow.

At other times, he was incredibly charming.

He could be whatever he wanted to be.

He was a strange, complex man, who had basically almost a, a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence.

He was two different people.

GEORGE REEDY: What was it that would send him into those fantastic rages where he could be one of the nastiest, most insufferable, sadistic S.O.Bs.

that ever lived, then a few minutes later really be a big, magnificent, inspiring leader?

ROBERT DALLEK: What you have is a man who was a thoroughly American president, who was American from day one of his birth in south central Texas.

This is a man who reflected American moods and attitudes and contradictions and trends, and when he failed, it was America's failure.

REEDY: "Hubris," as the Greeks would put it-- you know, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

This was a man who was so big, that reached so far and made it, and then let the whole thing crumble.

I think it's one of the great stories of history.

♪ ♪ My fellow Americans, I accept your nomination.

(crowd cheering) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The 1964 presidential campaign was all Lyndon Baines Johnson.

(crowd whistling and applauding) After years of compromise and opportunism, he fired America with his vision of a Great Society.

JOHNSON: Our first objective is to free 30 million Americans from the prison of poverty.

Can you help us free these Americans?

And if you can, let me hear your voices.

(whistling and cheering) NARRATOR: He reached out to the poor, the dispossessed, to Americans who were left behind.

JOHNSON: Do something we can be proud of.

Help the weak and the meek and lift them up and help them dream and give them an education where they can make their own way.

NARRATOR: Campaigning with the energy of ten men-- "As if he had an extra pair of glands," one aide said-- he sounded the battle cries of his political youth, echoing his very first campaign a quarter of a century before.

♪ ♪ In the spring of 1937, Johnson was 28 years old, campaigning as an ardent Roosevelt New Dealer, reaching out to the working men and poor dirt farmers of the Texas hill country.

He ran for office as if his life depended on it.

He spoke in every town in his district, lost 40 pounds in 42 days, made 200 speeches, and collapsed with appendicitis just two days before the election.

From his hospital bed, with his wife, Lady Bird, he learned that he'd been elected one of the youngest members of Congress.

His political ideals would waver, but for the rest of his life, he would display the same nervous intensity, the same obsessive drive to succeed, and a talent for attaching himself to power.

("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) One month after Johnson's election, the president paid a holiday visit to Galveston, Texas.

Franklin Roosevelt was Lyndon Johnson's political hero.

Now the ambitious new congressman seized the opportunity to meet him.

LADY BIRD JOHNSON: The governor was going down to pay his respects, so he called Lyndon and said, "I'd like to take you along, "because you ran so completely on Roosevelt's platforms that I think he ought to meet you."

And Lyndon was there with his eyes out on stems, taking in every word and every gesture.

NARRATOR: They talked about fishing, about the Navy.

Then Johnson asked for an assignment to nothing less than the appropriations committee.

The president said that would have to wait.

DALLEK: Here are the two great politicians in American history in this century, I believe, and they're sizing each other up.

And Roosevelt gives him the name of Tommy Corcoran-- Tommy the Cork, the White House aide, the Washington "fixer"-- and he tells Johnson, "If you need anything when you get to Washington, you call up Mr.

Corcoran."

Well, Roosevelt himself gets back to Washington and he calls up Corcoran, the story goes, and he says to him, "Tommy, I just met the most extraordinary young man down in Texas."

"With any luck, "if the chips go right "and he hangs on to the friends he makes, "this boy Lyndon Johnson one day "can wind up being president of the United States.

He's got it."

That was quite a call, wasn't it?

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In the Texas hill country, they said that Lyndon was born to politics.

His grandfather had run for state office, and his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, served six terms in the Texas legislature.

Sam was an old-time reform politician who voted to tax big business, and, like his father before him, supported the eight-hour day.

"I loved going with my father to the legislature", Lyndon said.

"The only thing I loved more was going with him "on the trail during his campaigns.

Sometimes I wished it would go on forever."

DALLEK: There are state legislators who remember Lyndon.

They said it was uncanny how much he looked like his father, how much his mannerisms were like his father's, and how they'd grab you by the, by the lapels and pull you toward them, and were very physical, and there was a kind of warmth to it, a kind of very human quality.

And he got the smell in his nose of politics, and it just enthralled him.

NARRATOR: Johnson's mother, Rebekah, was a college graduate, cultured and ambitious.

It was said that Lyndon got his drive and ambition from her.

Nothing had prepared Rebekah for the hardships of life in the rural backwaters of Texas, with no electricity or indoor plumbing.

"Life is real and earnest," she wrote, "and not the charming fairy tale of which I had so long dreamed."

"The first year of her marriage was the worst year of her life," Johnson later said.

"Then I came along, and suddenly everything was all right again; I could do all the things she never did."

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: There was a certain depression that was in her which could only be relieved by putting all of her hopes and ambitions on this child.

I mean, he would tell me that when his father was away at the state legislature, even when he was 11 or 12, that he was invited to stay in her bed at night to keep her company.

But then when he came home with a bad report card, she would literally withdraw her love to the point where, he told me, that she wouldn't even speak to him for days on end; that she would talk to her husband or the other children and pretend he didn't exist.

So that lack of consistent love, I think, was what made him feel always that only would he be loved if he performed.

NARRATOR: Fear of failure would haunt him all of his life.

When Lyndon was in his teens, he watched his father go broke.

Cotton prices plummeted.

Sam was forced to sell the family farm.

♪ ♪ Neither Lyndon nor his mother ever wanted him to be like his failed father, and it fired his drive to be successful.

The day Lyndon Johnson left for Washington to take his place in Congress, he bid his parents an emotional goodbye.

His mother had told him his election was compensation for her own disappointments.

"You have always justified my expectations, "my hopes, my dreams.

"How dear to me you are you cannot know, my darling boy."

Johnson never forgot his father's parting words: "Now, you get up there, support FDR all the way, never shimmy, and give 'em hell."

Less than six months later, his father was dead.

MAN: New Deal rhythm?

WOMAN: New Deal rhythm?

MAN 2: New Deal rhythm!

We're right!

He's right!

I'm right!

♪ Waiting for the New Deal ♪ ♪ Ready for the New Deal ♪ ♪ Dancing with the New Deal ♪ NARRATOR: As Johnson arrived in Washington, the excitement and promise of Roosevelt's New Deal still animated the capital.

♪ ♪ The New Deal was the perfect climate for the young congressman and his wife, Lady Bird.

He had proposed to her the day they met, and she became the perfect political wife: rising at midnight to scramble eggs for his friends; running his congressional office; working as his business manager.

Lady Bird never stopped serving her husband's ambitions.

Assigned a room in the Old House Office Building, far from the corridors of power, the freshman congressman didn't hesitate to turn to the president for help.

With the support of the White House, Johnson secured loans and millions of dollars in federal grants for farmers, schools, housing for the poor, roads, public libraries.

♪ ♪ But helping complete the great dam on the lower Colorado River was his greatest achievement, and the next step in the education of Lyndon Johnson.

In 1938, rural Texans were still living without electricity.

E. BABE SMITH: It was a rather primitive life-- you know, no running water, and they had no refrigeration.

Every meal had to be started from scratch.

They used to say, you know, the man was a gentleman who would provide his wife with a sharp axe, so, you know, to cut the wood with it.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: "Of all the things I've ever done," Lyndon Johnson later wrote, "nothing has ever given me as much satisfaction as bringing power to the hill country of Texas."

♪ ♪ My daughter, when she was about nine years old, she just couldn't believe how the house had lit up.

(chuckling) She said, "Mama, the house is on fire."

NARRATOR: The dam was everything a young congressman could have hoped for.

The hill country farmers thanked Johnson for the electricity, and the men who built the dam thanked him for the government contracts: George and Herman Brown of the Brown and Root Construction Company.

Johnson helped the Brown brothers build a billion-dollar construction empire.

In turn, the Browns would fund Johnson's political campaigns.

Judgmentally, what I'd say is that they were a couple of guys who were making a lot of money out of the New Deal, and they didn't want to have to pay higher wage rates, so they were against the union.

It wasn't a matter of high principle; they wanted to get rich, and they did get rich.

Well, Lyndon, Lyndon sidled up to them, or they sidled up to him, and they made book.

I remember asking Johnson once in the White House, um, uh, "Did you deal with cash?"

And he said it was all cash.

I mean, it was, there were, there were no records.

So under those circumstances, there were plenty of politicians who were selling out to business interests.

I, I use a pejorative term-- I don't know what other term to use, I mean...

In TV, you have to use some shorthand.

I mean, they were agreeing to be with those people in exchange for money which they used in their campaigns.

(sniffs): That's pretty close to selling out, isn't it?

And everything is organized not like his father, around ideas and ideals, but like the son, around himself and his own career.

Not to say that he is not therefore doing a lot of good.

He brings real electricity to people that don't have it in his own district.

Yeah, sure, he's really smart.

NARRATOR: On May 2, 1939, George Brown wrote Johnson a letter.

"I hope you know, Lyndon, how I feel "in reference to what you've done for me, "and I'm going to try to show my appreciation through the years with actions rather than words."

Two years later, the Brown brothers made good on their promise.

("Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" playing) In 1941, when Johnson made a run for the Senate, he needed all the money the Brown brothers could give him.

He was just a young congressman reaching beyond his own small district in a race that was pure Texas politics-- part campaign and part circus.

29 candidates took the field, but in the end, there was only one man to beat: the governor of Texas, "Pappy" Lee O'Daniel.

O'DANIEL: ♪ I like my music ♪ LEWIS GOULD: Well, Pappy O'Daniel was a man who'd come out of nowhere to be governor of Texas in the late '30s.

He was a radio personality, and that's what made him so popular.

He had a band that played for him called The Light Crust Dough Boys, and their theme song was "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy."

O'DANIEL: Please pass the biscuits, Pappy.

GOULD: And he became known as W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel.

♪ And I said, "Skedoodle, ol' hard time blues" ♪ GOULD: He was conservative, but he didn't really believe in anything except getting elected and being popular.

♪ And I got that million-dollar smile ♪ (laughing) He had been on radio, uh, for quite a long time with a very popular program of country music.

Every day at noon, he had his Texas network, you know, and he, and he played and he sang.

The ladies just worshipped him, you know.

You couldn't find anybody who voted for him, but he always won the election, you know.

O'DANIEL: ♪ Played by the real hillbilly band ♪ "Now, listen, everybody, from near and far, we're The Light Crust Dough Boys."

And then he would sing the... ♪ Beautiful, beautiful Texas ♪ ♪ Where the beautiful bluebonnets grow ♪ ♪ We're proud of our forefathers ♪ ♪ Who fought at the Alamo ♪ ♪ You can live on the plains or the mountain ♪ ♪ Or down where the sea breezes blow ♪ ♪ And you're still in beautiful Texas ♪ ♪ The most beautiful state that we know ♪ BAND: ♪ Oh, beautiful, beautiful Texas ♪ ♪ Where the beautiful bluebonnets grow ♪ JAMES PICKLE: And here was Johnson, an unknown young congressman, so to speak, but he also had the aura that he was going somewhere.

He was going to do something, and you could feel it.

And he would have fun, but he was all business of dreaming and daring, imagining, attempting new things.

BAND: ♪ The most beautiful state that we know ♪ DALLEK: There was nobody who campaigned harder than a Lyndon Johnson.

He worked night and day, speaking, walking, driving-- just doing everything he conceivably could to get his name before the public and convince them of the fact that he would make a first-class senator.

JOHNSON: I believe that you people are fed up on hired hands doing nothing but entertaining you.

You are going to send Lyndon Johnson to the Senate next Saturday by the greatest vote that you ever sent a senator there.

(cheering) LADY BIRD JOHNSON: He went to every small hamlet, walked up and down the street, shook hands with all the merchants.

He would lined up all the friends that all your friends could summons, and your mother and your kinfolks.

BAND: ♪ And you're still in beautiful Texas ♪ ♪ The most beautiful state that we know ♪ NARRATOR: As the campaign drew to a close, Johnson remained the underdog, but once again, by lifting high the Roosevelt banner, Johnson closed the gap.

On election night, he was confident.

With 96% of the vote counted, he led O'Daniel by 5,000 votes.

Congratulations were already pouring in from Washington.

LADY BIRD JOHNSON: We had been declared elected by the Texas Election Bureau on Saturday night, when the votes were counted.

Banner headlines on Sunday morning: "Johnson elected to Senate."

PICKLE: The "Dallas News," the great "Dallas News," he ran a story on Sunday morning: "LBJ, Johnson, United States senator."

They declared him elected, about like they had done it for Dewey.

But the margin by which we were elected began to dwindle.

It was about 5,000 to begin with, and it began to dwindle.

NARRATOR: The 33-year-old contender was about to get a lesson in the dark side of politics that he would never forget.

In the rough-and-tumble world of Texas elections, stuffing the ballot box was not unusual, especially in south and east Texas, and no one understood this more than John Connally, Lyndon Johnson's friend and campaign manager.

CONNALLY: A lot of those counties had political leaders-- sometimes it was a sheriff, sometimes a county judge.

They basically carried the county the way they wanted it to go, and this had been historically the case, and we had the support of most of those political leaders.

Saturday night about midnight, they called me and said, "We've got the returns.

What do you want us to do with them?"

I said, "Well, tell me what they are first, and, and then report them."

The opposition then, Governor O'Daniel and his people, knew exactly how many votes they had to have to take the lead.

They kept changing the results and changing the returns, and our lead got smaller and smaller and smaller.

Finally, Wednesday afternoon, we wound up on the short side of the stick and lost the election by 1,311 votes.

And I'm basically responsible for losing that '41 campaign.

We let them know exactly how many votes they had to have.

And I did it, no, no question about it.

("Beautiful, Beautiful Texas" playing) BAND: ♪ Oh, beautiful, beautiful Texas... ♪ PICKLE: It was a hard pill for Mr. Johnson to swallow, because we'd gone out late Saturday to celebrate.

I haven't done that in other campaigns.

I always waited till the next day.

Lyndon is asked, does he want to challenge Pappy's victory, because it is a stolen election, but Lyndon knows that his own folks and supporters have done some pretty untoward things, as well, including the fact that they violate all campaign finance laws and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Johnson says, "No, we can't challenge them."

He said, "I'll wait my turn, and when my turn comes, I'll fix the balance next time."

We thought it was the better part of wisdom not to contest it, not indicate that we, uh, we're guilty of just sour grapes, and go ahead and say, "We'll, we'll meet again."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Johnson was not prepared for defeat, and he was never more miserable.

"I felt terribly rejected, "and I began to think about leaving politics and going home to make money," he said.

But he couldn't bring himself to quit.

He bought a house and established the basis for his own personal fortune.

Lady Bird bought a small Austin radio station.

After nearly ten years of marriage, their first daughter was born.

Three years later, they would have another girl.

But politically, Johnson languished.

The House of Representatives was too small a stage.

Along with Southern congressmen, he voted against civil rights and told his liberal friends, "You can't be a statesman if you don't get elected."

Finally, after seven restless years, Johnson seized a chance to run for the Senate.

It would be a campaign that would haunt him for the rest of his political life.

LADY BIRD JOHNSON: And this time, his opponent was Coke Stevenson, also a governor and a very formidable man.

NARRATOR: Coke Stevenson was a self-made man, tight-fisted with the budget and immensely popular.

His most ardent admirers called him "Mr.

Texas."

CONNALLY: The polls clearly showed that Coke Stevenson, starting out, had almost a two-to-one lead over Johnson.

It was an almost insurmountable lead, and most people thought that Johnson couldn't win it.

He told us, and John Connally told us, and, and anybody that had been to a county fair and a goat-roping and knew anything about Texas politics knew that this was make or break for Lyndon Johnson.

("San Antonio Rose" playing) DALLEK: By 1948, Johnson had become a master of Texas politics.

BOB WILLS: That San Antonio rose!

DALLEK: They'd run these, these shows, these extravaganzas in these small towns, and the band and the music, and maybe giving a savings bond or a barbecue, beer, or, or some kind of watermelons or something like that.

This was all part of a traditional Texas hoopla, and Johnson didn't miss a beat there.

He understood that was an essential part of it.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Coke Stevenson was so popular and so well known that he campaigned from small town to small town the old-fashioned way.

But not Lyndon Johnson.

In a headlong five-week helicopter campaign, Johnson crisscrossed the state, made 370 landings, and lost 27 pounds.

In one day alone, he spoke to 15,000 people.

PICKLE: And I tell you, if you'd go into a little town and say, "Lyndon Johnson's coming to town, "and he'll be here at 2:00, and he'll land on his helicopter," everyone in town wanted to see that.

They'd kind of laugh about it, but they didn't want to miss it.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: They called him "The Johnson City Windmill."

Texans never saw anything like it.

PICKLE: It was dramatic.

Can you imagine a little small town that never had a helicopter come, or never seen one much?

No television those days, you see.

They'd fly in over a little town and circle a couple of time, and he'd get on the P.A.

system and say, "This is Lyndon Johnson.

"I'm gonna land in just a minute, and I want to shake every hand down there."

People would look up there, they'd kind of laugh and giggle, but their mouths would be open and they'd say, "Is this really happening?"

AVA COX: He would say, "This is Lyndon Johnson, your congressman.

How do you think things are running?"

"All right, Ed, what about that crop out there?

Do you have a good crop this year?"

He'd come over here and he'd call one's name.

"Well, all right, Sid Hyde, "how is the cattle business doing today?

Olin, how is the car business coming on?"

Old Olin jumped and looked around.

He wasn't expecting that to be called out.

PICKLE: When he'd land, he'd bank the helicopter over and he would circle around over the field and throw his Stetson hat out over the crowd.

Now, that was dramatic.

And he had about a four-beaver hat, you know, that a good one.

And when he did it, those of us on the ground who were part of the crew, our job was to go get that hat.

We had to reclaim that hat, and if we didn't get it, we'd catch "Hail Columbia" from the, from the boss then.

And he'd say, "Do you know how much that hat cost me?

"You know how much?

Have you been in to buy a Stetson hat lately?"

And we'd say no, of course, we wouldn't go, dare wear a hat like that.

He said, "That's coming out of my pocket.

You get that hat when we throw it out."

And we'd have to go get that hat.

Usually we could get it, but if you got it recovered by a little ten-year-old boy, it'd be pretty hard to run up and say, "Son, give me that hat," and take it away from him.

So it wasn't always pleasant.

NARRATOR: Johnson had begun his political life as a Franklin Roosevelt liberal, but in 1948, he ran against the unions, supported big business, and spoke out strongly against civil rights.

The oil boom had made Texas wealthy and conservative, and as Texas changed, so had Lyndon Johnson.

DUGGER: Well, you had an authentic conservative, Stevenson, running against a New Deal liberal, Johnson, who has concealed his colors.

Lyndon presented himself as more anti-union than Coke Stevenson.

Now, what kind of sense does that make to you in terms of who Lyndon really was?

None.

There's no sense to it, except, of course, the absolutely unqualified opportunism of a successful politician of this particular mold.

He out-righted the most conservative figure in Texas politics at that time.

DALLEK: Some people have tended to idealize Coke Stevenson and see him as a kind of old-fashioned Texas cowboy and man of great integrity.

In fact, Coke Stevenson was a terribly reactionary man.

First of all, on civil rights-- in 1942, a Black Texan was lynched in Texarkana, and Stevenson gave very little public response against this.

And when he was asked privately about it, his comment was, "You know," he said, "these Negroes sometimes do things which provoke whites to such violence."

And when the 1944 Supreme Court decision was handed down asserting that Blacks had the right to vote in Democratic primaries, Stevenson called it "a threat to our security and safety."

He was fiercely anti-civil rights and, and a racist and a segregationist of the first order.

NARRATOR: The race was so close, there was no way to call it.

The lead seesawed back and forth.

CONNALLY: I said, "I think you're gonna win it."

He said, "No, I think we've lost it."

And I said, "No, it's going to be the reversal of 1941."

NARRATOR: Three days after the polls closed, the votes were still coming in, and Stevenson led by a handful.

It looked as if Stevenson would be the new senator from Texas.

But Johnson remembered 1941.

He was not about to lose again.

The election now hinged on the "Duke of Duval County," George Parr, the man who controlled the votes in south Texas.

CONNALLY: George Parr controlled that county, and those people voted the way he wanted them to vote.

No question about that-- none whatever.

Now, the candidates had nothing to do with it.

In the nature of things, you don't write down, "Bought these votes," you know, "yesterday afternoon at 4:00," but obviously there was some understanding with the, between the Johnson people and the political bosses in south Texas.

DALLEK: Earlier, when Coke Stevenson ran for governor, he had also been the recipient of the favor of the bosses because he had paid them.

In one of his races, George Parr, the, uh, the "Duke of Duval County," had given Stevenson a vote of 3,310 to 17.

Is it conceivable that such a lopsided margin would have been given to any candidate for any office?

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In the tiny south Texas town of Alice, six days after the polls had closed, 202 additional votes were reported from Precinct Box 13.

When they were counted, all but two were for Lyndon Johnson.

When the signatures of the 202 new voters were examined, some say the names were all written in the same ink and listed in alphabetical order.

I did not notice that they were in alphabetical order, although some of the people who saw it testified later that that had happened.

NARRATOR: Homer Dean was a 29-year-old attorney working in the Johnson campaign when Coke Stevenson arrived in Alice and demanded to see the voting list locked in the vault of the Texas State Bank.

Dean is one of the few people who actually saw the disputed names.

DEAN: It did look to me like there had been a change in ink, and it looked like 200 or 202 or 203 names had been added to the poll list in a different ink by a different hand.

Mr. Stevenson was an outraged man that felt like the election had been stolen from him, and he felt like what he had just seen was evidence of that.

NARRATOR: Stevenson challenged the election at the Texas State Democratic Convention.

It was no use-- the Johnson forces were too powerful.

When it was all over, Precinct Box number 13 made the difference.

Johnson won by 87 votes.

But the question of a stolen election remained.

DUGGER: You cannot make the statement on the facts that Johnson stole the election.

I think you can say it was stolen for him.

That's true, but did he order it done?

I never could find John Connally down there doing it.

I wasn't within 200 miles of him.

I was in Austin, Texas, on a battery of telephones calling all over the state of Texas.

I didn't know anything about it.

And, uh, that's the truth of the matter.

If Homer Dean knew it was stolen, you don't find Homer Dean saying he stole it.

I didn't then, and don't now, think that Johnson directly participated in it.

He received the benefit of it, but I don't think he directed it or even knew about it when it was happening.

You see, it just gets away from you.

NARRATOR: 19 years later, Ronnie Dugger met in the White House with President Lyndon Johnson and asked him about the election of 1948.

DUGGER: One night, up in his bedroom, he started laughing and seemed as, wondered if he could find something, and he said he was going back into Bird's bedroom, which was next door.

And he rummaged around in the closet-- I could, I think I could hear him rummaging around in the closet-- and he came in with this photograph of these five guys in front of this old car with Box 13 balanced on the hood of it.

I looked at him and grinned, and...

He grinned back, and...

But he wouldn't explain it to me.

I asked him, "Well, who were these guys?

"Why did they have Box 13 on the hood of this car?

What did it mean?"

And he just-- nothing.

Wouldn't say.

That's what we'd say in Texas, "He wouldn't say nothing."

(laughing) So there it is.

(laughs) History turning on a... A mystery.

("Beautiful, Beautiful Texas" playing) NARRATOR: It was 1949, and Texas had a new freshman senator.

They called him "Landslide Lyndon."

GOULD: It cast a shadow of illegitimacy over the rest of his political career that he never escaped.

The idea of "Landslide Lyndon," 87 votes, that there were skeletons in his closet, that he was a wheeler-dealer, that there was always something kind of flawed about his title, both to being senator and to being president.

NARRATOR: When an exuberant Johnson entered the Senate, he was a powerless freshman joining a select club run by insiders very much his senior.

He turned for help to a man who knew just how the club was run: Bobby Baker.

Baker had come to the Senate as a teenage page in the 1940s and knew, everyone said, "where the bodies were buried."

BAKER: And so he said, "Mr. Baker, I wanted to meet you."

He said, "My spies tell me you're the smartest son of a bitch over there."

And I said, "That's not true.

"And the only reputation I have "is that, that my word is my bond and I'll protect your privacy."

He said, "Well, you're the kind of man I want to know."

So he said, "I want you to know "that the national Democratic Party is much more liberal than Texas."

He advised me in no uncertain terms that he was committed to the oil interest in Texas.

NARRATOR: Johnson always knew where the power was.

In Texas, he cozied up to the oil barons.

In the Senate, he attached himself to the Southern conservatives and their influential leader, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia.

BAKER: Senator Russell was a lonely bachelor.

He read probably ten books a week.

He was a loner.

But Lyndon Johnson at this time knew where the power was.

And had Senator Russell been a woman, he would have married him, because, uh... (chuckling): Or married her.

NARRATOR: Under Russell's patronage, Johnson was given the job of party whip.

He transformed what had been a minor post into a seat of power.

Two years later, he was elected Democratic leader.

"Landslide Lyndon" was now one of the most powerful men in the United States Senate.

♪ ♪ In his third year in the Senate, Johnson had bought himself a piece of land along the Pedernales River.

The consummate Washington politician soon took on the trappings of the mythical Texas rancher.

But he never stopped working.

The LBJ Ranch was more than a place of relaxation; it became part of the stuff of power.

♪ ♪ CONNALLY: He had no interests, really, except politics.

That was his whole life.

He was totally committed to it.

He never read anything except politics.

He didn't care about any sports, he didn't read any books.

I don't know of one book he read in all the years I've known him.

GOODWIN: I think for Lyndon Johnson's temperament, the Senate could not have been more perfectly suited.

For one thing, it was a small number of people.

You've only got a limited number, all of whom can be subject to his personality.

He could get up every day and learn what their fears, their desires, their wishes, their wants were, and he could then manipulate, dominate, persuade, cajole them.

And what really made things work in the Senate was personal relationships, and Johnson was just strictly the best at that.

DUGGER: He was determined to recruit you or kill you.

They used to call it "the Johnson treatment."

REEDY: It was an incredible blend of badgering, cajolery, reminders of past favors, promises of future favors, predictions of gloom if something doesn't happen.

When that man started to work on you, all of a sudden, you just felt that you were standing under a waterfall and the stuff was pouring on you.

I've seen him, he used to get his...

He would sit in front of a senator face-to-face, and then he would take his, his head and he would get it underneath and go up like this and talk to him.

Let me tell you something, man, I don't know-- you're not from this part of the country-- but if you can't eyeball a fellow and you can't look him in the face and talk to him, you can't tell what he's going to do.

♪ ♪ (newsreel theme playing) ANNOUNCER: The 1954 mid-term election will go down as one of the most peculiar on record.

NARRATOR: In 1954, with the Republicans in control of the White House, the Democrats gained control of the Senate, making Lyndon Johnson the youngest majority leader ever.

He was 46 years old.

DALLEK: There was no more powerful majority leader in American history.

He understood the way the Senate worked.

He understood what senators needed and what they wanted.

He had biographies on each of them so that he knew what their tastes and intentions and aims and desires and wishes and hopes were.

He knew the womanizers, he knew the drunks, he knew people who wanted what committee assignments.

He knew what rooms they wanted.

He knew if they wanted a trip to Europe and take their wife.

If we had a vote coming up and the senator couldn't vote with us but we could send him on a NATO trip, we would do that, so, you know, whereby he would not have to vote against us, but he would be off, and his wife would be happy, and he'd be attending a conference, and those conferences are very important.

His subordinate, Bobby Baker, who was the floor man for him, and people called "Little Lyndon," said one time, "I have ten senators in the palm of my hand."

It's a good ol' boy network.

Well, you know, if you've been, you've served, served in, in the Congress, either the House or the Senate, together for many years, you've, you've done favors for each other, and you say what you can do or can't do, and what's possible.

And they controlled all the... What I call boodle-- the things that were given to people.

Every senator wants a private office in the Capitol because it was a little hideaway; they could get away from the press, they can get away from their wife.

They can have private luncheons, they can go get drunk, you know.

They, they can be a human being.

SHUMAN: When he ran the Senate, incredible what he would do.

I saw him at one time hold up a roll call vote, which usually takes 15 to 20 minutes.

He held it up for more than an hour so they could extract Hubert Humphrey from out of the air over the National Airport, and they finally brought him in and voted it.

And during this time, Johnson would be going like this to the clerk, telling him to slow down as he called the roll.

And then there were other times when he had the votes and he was winning by maybe one or two votes, and he'd tell him to speed it up.

HARRY MCPHERSON: In the Senate, he would pace the floor, pull out his inhaler, draw a deep breath into his nose, looking around the chamber, thinking all the time, nervous.

He never sat in a chair.

He'd stand up and jitter.

He'd bounce up and down, rattling silver dollars in his pocket.

CONNALLY: He ate in a hurry.

He wolfed his food.

Most of the time, he had no manners.

He'd eat off of the plate of either person on either side of him.

If he ate something that he liked and they hadn't finished theirs, he'd reach over with his fork and eat off of their plate.

He would eat his dessert, Lady Bird's, Lynda's, and-- his daughter's-- and mine, too.

I'm telling you, he was a big man, but he could handle two fifths of Cutty Sark every night, and that's not good.

And he would smoke cigarettes like a crazy man.

Till he had his heart attack.

JOHNSON: I'm going home to get a long rest, and if the doctors give me the okay, I'll be back on the job in the Senate when the Senate reconvenes in January.

In the meantime, no politics and onto the rocking chair.

Well, I wouldn't say that you could take politics completely away from me, but we'll have it at a minimum.

BOTH: Good luck.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Johnson had very nearly died.

For the rest of his life, the image of a sudden death hung over him.

REEDY: One of Lyndon Johnson's real troubles was, he was incapable of relaxation.

Even when he tried to relax, it became terribly frenetic.

(engine revs) CONNALLY: He used to call me on Saturday mornings and say, "Let's go to the game, I've got some tickets."

We'd sit there during the whole ball game, talk politics.

He didn't watch the football game, literally didn't watch it.

He was watching the crowd, he was looking around, waving to this one, waving to that one.

SHUMAN: Johnson had an immense ego.

He had on his shirts and on his sleeves his initials, LBJ.

His wife's name was Lady Bird, at least informally, so her name would be LBJ.

His two children, his girls, were both LBJ.

His ranch was the LBJ Ranch.

(chuckles): His dog was Little Beagle Johnson.

NARRATOR: As Johnson prepared to return to Washington, the liberals within his own party began to attack him.

When he courted the popular Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, they accused him of selling out.

They wanted stronger action on housing, jobs, and civil rights.

My opinion was that he was destroying the Democratic Party and not doing his job.

His job was the opposition to the Eisenhower administration, and he didn't do it.

They were playing just hanky-panky with each other, and there was really no Democratic opposition.

SHUMAN: One doesn't know whether he was a liberal or a reactionary.

Probably he was neither.

He probably was just an extraordinarily skillful parliamentarian who, who was an opportunist, and who sensed the wind and then went in that direction.

NARRATOR: No one knew what Johnson really stood for.

In 1957, when a civil rights bill came before Congress, it looked as if he would be finally forced to take a stand.

MAN: You are not going to permit the N.A.A.C.P.

to take over your schools!

♪ ♪ We are not going to permit our little children to be used as pawns in a game of power politics to get the racial vote in Northern cities!

(cheering) You have to remember what the country was like for Black people in 1957 and 1959, when Johnson was majority leader.

MAN: They want to throw white children and colored children into the melting pot of integration, out of which will come a conglomerated, mulatto, mongrel class of people!

(people yelling) WILKINS: It was still a segregated country.

Blacks still could expect random violence.

(people talking in background, man yelps) NARRATOR: Nobody knew what the majority leader of the Senate would do.

Never in his life had Johnson voted for a civil rights bill.

But now, determined to shake his Southern image and become a truly national politician, Johnson confronted his old friend and mentor Richard Russell of Georgia.

S. DOUGLASS CATER: The very first thing he did was to meet with his old and closest advisers and say, "This time, we are going to get a bill and you might as well face up to it."

Richard Russell suffered a great deal, because they really did feel that this was the beginning of the end of the South as they knew it.

NARRATOR: Behind the scenes in the Senate cloakroom, Johnson moved from one side to the other, first trying to assure the Southern Democrats.

He would just say, "If you don't pass this moderate bill, "you're going to have a, a bill crammed down your throat, "because Richard Nixon is, is very smart politically, "and he is courting Black people right now and you're gonna get something that, that you can't live with."

NARRATOR: And Johnson knew just what to tell the Northern liberals.

BAKER: I've heard him many times chew Hubert Humphrey's ass out.

"Hubert, it don't take any genius to be for the civil rights from Minnesota."

He said, "How many Black people you got in Minnesota?"

Hubert said, "Well, we got 12,000."

(chuckling): He said, "Well, you know, you, you make me sick."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: By the middle of the summer, the Johnson treatment was having its effect.

REPORTER: Senator, there is some talk of a compromise.

Do you see any area for a compromise?

Well, I haven't had any compromise presented to me yet, but I am a, a realist and a reasonable man.

NARRATOR: By skillful maneuvering, Johnson engineered a bill acceptable to all sides.

JOHNSON: A compromise has been negotiated.

I'm pleased that the bill will pass.

It is a great step forward in a very important and delicate field.

NARRATOR: On August 7, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

But Johnson had traded away the muscle in the law.

In theory, the law protected the voting rights of Blacks.

In fact, it gave the federal government no real power of enforcement.

That bill had nothing in it.

In fact, when it was finally passed, Mr. Douglas said that it reminded him of Lincoln's old saying that it was like a, a soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.

"Can you believe those bastards?"

he said.

You know, "I, I'm the first man in the history of this country "to pass a civil rights bill, then they got to give me the, the shiv."

NARRATOR: The bill was pure Johnson compromise-- a masterpiece of Senate politicking.

But it was the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction.

Johnson had freed himself from the shackles of his Southern image, and he was ready to move on.

("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) By 1960, Lyndon Johnson made public what everyone already knew: he wanted to be president of the United States.

JOHNSON: The person you select as your president-- the weight he's carried, the burdens he knows, the decision he makes may well determine whether you live as free men.

NARRATOR: But John Kennedy, the young, wealthy, glamorous senator, who Johnson had casually dismissed as inexperienced, had the nomination all but wrapped up.

Johnson resentfully called Kennedy "Sonny Boy."

I have found it extremely beneficial serving in the Senate, with Senator Johnson as leader.

I think if I emerge successfully in this convention, it will be the result of watching Senator Johnson proceed around the Senate for the last eight years.

I have learned the lesson well, Lyndon, and I hope it may benefit me in the next 24 hours.

(audience laughs and applauds) NARRATOR: On the eve of the Democratic Convention, Johnson challenged Kennedy to a debate.

Kennedy coolly brushed Johnson aside.

...full of admiration for Senator Johnson, full of affection for him, strongly in support of him for majority leader, and I'm confident that in that position, we're all gonna be able to work together.

Thank you.

(audience applauds) MAN: Mr. Chairman, Wyoming's vote will make a majority for Senator Kennedy.

(crowd cheers and applauds) (band playing "Happy Days Are Here Again") NARRATOR: Kennedy was nominated overwhelmingly on the first ballot.

(cheering, music continue) Now all that was left was the vice presidency, and no one was sure what Johnson would do if Kennedy offered it to him.

CONNALLY: He said, "Well, Jack Kennedy just called.

He's coming down to see me."

Said, "What do you think he wants?"

And I said, "He's going to offer you the vice presidency."

He said, "Oh, no, he's not, he, he wouldn't do that."

Said, "He's probably gonna ask me to manage the campaign."

I said, "No, he's gonna ask you to be vice president."

He said, "Well... What should I say to him?"

I said, "Well, you don't have any choice.

You have to say yes."

And I said, "Mr. Leader, let me tell you, "John Kennedy knows that he, no Catholic "has ever been elected president in the history of this country.

"He knows the only chance in hell that he has "to be president of the United States is if you run as vice president."

And I said, "The vice presidency is the worst job in the country.

It's not worth a warm bucket of spit," as John Nance Garner said.

"But you're one heartbeat away from the presidency."

NARRATOR: When Kennedy offered Johnson the vice presidency, no one was happy.

The conservatives didn't want Johnson to run with the liberal Kennedy, and the liberals wanted one of their own.

Finally, the candidate's brother Robert Kennedy paid Johnson a visit.

I was in the room, in Johnson's bedroom, with Johnson and John Connally-- the three of us alone-- on the morning of the nomination for the vice presidency at about 10:30, when Bobby Kennedy stormed in and started screaming at Johnson that if he knew what was good for him, he'd get off that ticket.

BAKER: Well, Johnson did not like Bobby Kennedy, and it was mutual-- they hated each other.

So what happened was that, that Mr. Rayburn and John Connally went in to meet with Bobby Kennedy.

CONNALLY: Bobby Kennedy said that all hell had broken loose on the convention floor, and that Johnson was going to have to withdraw, just change his mind and not accept the vice presidency.

And Mr. Rayburn looked at him and he said, "Aw..." And then, and uttered an expletive that I'm not going to use.

Old Man Rayburn said, "Shit, sonny," and kicked him out.

I said, "Your brother came down here, "offered him the vice presidency, "and Mr., and Mr. Johnson accepted it.

"Now, if he doesn't want him to have it, he's going to have to call and ask him to withdraw."

And I am grateful, finally, that I can rely in the coming months on many others-- on a distinguished running mate who brings unity and strength to our platform and our ticket, Lyndon Johnson.

(audience cheers and applauds) CATER: And that was a, a real transformation in which this young pup, Jack Kennedy, suddenly is it, and he, Lyndon Johnson-- big old clumsy Lyndon Johnson-- is playing second fiddle.

And you got to believe it, that those vice presidential years were, were agony for him.

("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing slowly) GOODWIN: It was a terrible sense of having lost that center of dominance, and suddenly, I think he felt like a little kid looking in a glass door at the, at the candy display inside and he couldn't quite reach it.

It was devastating.

BAKER: Bobby never got over the fact that his brother overruled him and put Johnson on the ticket, and there was a, a mutual dislike second to none in the history of the world.

♪ ♪ CATER: It wasn't the way the president treated him.

I think Jack Kennedy treated him with due respect.

But everybody around Kennedy kind of poked fun at him and, and made mockery of, "Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?"

BAKER: And Kennedy, you know, named him the head of the space center, plus, he sent him on every foreign trip in the history of the world to, you know, try to give him something to do.

("Deep in the Heart of Texas" playing) MAN: Aw!

Deep in the heart of Texas, yeah!

NARRATOR: Vice President Johnson made ceremonial visits to 26 countries.

But he wasn't the kind of man who could get the feel for another culture.

Wherever he went, he took his own oversized bed, a special nozzle for his shower, dozens of cases of Cutty Sark, and thousands of personally inscribed ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters as gifts.

But at least abroad, he was center stage.

At home, there were still the Kennedys: urbane, charismatic, immensely popular.

JANEWAY: He was consumed with this passion of inferiority towards the Kennedys.

And they gave him a very hard time when he was vice president.

They were going to dump him from their ticket.

They made a buffoon of him-- a laughingstock.

When, as vice president of the United States, he visited Scandinavia, Bobby Kennedy sent an uncoded telegram to the embassies-- uncoded, so that everyone could see it-- saying that the vice president in no way speaks for the government of the United States and is not to be received as if he were an emissary of the president.

NARRATOR: In 1963, a chagrined and frustrated vice president told an aide, "My future is behind me."

♪ ♪ And then, Dallas.

♪ ♪ LADY BIRD JOHNSON: It all began so hopefully.

But the feeling in Texas was not good for Kennedy, and so of course, we were uptight.

We were going along, and I was heaving a sigh of relief.

"Thank the Lord, everything is going to be all right."

And then came, um, that shot.

(gun firing) The Secret Service man suddenly vaulted over Lyndon and pushed him to the floor.

♪ ♪ And here we were, racing down at breakneck speed, not knowing what had taken over our lives.

♪ ♪ This man came in and told Lyndon that President Kennedy was dead.

I guess we were all silent for a while, and then Lyndon said, "We must get to Air Force One."

I don't know how long we sat, but quite a while.

He said, "Does anybody in this plane know the oath of office?"

Nobody did, word for word, precisely.

He said, "You'll have to call the attorney general and ask him."

What an excruciating call.

The attorney general was Bobby Kennedy.

♪ ♪ SARAH T. HUGHES: I do solemnly swear... JOHNSON: I do solemnly swear... HUGHES: ...that I will faithfully execute... JOHNSON: ...that I will faithfully execute... HUGHES: ...the office of president of the United States... JOHNSON: ...the office of president of the United States... NARRATOR: A beloved president was gone, and in his place stood this big Texan with an unsavory past.

The Kennedys distrusted him.

The American people were suspicious, stunned, and baffled.

On November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson became the 36th president of the United States.

♪ ♪ "I took the oath," Johnson said, "but for millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate-- "a naked man with no presidential covering.

"A pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper.

"And then there were the bigots and the dividers "and the Eastern intellectuals "who were waiting to knock me down "before I could even begin to stand up.

The whole thing was almost unbearable."

(drums pounding) Rumors of dark schemes and conspiracies were everywhere.

Anxious Americans knew little about the new president.

What they did know was that their beloved John F. Kennedy was gone.

"I always felt sorry for Harry Truman and the way he got the presidency," Johnson told an aide, "but at least his man wasn't murdered."

MAN: Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States.

(applauding) NARRATOR: President for only five days, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress.

After decades in Washington, he knew them all, and he knew what they were thinking.

Would he measure up?

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, members of the House, members of the Senate, my fellow Americans, all I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time.

Today, John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind.

NARRATOR: He was never very good at formal speeches, but in the most important speech of his life, he reassured a shocked and grieving nation.

John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished in the first thousand days nor in the life of this administration.

"But," he said, "let us begin."

Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans... "Let us continue."

(audience applauding) NARRATOR: With a few simple words, he invoked the legacy of the dead president.

The new president would carry on.

♪ ♪ "I knew it was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay," Johnson later wrote.

He convinced a reluctant and grieving Kennedy cabinet to stay on, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

♪ ♪ I said, "These are all Kennedy people.

"A lot of them are good people, but they... "They are Kennedy people.

They were committed to him, not to you."

I said, "I don't know that these people will be disloyal, "but they obviously can't have the same feeling for you "that they had for Jack Kennedy.

"You're entitled, as president of the United States, "to have your own cabinet, people that you know and whom you trust."

"Well," he said, "I, I just can't change them now."

Said, "I promise you I'll change them after the election in '64."

NARRATOR: "I had to take the dead man's program and turn it into a martyr's cause," he said.

"That way, Kennedy would live on forever-- and so would I."

♪ ♪ An accident of history had given him the power that he had reached for his entire life.

Now he was determined, as he said, "to be the greatest president of them all-- the whole bunch of them."

WOMAN: ♪ Freedom, freedom ♪ ♪ Got to have freedom, freedom ♪ NARRATOR: His first test would be civil rights.

Racial tensions could no longer be tempered by compromise.

The Civil Rights Movement was demanding freedom, now.

WOMAN: ♪ Freedom ♪ ♪ Freedom, freedom, freedom ♪ NARRATOR: Johnson's abrupt assumption of the presidency had converged with the fierce struggle for Black equality.

(song continues) ♪ ♪ In 1964, racial segregation still ruled the South by both law and custom.

And Lyndon Johnson was a Southerner burdened by a history of vacillation, compromise, and a long string of votes that had kept segregation strong.

Civil rights would measure the limits of Lyndon Johnson's moral imagination.

WILKINS: A Southern accent went a long way to raise my defenses.

So when Johnson became president, I was fearful-- very, very unhappy.

NARRATOR: With civil rights activists confronting segregation all across the South, many Americans wondered how the new president would react.

JAMES FARMER: Johnson did not approve of, he did not like-- I can even use a stronger term-- he hated the demonstrations of the movement in the streets.

He hated them.

But he had enough sensitivity that he knew that all hell was going to break loose if we, we didn't do something about it.

(people shouting) NARRATOR: Civil rights workers lay siege to a segregated society.

There were sit-ins at lunch counters, on trains and buses, in hotels and theaters, forcing Johnson to act.

When some of Johnson's aides advised him not to lay the prestige of the presidency on the line, he responded, "What's it for if it's not to be laid on the line?"

WILKINS: He said over and over and over again in those days, "I'm going to be the president who finishes what Lincoln began."

He said it over and over again.

Well, it was great rhetoric, but you also knew that was a great reading of history; that if in fact he could accomplish that, he'd have belonged up there on Mount Rushmore.

NARRATOR: A bill to prohibit the segregation of Blacks and whites in public facilities had been put before Congress by John Kennedy, but it was stalled.

Johnson determined to act.

This bill is going to pass if it takes us all summer, and this bill is going to be signed and enacted into law because justice and morality demand it.

WILKINS: All of a sudden, there was a power and a force behind this kind of legislation that we hadn't seen in the Kennedy time, and with that, my view about him began to change.

NARRATOR: The full force of the Johnson treatment, perfected in the Senate, now became a weapon in the arsenal of the presidency.

FARMER: He was on the phone with Republican senators and with Southern Democrats, and he was bargaining with them.

He was telling them about some bridge that they wanted back home or some dam that they wanted, and he would help them with that if they would help him with this, and give him this thing that he wanted, that the whole nation wanted, and the nation had to have.

And he was also reminding them in not too subtle tones that if they didn't support him, he would have ways of getting back at them.

JACK VALENTI: So in those days, we played hard ball.

My catalogue included a number of Southern congressmen, where you had to say...

They'd say, "Well, now, Jack, there's no way I can vote for that," and I'd say, "Well, Mr.

Congressman, now, "I know you've got this, this, and this that you want, "and I don't think we're prepared "to deal with you on that "unless you're gonna be responding to some of the entreaties from the president."

We let them know that for every negative vote, there would be a price to pay.

And he kept saying to his Southern friends, "If I can advocate it as president, "you ought to be able to vote for it in, in your constituency.

"This may be the best chance we'll ever have.

I think we've got to change the way of doing things."

It's not like a Yankee from New York saying, "We gotta do this."

This was a Southerner saying it ought to be done.

And that helped.

It didn't help a whole lot, because the Southern boys, they knew that they were going to catch heck for it.

That's what he got from the Southerners, that, that, "You're, you're killing us "by loving up the niggers.

"You're, you're ripping the party apart.

You're, you're hurting us."

And Johnson, Johnson's answer was, "This is what we've got to do.

"And this is, this is what I'm going to do.

And this is what the Democratic Party is supposed to do."

NARRATOR: Once again, the leader of the Southern Democrats, his old friend and mentor Richard Russell, stood in his way.

But we are not yet ready to surrender in our opposition to this bill, which we feel is a perversion of the American way of life... VALENTI: And he said to Dick Russell, "I want this civil rights bill passed, and you nor no one else is going to stand in my way."

And I remember Richard Russell said to him, said, "Well, Mr. President, you may do it, "but I'll tell you what: "it's going to cost you the South and it will cost you an election."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Southern senators prepared to filibuster to prevent the bill from ever coming to a vote by talking it to death.

But Johnson was not to be denied.

RAUH: What the president did was to say, "They can filibuster till hell freezes over.

I'm not going to put anything else on that floor."

So the filibuster couldn't win.

And that was Johnson's great contribution to the civil rights bill.

NARRATOR: The debate paralyzed the Senate for 83 days.

It was the longest filibuster in Senate history.

And then the Senate voted to stop the talking.

♪ ♪ The bill passed.

That same evening, at 2:00 in the morning, Johnson reached Congressman Jake Pickle, one of only six Southerners to vote in its favor.

PICKLE: And he said, "Now, Jake," he says, "this is your president."

He said, "I know it's late, and I know where you've been."

I said, "Where have I been?"

He said, "You've been out having a few drinks "and trying to vote, trying to forget that vote you cast.

You voted for the civil rights, and you're trying to forget it."

And I said, "I sure have been."

He said, "Because you're going to catch heck, aren't you?"

And I said, "Yes, I'm afraid I will."

He said, "Well, let me tell you, "the reason I keep calling is, I want you to know that your president is extremely proud of you."

He said, "I had chances to do something like that," when he was a congressman.

He said, "I didn't," and he said, "I've always regretted."

And he said, "You did something I thought was basically right, "and I didn't want this night to go by "until I called on you personally to tell you how proud I am of you."

He said, "I am.

Now," he said, "go to sleep," but of course I couldn't.

Between the vote and that call, it was hard to go to sleep in.

♪ ♪ I remember that when I was in the White House talking with him, I asked him how he got to be the way he was.

He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "Well, here you are, calling senators, "twisting their arms, threatening them, cajoling them, "trying to line up votes for the civil rights bill "when your own record on civil rights was not a good one "before you became vice president.

So, what accounted for the change?"

Johnson thought for a moment and wrinkled his brow.

Then he said, "Well, I'll answer that "by quoting a good friend of yours, "and you will recognize the quote instantly.

"'Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!'"

(newsreel theme playing) ANNOUNCER: Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law, and thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men that began with Lincoln and the Civil War 100 years ago.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964... NARRATOR: When Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill into law, a century of enforced segregation was finally over.

Blacks and whites could ride the same buses, eat at the same restaurants, use the same washrooms, stay at the same hotels.

A Southern president had broken the Southern system of segregation.

There was something about this man.

I mean, he had a pretty shoddy career and he'd done some pretty ruthless and awful things, but he knew poverty and he knew racism, and I really think that he decided that this was the way to assure his place in history.

This was the way to really save the nation.

And he knew it was not politically expedient, but I think he really knew it was right.

JANEWAY: His attitude going in was that Kennedy couldn't pass anything.

"I will pass everything that Kennedy failed to do.

"Where Kennedy failed, I will succeed.

"I am Kennedy's trustee; I will out-Kennedy Kennedy.

"I will perform where Kennedy promised.

Period."

"Especially Vietnam."

♪ ♪ (giving commands in Vietnamese) NARRATOR: Far across the world, in a small country in Southeast Asia, there were ominous forebodings of a war that would one day consume Lyndon Johnson's presidency.

♪ ♪ LARRY BERMAN: I believe Johnson wished he'd never heard of Vietnam.

He didn't have an interest in Vietnam.

He didn't care about Southeast Asia when he first came to the White House.

He wished it had never come to him, but it had.

He couldn't pass the buck any longer.

This was the great tragedy, really, of the, of his presidency.

REEDY: I can recall one night, on a very long walk with him around the south grounds of the White House, where he said that Vietnam was going to be his downfall; that Vietnam was going to give him a role in history that would be very, very negative.

♪ ♪ Vietnam had not figured very prominently in the American press.

Most Americans didn't have the faintest idea where it was or why it was there.

I know, I myself, for instance, when I was a child, I had one of those children's books-- "Children Around the World."

I understood most of it: little Dutch boy, little Dutch girl; little Chinese boy, little Chinese girl.

But one page had me baffled.

It was a place called Indochina.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Johnson didn't start the war in Vietnam.

He inherited it.

Three presidents before him-- Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy-- had sent American advisers and weapons to help fight a nationalist uprising led by Communists.

By 1963, 16,000 American advisers were already there.

Vietnam was divided in two.

South Vietnam-- weak, corrupt, and dependent on American aid-- was fighting the Vietcong, a guerrilla army that received support from the Communists in the North.

(singing) NARRATOR: In the North, Johnson would find adversaries with a will as powerful as his own.

They wanted one Vietnam, not two.

They had resisted the Japanese and defeated the French.

They were not afraid of the Americans.

Their leader was a man they called "Uncle Ho."

♪ ♪ Ho Chi Minh was a soldier, a politician, and a dedicated Marxist.

Ruthless when necessary, ready to risk everything to unite his country.

To the Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh was a patriot.

To Lyndon Johnson, he was just another Communist.

♪ ♪ Less than one month before Johnson became president, South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse.

(guns firing, people shouting) WILLIAM P. BUNDY: President Johnson inherited a Vietnam situation that was deteriorating.

♪ ♪ The political situation was deteriorating; the military situation was deteriorating.

I remember vividly that it was about... Oh, it was the Sunday after he was sworn in that he had a meeting in which he said, "We are going to carry on with this."

And that was the theme: continuity.

"We are not changing things; we are going to make it work."

GOODWIN: His need to fight that war was out of a whole world view that he shared with the majority of the country: that what Vietnam really represented was a huge struggle in the Cold War with the Communists, and that if you gave an inch somewhere, somehow, they would be taking advantage of that.

ANNOUNCER: The aim of the Communists is to establish control over all of Vietnam.

And after that, over all of Southeast Asia.

JAMES THOMSON, JR.: People got entranced by maps and great red lines sweeping southward and then westward.

This great cartographic fallacy in fact seized the minds of men who should know better at the top.

NARRATOR: Just two days in office, Johnson told an aide, "The Chinese and the fellows in the Kremlin, "they'll be taking the measure of us.

"They'll be wondering just how far they can go.

"They'll think with Kennedy dead, we've lost heart.

They'll think we're yellow and don't mean what we say."

CLARK CLIFFORD: President Johnson, in one of his more hyperbolic moods, said he felt we had rather face the threat of communism in Southeast Asia than face it on the west coast of the United States.

NARRATOR: The president turned to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara-- "The most competent man I ever knew; the most objective man I ever met," Johnson said.

The president affectionately called him "my lard hair man."

There's no question in our minds but what the Communists have stepped up their rate of attack in recent weeks in South Vietnam.

NARRATOR: When McNamara proposed an increase in American advisers and covert commando raids against the North, Johnson agreed.

THOMSON: There was a strong sense that Americans were "can do" people, and that anything we put our mind to, we could accomplish.

And the kind of rural, jungle warfare that the Communists were inflicting on us in, in the Third World, we could adapt, and we could win at it because we were smarter, we had more technology, we had billions of dollars, and we would prevail.

The government and the people of my country, the United States, stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of yours.

NARRATOR: Johnson made it McNamara's war.

"I want them to get off their butts "and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists," he said.

"And then I want them to leave me alone, because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home."

(audience applauding) And this administration, today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

NARRATOR: A war against poverty was the war that Johnson really wanted to fight.

In his first State of the Union address, he reached back to the populism of his father and grandfather.

He took a Kennedy anti-poverty proposal and made it his own.

JOHNSON: It will not be a short or easy struggle, but we shall not rest until that war is won.

The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it.

We cannot afford to lose it.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: When Lyndon Johnson became president, 35 million Americans were living below the poverty line in the most affluent country in the world.

CATER: And I said, "But they don't vote.

"They don't have any organized lobbies.

"How in the world are you going to get "any substantial legislation on poverty?

Jack Kennedy couldn't; how are you going to do it?"

He leaned back and he said-- and these words are engraved on my memory-- he said, "I don't know whether I'll pass a single law "or get a single dollar appropriated, "but before I'm through, no community in America is going to be able to ignore the poverty in its midst."

NARRATOR: Johnson now turned to the director of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver.

SHRIVER: One Saturday morning, he called me up and said that his radio show, which he had every Saturday, was going to go on in a couple of hours, and he wanted to announce at, on that show that I was going to be the new head of the war against poverty, or the head of the new war against poverty.

And I said, "Well, Mr. President, really, you know, "I haven't had a chance to speak to my wife, "I haven't had a chance to talk "to any of the people in my office.

"I don't know what they'll think about it in the Peace Corps.

"Couldn't you just postpone that?

Frankly, I would rather talk to you about it next week."

He said, "Well, now, Sargent," he said, "you know, the truth is, "we've got to get on with that war against poverty, "so please talk to Eunice now, just talk to her now, and I'll call you back."

So I put the phone down; I couldn't believe my ears.

Next thing you know, the phone rang again.

There was the president on it.

He said, "Well, what have you decided?"

And I've decided, I said, "Well, Mr. President, "it would really be much better for me and my family "if we could just talk about this next Monday or Tuesday, "and, and see what, have a better idea "of what you want me to do, and I'm afraid if you announce "that I'm the head of the war on poverty, "people will ask me what I'm going to do about it, "and I don't know, "and that will be a source of embarrassment to me and maybe not so good for you."

He said, "Well, Sargent," he said, "you know, I have this radio program, it's going on in about an hour."

Said, "Let me call you back."

So, he called me back about 20 minutes later, and in a very low voice, confidential-sounding voice... (softly): ...he said, "Now, listen."

He said, "I'm going to announce you.

"And I can't speak about it loud "because I have the whole cabinet here in the office.

"But you just have to understand, Sargent, "this is your president speaking, "and I'm going to announce you as the head of the war against poverty."

Bung.

I turned to my wife and I said, "Looks as if I'm going to be the new head of the war against poverty."

(laughing) President Johnson's program on poverty is distinguished in at least four ways.

NARRATOR: In six short weeks, Johnson had come up with his package.

But he would let Shriver worry about the details.

SHRIVER: He didn't have to tell me what he desired.

I knew what he desired.

He wanted to get going big and he wanted to get going with success.

He didn't have to tell me that.

("Happy Days Are Here Again" playing) NARRATOR: Johnson crisscrossed the country appealing for support for his anti-poverty legislation.

Poverty in America had been invisible.

Johnson put it on the front pages.

JOHNSON: Our first objective is to free 30 million Americans from the prison of poverty.

Can you help us free these Americans?

And if you can, let me hear your voices!

NARRATOR: For Johnson, it was a return to his political past, the old battle cries of the New Deal coming alive again.

DONALD MALAFRONTE: He was the last soldier in the New Deal war, like the final expression of everything which had gone on in the '30s and '40s-- government as mother, father, smothering, Lyndon Johnson, big arms around you, "I love you, I want you to do better."

Do something we can be proud of.

Help the weak and the meek and lift them up and help them train and give them an education where they can make their own way, instead of having to live off the bounty of our generosity.

DUGGER: Most people don't actively care about people they don't know, people who are suffering.

It's hard for us to remember those people.

Lyndon never really forgot them, I think.

I really think he never did.

DALLEK: His vision was of helping the disadvantaged to help themselves.

His hope was that you give them education, you give them opportunity, you give them the chance to come into the mainstream of American middle-class economic life.

And that's as thoroughly American as apple pie.

JOHNSON: We have a right to expect a job to provide food for our families, a roof over their heads, clothes for their bodies.

And with your help and with God's help, we will have it in America.

(pounding) Thank you.

(crowd cheering) NARRATOR: Johnson would make war on poverty, and there would be no casualties.

Everyone would be a winner, even big business.

He would tell businesspeople, "Listen, we've got a very abundant country.

"We've got the resources to help these people "who are right at the bottom.

"For God's sakes, don't you understand that your interest..." In effect, he was arguing, "Your interest as a business leader is the welfare state, because you keep everything stable."

It must have been a very appealing argument to a corporate executive who was not to the right of Attila the Hun that in a civilized country with such abundance as we have-- astounding abundance compared to the rest of the world-- you can afford to be liberal with the poor.

SHRIVER: We were a generation of people who had been in World War II.

So when a war against poverty was launched, it was typical of all of us at that time to think of this war, the war against poverty, in terms just like the war against Hitler.

We were accustomed to thinking in terms of the United States being able to do big things.

America bestrode the world like a colossus.

There was nothing in the world equal to the United States of America.

NARRATOR: The war on poverty was just part of Johnson's program for the country.

Few anticipated that this coarse and abrasive Texan would propose a series of laws to enrich daily life for all Americans.

He called his vision "the Great Society."

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 leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.

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.

NARRATOR: It was an inflated rhetoric, the kind American leaders seldom use anymore.

It is a place which honors creation for its own sake.

NARRATOR: As one aide described it, "What he meant was a full stomach, yes, but a fuller life, too."

It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

(audience applauds) NARRATOR: His aspirations were enormous.

He wanted to do something for everyone.

He wanted to be the best father Americans ever had.

♪ ♪ But in 1964, Johnson still thought of himself as standing in John Kennedy's shadow.

He hated that he was merely an accidental president.

He wanted to be elected president in his own right.

The Republican Party was going to make it easy.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

(crowd cheering) NARRATOR: In the middle of July, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, the right wing of the Republican Party triumphed.

A major general in the Air Force Reserve, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, was nominated for president.

Goldwater's campaign slogan was, "In your heart, you know he's right."

Some wag appended "far right," and it stuck.

Thank you.

I'll say so that all American people can hear that the only enemy of peace in the world is communism.

(crowd cheers) And I don't care whether it's Red Chinese communism or Russian communism, or whose communism it is, it's communism.

(audience applauding) NARRATOR: Johnson watched Goldwater on television, then flicked off the set with a smile.

Goldwater had accused the Democrats of being soft on communism.

If Johnson could prove he was as staunch as his Republican rival, he would have more than a victory.

The 1964 presidential election would be a landslide.

♪ ♪ Less than three weeks later, close to midnight, Johnson made a dramatic television appearance.

As president and commander in chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.

♪ ♪ Our response for the present will be limited and fitting.

NARRATOR: American bombers striking deep into North Vietnam demonstrated that Johnson was a committed anti-communist.

MAN (on radio): Roger, let's go get 'em.

(man speaking on radio) NARRATOR: Johnson would use this incident to acquire the power to make war in Vietnam whenever and however he would choose.

♪ ♪ Johnson accused the North Vietnamese of an unprovoked attack.

But in fact, for six months, the president had been running covert raids against North Vietnam.

MAN (on P.A.

): General quarters, general quarters.

All hands, man your battle stations... NARRATOR: Finally, on August 2, North Vietnamese torpedo boats retaliated.

They fired on the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin.

The Maddox returned the fire, sinking one Vietnamese ship and crippling two others.

DEAN RUSK: And we took the view when that occurred that that might have been the action of trigger-happy local commanders and did not represent a governmental policy on the part of North Vietnam.

And so we tended to disregard that attack.

(firing) NARRATOR: Two days after the first incident, fearing they were once again under attack, anxious sailors on the Maddox fired their weapons into a dark, moonless night.

(firing) Their uneasy commander began sending cables back to the Pentagon.

On August 4, I began reading a kind of cable that one very rarely saw in the Pentagon and that I don't, I very rarely saw again.

These were operational cables.

NARRATOR: Daniel Ellsberg, his second day on duty in the Pentagon, found himself reading this remarkable series of top-secret messages from the Gulf of Tonkin.

These were operational cables coming in on a flash basis, a very special handling, about an operation that was going on at that moment on the other side of the world.

The cables said, "We are under attack at this moment.

"We have just successfully evaded one torpedo.

I am taking evasive action."

"Now two torpedoes."

"Now"-- another cable-- "four torpedoes are in the water."

"Six torpedoes are in the water."

"We have 21 torpedoes"-- not all at the same time-- but, "We've had 21 torpedoes coming at us."

Apparently the water was just sown and strewn with torpedoes.

NARRATOR: As soon as the Tonkin cables were relayed to the White House, Johnson prepared to retaliate.

And then, suddenly, a cable came in that was a warning bell.

Said, "Reevaluation of the information we're getting here "suggests that freak weather effects "and an overeager sonar man may have accounted "for most of the reports we've been getting.

Recommend full evaluation before any action is taken."

Just as soon as we started to get kind of coherent messages that had been put together, I began to feel a cold chill-- "Hey, wait a minute, there's something wrong here."

NARRATOR: The commander of the Maddox was still doubtful.

Were any North Vietnamese boats ever out there that dark night?

At daybreak, reconnaissance planes scanned the ocean for a slick of oil, a stick of wood, anything that would be evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.

Nothing could be found.

The evidence was inconclusive, but Johnson went ahead anyway, and ordered the first bombing raids on North Vietnam.

Retaliation after Tonkin went on for nearly five hours.

One pilot was killed, another captured.

No one knew how many North Vietnamese were killed.

(talking in background) NARRATOR: The next day, Johnson presented his version of the incident.

On August 2, the United States destroyer Maddox was attacked on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin.

NARRATOR: Facing a huge banner that proclaimed "Syracuse loves LBJ," the president was careful not to reveal the whole story.

On August 4, that attack was repeated.

ELLSBERG: They didn't explain that, "On the whole, we think "that there probably was an attack, to which we were retaliating."

They said instead, for obvious reasons, "There was an unequivocal attack upon our ships," which was a lie, "and it was unprovoked."

The attacks were deliberate.

The attacks were unprovoked.

ELLSBERG: That, too, was a lie.

We were running raids against North Vietnam, which the North Vietnamese correctly associated with the destroyer patrols.

NARRATOR: Johnson called in congressional leaders for a briefing.

Well, as I recall it, he had me and a number of the committee down at the White House and told them about this terribly unprovoked attack-- "We were very peaceably going about our business, "and, oh, without provocation, they, they attacked us, "sent out these gunboats, you know, and surrounded us and shell..." And they even had a little shell.

"This is evidence, this...

It had fallen on the deck of one of our ships."

It didn't occur to me to think he was lying about it, or misrepresenting.

I swallowed it, I, I mean, it was, it was a year or two before I discovered I had been taken in.

NARRATOR: Few Americans questioned the president's version of events.

What happened on that dark night halfway around the world only became apparent later.

GEORGE BALL: Johnson told me in some disgust that "those damn sailors were shooting "at a lot of flying fish, and they ought to know better than that."

(chuckling) He never thought-- well, he, he believed at first, but then he came to believe that there was nothing in it, that, that this had been a...

They'd, they'd just been seeing shadows.

NARRATOR: Johnson never asked Congress to declare war.

Instead, he used the incident to cut himself loose from congressional control.

He requested a resolution that would give him the power to expand the war without further authorization.

After deliberating just 40 minutes, the House approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

Not a single representative voted no.

Over in the Senate, there were just two dissenting votes.

On August 7, Johnson signed the resolution.

The language was broad, the authority sweeping.

Johnson was heard to say, "It's like Grandmother's nightshirt-- it covers everything."

CLIFFORD: It was about as close to a declaration of war as one could get.

That started us down the long road of Vietnam.

(audience applauding) NARRATOR: Just three weeks after Johnson signed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the Democratic Party held its nominating convention in Atlantic City.

(cheering and applauding) NICHOLAS KATZENBACH: One has to remember that the candidate running against Lyndon Johnson was Barry Goldwater.

(applause continues) And I've always thought that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was essentially an election resolution.

It was aimed at, at Goldwater and aimed at the right wing.

I think most of the Democratic senators in Congress thought that.

It was designed to show that Lyndon Johnson was prepared to be as tough as anybody could be, and therefore take some of the wind out of the sails of a right-wing candidate.

My fellow Americans, I accept your nomination.

(audience cheering) NARRATOR: When he won his race for the Senate with a tainted 87 votes, he was dogged by the nickname "Landslide Lyndon."

When the murder of a beloved president put him in the White House, he was scorned as an accidental president.

In November of 1964, Lyndon Johnson wanted a victory to wash all those memories away.

JOHNSON: I ask the American people for a mandate not just to keep things going.

I ask the American people for a mandate to begin.

(cheering and applauding) Let us be on our way!

(audience cheering) ("Hello, Lyndon" playing) ♪ Hello, Lyndon ♪ ♪ Well, hello, Lyndon ♪ ♪ It's just great to have you there where you belong ♪ ♪ You're looking swell... ♪ NARRATOR: From the beginning, Johnson was far ahead, and the lead inspired him.

He excited the crowds and relished their ardor.

"Look at them," he would say, "just look at them."

Here, in the faces of millions of Americans, was the love and affection he was always seeking.

GOODWIN: The great majority felt that Lyndon Johnson was safe, secure.

Everybody was with Lyndon Johnson, except, for as he could say, "the kooks," who were with Goldwater.

(laughs) Johnson, I'm not sure, could ever accept that there was a group out there that wasn't going to like him.

He wanted to win over everybody if he possibly could.

♪ ♪ ELIZABETH WICKENDEN: Underneath it all, he was very insecure-- easily hurt or affronted.

Whenever he ran for office, he broke out in spots.

He, he, uh...

He had a kind of psychological eczema that he got.

WILKINS: I was in the White House one day, and Johnson put his arm around me and said, "We need all the help we can get.

"I've got-- I need, I need New York.

"You know people in New York.

You, you were raised up in Michigan."

How he knew I was raised in Michigan I'll never know.

"I want your help in Michigan, and, and in... What other states do you know?"

So later, I talked to a guy, a Texan whom I knew who was close to Johnson, and I described this, and I said, "Craig," I said, "he's way ahead."

I said, "The polls show he's going to destroy Goldwater."

I said, "What's he doing this with me for?

What does he want?"

And Craig looked at me and said, "He wants it all."

♪ ...that he's the one ♪ ♪ The whole world says that he's the one ♪ ♪ The whole darn world agrees that he's the one ♪ NARRATOR: Johnson painted his Republican rival as insensitive to the needs of minorities and the poor.

It wasn't hard to make the charges stick.

Minority groups run this country.

(crowd boos) And just face up to it.

And I must be honest enough to say I don't see how any Negro or white person of self-respect can vote for Mr. Goldwater.

(cheering) I'm Ronald Reagan.

Every American should hear what Barry Goldwater really has to say, not what a bunch of distorters of the truth would have you believe.

This country, my friends, must always maintain such superiority of strength, such devastating strike-back power... NARRATOR: Goldwater frightened many Americans with talk about using nuclear weapons.

...creating suicide for themselves and their society if they push the button.

(audience cheers and applauds) One... Two... NARRATOR: The Johnson staff devised a commercial that captured everybody's nightmare.

Five...

Seven... NARRATOR: It was so controversial, they ran it only one time.

Eight... Nine... MAN (echoing): Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.

JOHNSON: These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children can live or to go into the dark.

We must either love each other or we must die.

ANNOUNCER: Vote for President Johnson on November 3.

The stakes are too high for you to stay home.

NARRATOR: Johnson presented himself as the peace candidate.

He promised he would never send American boys to fight in Vietnam.

He never wanted Vietnam to become a campaign issue.

"If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye and she has it in the center of her forehead," he said, "you don't keep her in the living room."

♪ Hello, Lyndon ♪ NARRATOR: On the day of the election, Johnson waited, he said, "for the moment that I have spent my whole life getting ready for."

GOODWIN: He couldn't take any pleasure, obviously, out of becoming president because John Kennedy had died, but now suddenly, as he saw it, he could picture, he would tell me, everybody going into the voting booth, pulling the lever or writing an X for him, and I think he really meant, "They love me."

It wasn't enough to defeat Goldwater by a huge landslide.

He couldn't understand, if it had been 90% to ten percent, why those other ten percent hadn't been persuaded.

NARRATOR: "Millions and millions of people," he would later say, "each marking my name on their ballot.

"Each wanted me as their president.

"For the first time in all my life, I truly felt loved by the American people."

Throughout the campaign, Johnson had kept Americans ignorant about Vietnam.

But behind closed doors, he and his advisers had been making decisions that would lead the nation deeper and deeper into war.

I was present at a meeting in August '64 with the secretaries of state, defense, and others, with the president, at which the president issued marching orders for what they should be doing while he was out campaigning.

What he wanted to have available for him when he returned-- victorious, we hoped-- was as wide a range of options as to how Vietnam should be coped with as possible.

Do we have to escalate the war?

Do we have to attack North Vietnam?

Do we have to send troops?

Can this regime in Saigon hold itself together, not totally collapse, not defect en masse?

Can we avoid defeat in Vietnam another week, another month?

Can we hold Vietnam together without enlarging the war enormously till the election?

♪ ♪ JOHNSON: I, Lyndon Baines Johnson, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the presidency of the United States... EARL WARREN: And will, to the best of your ability... NARRATOR: It was an unprecedented victory: the presidency by more votes than any man ever before, the Congress by an overwhelming majority, and with political power, an opportunity to do great things.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ No longer a scorned and frustrated vice president... No longer an accidental president... Lyndon Johnson was now one of the most popular presidents of the century.

♪ ♪ On the night of his inaugural gala, Johnson told his guests, "Don't stay up late.

We're on our way to the Great Society."

♪ ♪ On January 20, 1965, there was no hint that Johnson's Great Society was about to be overwhelmed by a full-scale land war in Asia-- that Lyndon Johnson had already sown the seeds of his own destruction.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: "American Experience: LBJ" is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪