Lyndon baines johnson biographical info

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  1908-1973
  
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  36^th president of the United States
  
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  Texas native
  
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  Southwest Texas State Teachers College
  

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  1960 – Johnson named VP for Kennedy
  
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  1963 – Kennedy assassinated, Johnson named President
  
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  1963 – Martin Luther King gives “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington
  
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  1964 – Civil Rights Act of 1964
  
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  1965 – Voting Rights Act speech, March 15
  
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  1965 – Voting Rights Act passed
  
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  1965 – Johnson calls for American troops to Vietnam
  
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  1967 – First Super Bowl
  
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  1968 – Johnson announces he will not run for re-election
  
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  1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated
  

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  Johnson passes the Civil Rights Act in 1964
  
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  By the end of 1964, the administration was working on legislation that would guarantee African Americans the right to vote
  
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  However, “the president wanted to give the South time to ‘digest’ the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he feared losing congressional support for the rest of his legislative plans” if he pushed for the voting act too early
  
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  Johnson showed signs, however, by Dec. 1964, that he was ready to move forward with voting rights legislation, and in his State of the Union address in January, 1965, he stated:
  
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    “I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and opportunity to vote” (Pauley 31, from Public Papers of the President, Lyndon B. Johnson 1965 5).
    
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      Throughout February, the administration “moved slowly and carefully on the purposed legislation. They realized that it was an important bill with significant ramifications, and, therefore, they did not want to act hastily” (Pauley 33).
      
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      Sunday, March 7, 1965 changed everything when police and other law offices attached civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama --- “Bloody Sunday”
      
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      The president chose not to respond to the events right away.
      
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      Everyone looked to the president for a rhetorical response
      
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      The circumstances following Selma clearly constituted a “rhetorical situation”, which, in Lloyd Bitzer’s terminology, “invited discourse capable of participating with the situation and thereby altering its reality” (Pauley 35, from Bitzer 6).
      
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      At the same time, the situation required legislation action as well, not just “mere rhetoric” (Pauley 35)
      
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      The problem for Johnson – rhetoric and legislation were bound closely here. In order to speak, his legislation needed to be complete, which is was not
      
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      Thus, instead of speaking right away, the White House put the finishing touches on the Voting Rights legislation.
      
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      Johnson did not decide to speak until the late evening of March 14, when, in a meeting with the congressional leadership, he decided to speak to a join session of Congress the following day. In this meeting, the Speaker of the House John McCormack “shifted the discussion towards rhetorical concerns, suggesting that the president deliver a voting rights message before a joint session of Congress, stating that a speech ‘would show the world that action is being taken’” (Pauley 37)
      
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      The president stated: “I wanted to use every ounce of moral persuasion the Presidency held. I wanted no hedging, no equivocation. And I wanted to talk from my own heart, from my own experience” (Pauley 38, from The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency by LBJ, 164)
      

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  Most scholars provide an oversimplified view of Johnson’s complicated public discourse and overlook this speech, and instance where everything that typically characterized LBJ was not there.
  

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  “His most moving public address, conveying the natural eloquence that he so often took care to shield” (Pauley 26, from Zarefsky, “Lyndon” 224)
  
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  “The strongest public discourse of Johnson’s presidency” (Pauley 26, from Edwin Black 24)
  

EMOTION

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  “Johnson spoke with force and compassion, drawing upon his personal experience and his ethos as a Southerner” (Pauley 26)
  

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  “Timing was a central theme in his rhetoric” (Pauley 27)
  
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  “Depending on one’s perspective, the president’s discursive involvement in the voting rights campaign seemed to be crisis rhetoric at its finest or at its worst” (27).
  
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  “Johnson’s response to the voting rights crisis was unusual. He departed from his usual approach to rhetoric in two important ways.
  
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     The legislation had been under consideration for some time and was nearly finished when the crisis came.
     
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     President Johnson not only was ready to speak to the immediate tactical issue of voting rights but also already had formulated his own understanding of voting rights as a moral and historical issue” (27)
     

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  The voting rights address shows that Johnson’s rhetoric was not always myopic.
  
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  Johnson planned carefully his voting rights strategy; he considered both the legislative and rhetorical implications of speaking publicly about the voting rights bill.
  

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  Kairos – a timely response to a given situation.
  

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  LBJ’s rhetoric was calculated carefully and coordinated closely with the development of social policy (Pauley 29)
  

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  The language of Johnson’s speech, not just its moment of delivery, also appealed to the urgencies of the moment (Pauley 38).
  
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  Terms were used such as “no delay” and “no hesitation”...
  

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  “We ought not and we cannot and we must not wait another eight months before we get a bill. We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone”
  
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  “So I ask you to join me in working long hours – nights and weekends, if necessary – to pass this bill”
  

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  His language also gave Selma a broader historical meaning by associating the terms freedom and equality with the terms purpose and promise.
  

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  LBJ’s timely response was a complicated proposition.
  
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  Although President Johnson’s speech was tactically timely, it was too little and too late for the rising militancy within the civil rights movement. Lyndon Johnson’s voting rights message on 15 March 1965 was timely, timeless, and, ironically, out of time – all at the same moment.
  

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  Typically focused on the urgencies of the moment
  
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  His rhetoric often was short-sighted.
  
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  Opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had criticized Johnson for attempting to legislate by rhetorical appeals to temporarily aroused emotions, and opponents of the voting rights bill believed that 1965 was a repeat performance”
  
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  Often spoke before he should
  
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  His own discourse created most of his political problems.
  
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  Not only was his rhetoric myopic, but it was also so idealistic as to be unrealistic
  
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  He promised more than he could achieve, and thus aroused expectations and courted disappointment (29)
  
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  He ignored the possibility that rhetorical alone might effect social change
  

David Zarefsky - “Much of Johnson’s rhetoric provided a grand vision to solve social problems, but failed to provide specific recommendations because he had not yet formulated specific policy measures to deal with those problems” (Pauley 28, from “Great Society” 366). “His implicit theory of rhetoric...viewed it as a process of selecting strategies and tactics which would comprise an effective public appeal” (Ibid, 277). Zarefsky suggests that LBJ saw a limited role for rhetoric: he made judgments about the value and ability of his programs without any factual support, and simply used rhetoric to rally public support (Pauley 29).