Tip2Top: On Peter Murtagh’s journey up the Americas, he ponders how a president of such reforming zeal as Lyndon B Johnson could emerge from such a place
Lady Bird Johnson poses with two 40lb Thanksgiving turkeys gifted to her family and president John F Kennedy's family in 1962. Photograph: Bettmann ArchiveRiding through the Hill Country, one is immediately struck by the wildflowers lining just about every road in the area. There are great big drifts of them, blues, yellows, whites and reds, on the sides of the roads and in the medians separating lanes. And because they are there, so too are flocks of butterflies.
LBJ was born into poverty in a very modest wooden cottage on what became the LBJ ranch. His mother’s midwife was Augusta Sauer, descendant of one of those early German settlers. His father, a cotton trader who went bust, was also a Democratic Party member of the Texas House of Representatives. LBJ’s own legacy as an environmentalist is on display at their ranch, now a state park, where both he and Lady Bird are buried, only a few feet from that wooden house where he was born.
President Lyndon B Johnson and Martin Luther King discuss the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty The library and the story it tells is quite extraordinary. Johnson, who spent virtually his entire political life in Washington – as a congressman, then senator, then vice-president to Kennedy and on into the White House – knew how to get his way by political arm-twisting and bullying, and emerges as a hugely consequential president with a legacy blighted by a war he could not win or end.
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