LBJ cultivated the masculine image of a Texas cowboy. Biographers have suggested that Johnson was torn between the expectations
of his father, a crude local politician who flouted polite society, and those of his mother, a refined woman who insisted that her son
read poetry and practice the violin. Johnson later told biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin that he persisted in Vietnam because he
worried that critics would accuse him of being “an unmanly man. A man without a spine.”Lyndon Baines Johnson: The Great Society 773unimaginable to the most affluent Americans of the
1860s, were necessities a hundred years later. But as
living standards rose, so did job requirements. A
strong back and a willingness to work no longer guar-
anteed a decent living. Technology was changing the
labor market. Educated workers with special skills and
good verbal abilities easily found well-paid jobs.
Those who had no special skills or were poorly edu-
cated went without work.
The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created a
mixture of programs, among them a Job Corps similar
to the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, a com-
munity action program to finance local antipoverty
efforts, and a system for training the unskilled unem-
ployed and for lending money to small businesses in
poor areas. The programs combined the progressive
concept of government aid for those in need with the
conservative idea of individual responsibility.
Buttressed by his legislative triumphs, Johnson
sought election as president in his own right in
- He achieved this ambition in unparalleled
fashion. His championing of civil rights won him the
almost unanimous support of blacks; his tax policy
attracted the well-to-do and the business interests;
his war on poverty held the allegiance of labor and
other traditionally Democratic groups. His down-
home southern antecedents counterbalanced his lib-
eralism on the race question in the eyes of many
white southerners.
The Republicans played into his hands by nominat-
ing the conservative Senator Barry M. Goldwater of
Arizona, whose objective in Congress had been “not to
pass laws but to repeal them.” As a presidential candi-
date he favored such laissez-faire policies as cutting back
on the Social Security system and doing away with the
Tennessee Valley Authority. A large majority of voters
found Goldwater out-of-date on economic questions
and dangerously aggressive on foreign affairs.
In November, Johnson won a sweeping victory,
collecting over 61 percent of the popular vote and
carrying the whole country except Goldwater’s
Arizona and five states in the Deep South, where
many conservatives were voting more against
Johnson’s civil rights policies than in favor of
Goldwater. Goldwater had voted against the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and was opposed to government-
mandated school integration. (Mapping the Past,
“School Segregation after the Brown Decision,”
explores the status of school integration in the decade
after the Supreme Court’sBrowndecision.)