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President Lyndon Baines Johnson

    Color photo of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, shown facing the camera and standing with his left arm resting on a chair. He wears a dark blue suit, white shirt, and blue tie with pink stripes. The room is apparently a library of sorts. It is painted white with a Greco-Roman decorative design.

    President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963–1969), who orchestrated the Great Society social welfare programs of the mid-1960s, crippled his presidency by escalating the Vietnam War and honoring the Pentagon’s persistent demands for more troops. From 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the nation’s most controversial critic of the Vietnam War and its sapping of resources from Johnson’s social welfare programs; he and Johnson stood at loggerheads on “guns vs. butter,” and King became persona non gratis in Washington.

    December 1963
    Copyright
    Public Domain
    Attribution/Credit

    Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library & Museum, Austin, TX