Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon Baines Johnson (August 27, 1908 - January 22, 1973) served as the 36th President of the United States from 1963 to 1969, succeeding to the office after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, having served as Kennedy's vice president since 1961. He had built a long congressional career beforehand, representing Texas in the House of Representatives from 1937 to 1949 and in the Senate from 1949 to 1961, where he served as an unusually effective Senate Majority Leader. As president he pursued the Great Society, a sweeping liberal domestic agenda that included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid through the Social Security Amendments of 1965, and a War on Poverty aimed at improving conditions for low-income Americans. His foreign policy centered on containing communism, chiefly through the escalating commitment of American forces to the Vietnam War, a conflict that, combined with domestic unrest and urban riots, eroded the broad support he had enjoyed early in his presidency and led him to withdraw from the 1968 presidential race.