Portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson

Robert Caro: Credit LBJ for Obama

May 03, 2012

Biographer Robert Caro said Thursday that Lyndon Johnson made possible Barack Obama’s election – and that of any other potential African-American presidential candidate, for that matter.

“[Johnson] had the most idealistic aims, he wants to end poverty and… you have an African-American president in the White House – that wouldn’t have been possible if Lyndon Johnson hadn’t passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the longtime chronicler of the former president said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” during an appearance discussing the fourth volume of his series on Johnson, “The Passage of Power.”

“He gets it passed in 1965 and 43 years later, in 2008, there’s an African-American in the White House, that’s a blink of history’s eye, and that’s what Johnson did,” Caro said. read more