In my last post here, I mentioned Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was President of the United States from 1963 (after the murder of President John Kennedy) through 1968.
I thought later, that maybe I made it sound like Lyndon Johnson had a 5-year political career, as President of the U.S., from 1963 to 1968.
That isn't correct - to be specific, Johnson had a much longer political career than that - he devoted his whole life to public service. (And - come to find out, he only lived to be 64 years old.)
He was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1937 to 1949. And he was a U.S. Senator from 1949 to 1961.
In 1961 he became Vice President of the United States of America, when John Kennedy got elected President, and he had Lyndon as his Vice Presidential candidate.
In 1963, Lyndon Johnson became President of the United States when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
Johnson's accomplishments included:
* (during his time as a Congressman, in the late 1930s) establishing the REA (Rural Electrification Association) - which provided electricity for people who lived out in the country, and could not get electricity from the private companies, who considered serving them as not profitable enough
* signing the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) as President
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Before he got involved in politics, Lyndon Johnson was a schoolteacher for a couple of years, in a little town in Texas: Cotulla. A few years ago, I was reading a book about Johnson's life and I read the school-teaching part, and I talked to a man who worked in Refrigeration at the company where I work - he was from Texas, and spoke Spanish and English, and when I shared with him the part about Johnson teaching in Cotulla, he said he was from Cotulla.
We talked about that a couple of times, before he retired.
Lyndon Johnson; John Kennedy
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