Lyndon Baines Johnson's Legacy w/ Mark Updegrove & Mark A. Lawrence
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 629 Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2024
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With a sitting VP running for President for the first time since Al Gore's failed bid for the White House in 2000, there's been a lot of talk about the role the VP plays in government, the impact a VP pick has on a Presidential campaign, and just how much Kamala Harris' record as VP/relationship to President Joe Biden can show us about her own agenda, should she win the White House. So today we begin a three-episode run focused on the Vice Presidency and those who have held the office with a conversation on Lyndon B. Johnson.
Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency is bookended by the tragedies of JFK's assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam war, but his career in politics and the policies he championed transcend his time in the Oval Office. In this episode, two of the foremost experts on LBJ, Mark Updegrove and Mark A. Lawrence, join Bob & Ben to discuss Johnson's life and legacy.
Mark Updegrove is the President & CEO of the LBJ Foundation in Austin, TX, the presidential historian for ABC News, and the author of multiple books on Presidential History, including Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency.
Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence is Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum and Associate Professor of History at UT-Austin. He is the author of multiple books on US history including The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.
This is a rebroadcast of RTN #256, which originally aired on December 12, 2022. This reair was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:09.3 | Guys, there's been a lot of discussion about the vice presidency in the news lately. |
| 0:13.1 | That's not a surprise. |
| 0:14.7 | Despite the fact that those of us 40 and older are not surprised to see a vice president running for president, |
| 0:19.4 | it has been since 2000, since we've seen a sitting vice vice president running for president. It has been since 2000, |
| 0:21.9 | since we've seen a sitting vice president actually run for office. And the accusations about |
| 0:26.6 | Kamala Harris and her time in office and claims that she's the worst vice president in history |
| 0:31.9 | have flown about. But the reality is, I get the sense that most people don't really understand what the vice president's role is. |
| 0:40.2 | But here on the road to now, our job is to remedy these issues. |
| 0:44.2 | So today, we are kicking off a three-episode run focused on the vice presidency and what we can learn about it. |
| 0:50.2 | With an episode that we actually recorded back in 2022. It's a conversation about Lyndon Baines |
| 0:55.2 | Johnson, a guy whose time in the vice presidency was shorter than he expected, but who came out of |
| 1:00.6 | the gate swinging. He had been expected to be the presidential candidate, but as you'll hear, he was |
| 1:05.5 | surpassed by Kennedy. But he comes into the presidency, and interestingly enough, the last sitting |
| 1:10.7 | president to decline to run for another term despite being constitutionally eligible was Johnson before Biden just stepped down. |
| 1:18.0 | And he also served time as a vice president under someone who was less experienced than he was. |
| 1:22.9 | So a lot of parallels there with recent events. |
| 1:26.4 | So we're going to begin this. |
| 1:27.2 | Our guest are Mark Uptogrove. He's the president and CEO of the L with recent events. So we're going to begin this. Our guest are Mark Uptogrove. |
| 1:28.7 | He's the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation in Austin, Texas. Our second guest is Mark |
| 1:34.0 | Atwood Lawrence. He's the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum, an associate |
| 1:38.4 | professor of history at UT Austin. These guys were fantastic. So we're going to begin here. |
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