18. LBJ’s Quirky Side
Lyndon Baines Johnson, (1908 – 1973) would have gone down in history as one of the country’s greatest presidents, if not for the Vietnam War. LBJ had spent decades in Congress, both in the House and Senate, whose Majority Leader he became in the 1950s. When fate elevated him from vice president to president after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, LBJ entered the Oval Office with an unequaled mastery of the legislative process. He put that expertise to good use, and pushed through landmark legislative accomplishments such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both Medicare and Medicaid also began during his administration. Had Vietnam not derailed his ambitious “Great Society” program, LBJ would probably rank alongside Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an exceptionally transformative president.
The disastrous war and the great legislative accomplishments loom large in the public’s perceptions of LBJ. They obscure the lesser known quirky – and sometimes seedy – side of the man. LBJ liked to depict himself as a simple a Good Ole Boy, and in many ways, he really was. A Good Ole Boy, that is: there was nothing simple about the smart-as-a-whip Lyndon Johnson. One way the Good Ole Boy side came out was in his humor. Not subtle salon or New Yorker type quips and bon mots, but down to earth – and quite often earthy – jokes and pranks. One of his favorites was to convince guests – whose numbers included important foreign dignitaries – that they were about to die. As seen below, LBJ pulled it off with his Amphicar – a West German vehicle that was the only civilian passenger amphibious automobile to ever be mass produced.
