by David Macadam @ The Oligarch Kings….
The young Johnson listening to his elders
Picture credit: Finding Out Vol 13 No 2, 1965
President Lyndon Baines Johnson was solid establishment, if not blue blooded Oligarch. The thirty-sixth President of the United States had been born to frontier folk in Texas. The Johnsons went back five generations before his grandfather Sam, to James Johnston (with a “t”) of Currowaugh Virginia, and he may have been the son of an even earlier colonial settler in Nansemond County, born about 1662. His older relatives had fought for the South in the Civil war before establishing small homesteads against the hills that flanked the Pedernales river.
The young LBJ soon moved with his family to Johnson City (population about 100) when he was small. His grandfather Sam and his grand-uncle James Polk Johnson had founded the town and given it the family name. Politics was in the blood.
His father was Samuel Johnson and a member of the Texas State Legislature. Sam married Rebekah Baines whose own grandfather George Washington Baines was President of Baylor University.
For our interest here we might concentrate on the President himself, who married Lady Bird Taylor. “Lady Bird” being a childhood nick-name that she rather took to heart. Lyndon’s sister Rebekah married Oscar Bobbit.
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If Kennedy had lived, would there have been a great Society?
And if the answer is no, who is the one who enabled the Great Society?
think about that one Quiz team!