Civic Calendar: Remembering LBJ

The Forty-Ninth State Fellows Program of the UAA Honors College call the attention of the University community to the anniversary of the birth of Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the U.S., Aug. 27, 1908.

Born in a poor area of Texas on the Perdenales River west of Austin, Johnson served in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate before being selected as John Kennedy's vice-president in 1960. He assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, and was elected in his own right the following year. As president, he championed civil rights, Medicaid and Medicare, and education. He also escalated American military engagement in Vietnam, and in 1968 declined to run for re-election in the face of a massive protest against the Vietnam War.

He died at his Texas ranch on Jan. 22, 1973, his telephone in his hand, after suffering his third heart attack.