LBJ and his monumental presidency
CBSN
It is an indelible image: aboard Air Force One, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's tragic assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson is sworn in as president, flanked by his wife Lady Bird, and Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline. "She wanted, as did Lyndon Johnson, the country and the world to see that there was a continuity in government," said historian Mark Updegrove, president of the LBJ Foundation.
According to Updegrove, what started out as an accidental presidency would become one of the most consequential, yet unappreciated, in American history. "His legacy was undervalued," he said.
Perhaps no one knows more about Lyndon Johnson than historian Robert Caro, currently working on the final volume of his series on the man born in 1908 in Texas Hill Country. Caro said, "He believed that he could make America a better place for its underprivileged people."
