Good article, and I agree that Kennedy's speeches are generally associated with the push for the Apollo program ("We choose to go to the Moon..."), but I would hardly say that LBJ's role was "unsung". They did rename the Manned Space Center in Houston to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in 1973. All flight control of the Apollo, Space Shuttle, and ISS operations have been, and continue to be conducted there. Kennedy's tragic assassination (56 years ago, yesterday) increased the public focus on "fulfilling Kennedy's dream", a glimmer of hope the American people needed after such a terrible event. True, LBJ isn't the individual most people first associate with the Moon landings, but for Apollo-geeks like me, Johnson's name and role are quite evident.
Without LBJ, we wouldn't have had the Space Program, the various civil rights bills of the 60s, or Medicare. He also escalated Vietnam from a minor conflict to a major disaster.
Most impactful President since FDR, easily, yet he doesn't get half the press of Reagan or Nixon.
Lyndon Johnson is complicated. The NASA budget was significantly increased, and the civil Rights act was passed. But he also increased the US military presence in Vietnam from around 5000 to a peak of 500,000 in country armed forces, and dramatically escalated the Vietnam war. Hundreds of thousands of fatalities on both sides of the war are directly attributable to his policies.
If there’s a President that isn’t complicated, he probably wasn’t a good President.
It’s like I always tell people: being a nice guy isn’t a prerequisite for the job, and the President usually isn’t a nice guy. He’s the Commander in Chief of the United States Military.
> Hundreds of thousands of fatalities on both sides of the war are directly attributable to his policies.
Millions of fatalities on one side ( 4+ million innocent vietnamese died - mostly civilians ). Tens of thousands on the other side ( 58 thousand - mostly invading soldiers ).
