This chapter is about Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with Mexican Americans and his work in the arena of US–Latin American relations. Johnson always credited his teaching experience at the “Mexican school” in Cotulla, Texas with his lifelong sympathy toward Mexican Americans, and as the influence that made him want to help them when he was president. But Johnson’s presidency also coincided with a period of great flux for Latinos in the United States and US–Latin American relations more broadly. The number of Latinos in the United States was growing, in part because of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Johnson signed into law in 1965, and in part because the United States needed Cold War allies, so Johnson maintained the “Good Neighbor” policies of his predecessors in order to secure support from Mexico and other Latin American nations. Throughout the civil rights era and the middle period of the Cold War, when Johnson was in office, Latinos were key deciders of their own fate, waging campaigns for greater rights and inclusion in the social, political, and economic life of the United States.

As the first study of collaboration in Congress, this book significantly expands our understanding of why members of Congress often choose to work together in a polarized Congress and often do so across party lines. Chapter 8 reviews the book's key findings: (a) members of Congress collaborate on substantive policy initiatives, (b) they are strategic about when and with whom to collaborate, and (c) collaborative legislation is more successful at every stage of the legislative process. The chapter concludes with discussions of the implications of this study for understanding legislative behavior and congressional policymaking, avenues for future research, and the outlook for the collaborative Congress and ways to support it in the years ahead.

Chapter 4 examines how collaboration varies across issue area and policy substance. Dear Colleague letters are classified into one of twenty issue areas based on the comparative agendas project coding scheme, and for each issue area, the proportions of letters that are noncollaborative, bipartisan, and partisan are identified. Examining why some issues are more collaborative than others reveals that collaboration – particularly bipartisan collaboration – is more common on issues that do not fall neatly onto a liberal–conservative scale, where compromise and common ground are easier to find, and on issues that are on the majority party agenda, where there are more opportunities to create policy by incorporating an idea into a larger, moving bill. The second part of the chapter considers the significance of collaborative policy and establishes that members of Congress routinely coauthor substantive policy proposals, and this is not a phenomenon limited to naming of post offices. These findings support the social exchange theory of collaboration by providing evidence of how expected costs and benefits shape the likelihood of collaboration.

Warrior, dove, pragmatist, revolutionary, institutionalist – Lyndon Johnson inhabited a range of personas, each of which expressed his hopes, fears, vision, and philosophy. Johnson’s presidency expressed itself in those contradictions, securing extraordinary gains on behalf of those marginalized at home while unleashing bloodshed on millions living abroad. His lifelong desire for recognition, his powerful wish to be loved, his surpassing need to control and dominate, his deep-seated yearning to lift up the oppressed and ennoble the downtrodden – these attributes coalesced in a roughly five-year presidential tenure that harnessed the power of the state to effect fundamental change. This chapter offers a window onto his persona and its impact on his presidency. His strengths and weaknesses are evident in several dimensions of his management style, including his use of people, his workday habits, his pursuit of information, and his decision-making process. Each shaped his triumphs and his failures, and persisted throughout his life and career, as would the principles he gleaned at an early age – both the idealistic and the less ennobling. Collectively, these aspects reveal much about LBJ and his presidency, and provide a backdrop for deeper exploration of his legacy and significance.

This chapter examines the ways in which Lyndon Johnson attempted to build on and expand the liberal tradition in twentieth-century American politics. As he did so from the perch of the Oval Office, Johnson ran directly into the structural limitations and debilitating political fears of liberalism that were at work right at this high point for Johnson’s career: the racial accord that Northern Democrats had entered into with Southerners in the 1930s, and the fears about appearing weak on national security. In the end, the political vulnerabilities and limitations of this tradition would overwhelm him, leaving him to announce that he would not run for reelection in October 1964 and defining his legacy over the failed war in Vietnam. While it is important to understand how Johnson’s own agency led to his downfall, it is equally relevant to understand how the nature of American liberalism trapped Johnson into these positions. The president was caught in the basic contradictions of the agenda that he inherited and championed. The same tradition that strengthened his resolve to grow the government to tackle new areas of domestic life also pushed him toward the decisions that drowned his legacy for decades to come. This is not just the story of Lyndon Johnson – it’s the story of American liberalism in the twentieth century.

One of LBJ’s signature civil rights achievements, the 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration Act still stands in providing the overarching structure for immigration regulation in the US today. Its enactment ended decades of overtly racist immigration laws, crowning the almost equally long campaigns by immigration reformers seeking a more egalitarian system. In securing passage of the legislation, LBJ provided essential leadership but accepted significant compromises to do so. The immigration overhaul succeeded in abolishing the most discriminatory aspects of the old system for immigration regulation, even as it has implemented new forms of inequalities that have criminalized migrations particularly from the US’s closest neighbors. This law has transformed the US through the most diverse immigration in national history, even as it has produced a large and persistent caste of second-class residents whose unauthorized immigration bars them from citizenship.

Harnessing the power of the presidency, Lyndon Baines Johnson required America to wrestle with its past. Together, the powerful social movements of the 1960s and his Great Society catalyzed a cycle of reckoning and discomfort that changed America until the war in Vietnam, and anger and angst about government, identity, and power brought it to an end. We’ve tried to forget LBJ and, in some cases, what his presidency achieved and helped unearth. But we ignore him at our peril. The Johnson years have much to teach us, as America in the 1960s and today’s America have much in common. America today, as in the 1960s, is tumultuous. Armed with our memories and different conceptions of how we got here, we’re struggling to define our problems and the answers appear unknowable and out of reach. But instead of actively looking away from the past, we can choose to learn from it. Remembering Lyndon Johnson and his presidency – the good and the bad – offers us the opportunity to reposition government as an ally, not an enemy, and to acknowledge and confront the historically toxic relationship that binds power, politics, and American identity so we can move closer to our democratic aspirations.

President Lyndon B. Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stand out as remarkable co-architects of the movement for racial progress and just democracy that marked the decade of the 1960s. Individually, each put an indelible stamp of the civil rights and Great Society eras. Together, for a time, they formed perhaps the most formidable political tandem between a president and social justice movement leader in American history. Yet their relationship was also a fraught one,  filled with creative tension, political conflicts, and personal disappointments. This chapter delves into the arc of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr.’s relationship to tease out the extraordinary ways they were able to galvanize America toward some of the most remarkable achievements of the nation’s Second Reconstruction; yet, by the end of the public political careers, they grew increasingly distant, combative, and disappointed in the other. Ultimately, the chapter argues that, despite their political differences, their evolving relationship helped to fundamentally transform postwar American democracy even as it framed the limits of the political liberalism within which such change could occur.

This chapter argues that two Congresses coexist in Washington, DC. The partisan Congress, which receives the bulk of public and media attention, is characterized by polarization, gridlock, and partisan conflict. But there is also the collaborative Congress, in which members work together to find common ground. Chapter 1 draws on examples from media accounts, interviews with congressional staff, and a new dataset of congressional communications to illustrate what the collaborative Congress looks like in practice and introduce the central question of the book: Why do members of Congress collaborate? The discussion of collaboration is situated in the broader literature on Congress to explain why we know so little about it and why it matters. Conflict draws attention, and Congress is rife with highly visible disagreements, leaving little room for awareness of the members who are crafting policy through negotiation, compromise, and bipartisanship. But if the partisan Congress explains why Congress is broken, the collaborative Congress can help us understand why it works, improving Congress's capacity to legislate and address pressing societal problems.