Episode 20: Lyndon B. Johnson

The Past, the Promise, the Presidency

Today’s episode is all about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, and arguably its most consequential. Note we did not say best or greatest or anything overexuberant like that. But if you are talking about presidents who left their mark on American society, presidents from the past whose impact we still feel today in our daily lives, for good and for ill, you could do worse than to put Johnson at the top of your list. That was true for civil rights and race relations, especially.
For this episode, we spoke with Drs. Julian Zelizer and Elizabeth Hinton.

Together our conversations highlighted two themes:

• First, the extraordinary volume of legislation produced during the Johnson era and the influential legislation at that.
• Second, the unexpected consequences of that legislation that no one saw coming—something that could be said for the entire Johnson administration.