Abstract

A Texan Remembers Lyndon

This article recounts the work by the U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in Texas before getting elected. When Johnson was a Congressman in 1945, he called a meeting of the leaders from the ten counties from his 10th District in Austin, Texas, discussing what they should be doing about the men and women coming home from the war. Johnson told the group that, first, it was a responsibility of free enterprise to provide jobs for the returning GIs. To Texas liberals, Johnson has generally been the lesser of two evils at election time. Some people have thought that he was as liberal as he could be and get elected, by a Texas constituency. But since he picked up and passed the Kennedy program in 1964, not a single Texas liberal voting against him on November 3, 1964.