Dead Presidents

When Lyndon B. Johnson stunned the nation on March 31, 1968 by announcing that he would not seek another term as President, there was more behind his decision besides Eugene McCarthy’s near-upset of LBJ in the New Hampshire primary and growing anti-war sentiment against Johnson’s Vietnam policy.

While Johnson’s domestic accomplishments had been overshadowed by the stain of Vietnam, LBJ also worried about his own health.  He had suffered a major heart attack in 1955 when he was Senate Majority Leader and had recurring nightmares that he might fall ill and end up incapacitated like Woodrow Wilson after his 1919 stroke.  LBJ often mentioned that his father and grandfather had died in their early-60’s and he had a premonition that he wouldn’t live past the age of 64.  After he left the White House, Johnson told a reporter visiting him at the LBJ Ranch, “My daddy was only 62 when he died, and I figured that with my history of heart trouble I’d never live through another four years.  The American people had enough of Presidents dying in office.”

Had Lyndon Johnson sought and won re-election in 1968, his term would have ended on January 20, 1973 — a few months after his 64th birthday.  Instead, he retired to the LBJ Ranch in the Texas Hill Country, grew his hair out long, started smoking again, and tried to enjoy the time he had left.  His premonition, however, was correct.  In an eerie coincidence, Lyndon Johnson died at the age of 64 — on January 22, 1973, two days after his term would have ended had he been re-elected in 1968.

On the night that Lyndon Johnson died, George Foreman — a young boxer who escaped his troubled life in the Houston ghetto with the help of LBJ’s Job Corps program to win a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics — knocked out Joe Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica to win the World Heavyweight Championship.  Foreman felt so indebted to LBJ and the Job Corps for helping him achieve his goals that he donated his championship belt to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas where it is on display today.

The very next evening after LBJ’s death, his successor, President Richard Nixon, announced an agreement with the North Vietnamese to bring an end to the war in Southeast Asia that had caused Lyndon Johnson so much grief.  In his speech that night, President Nixon said, “Just yesterday, a great American, who once occupied this office, died.  In his life, President Johnson endured the vilification of those who sought to portray him as a man of war.  But there was nothing he cared about more deeply than achieving a lasting peace in the world.”

At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a young man from Texas won a gold medal in heavyweight boxing while an old man from Texas proudly watched from the White House in Washington, D.C.

As a teenager growing up in Houston’s rough Fifth Ward, George Foreman was spending his days and nights fighting in the streets and committing petty crimes.  Foreman had little education, few role models, no direction and found the crippling poverty that he lived in to be unbearable.  Then, in 1965, he heard of the Job Corps.

One of the foundations of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War On Poverty, the Job Corps was created in 1964 to provide vocational training and technical education, free of charge, to students aged 16 through 24.  For many young Americans, the Job Corps as an opportunity.  For George Foreman, it was a path to superstardom and success.

After beginning his Job Corps training in Oregon, Foreman was stationed at a center in California where a Job Corps supervisor named Doc Broadus encouraged the 6’4” Texan to consider boxing.  Just three years after he signed up for the centerpiece program of LBJ’s Great Society, George Foreman was representing his country in the Olympics. 

To this day, Foreman credits the Job Corps for saving his life.  Later, he would proudly declare that “Job Corps took me from the mean streets and out of a nightmare lifestyle into a mode where the most incredible dreams came true.”

Following Foreman’s gold medal victory at the 1968 Olympics, he was invited to the White House by President Johnson and became a proud symbol of a Great Society success story.  At the White House, President Johnson asked Foreman when he thought he’d win the world championship and Foreman recalled that “I told him I hoped it would be quick, as I needed the money.  He laughed about that.”

As LBJ headed into retirement in Texas, George Foreman embarked on a successful professional boxing career and with a 37-0 record, he prepared to fight for the undisputed heavyweight championship against the undefeated champion — Joe Frazier.  Foreman started going by the nickname “The Fighting Corpsman”, paying tribute to his Job Corps roots because “it had been President Johnson’s Job Corps which changed my direction in life.  I thought all those Job Corps men out there would see that one among them was making it, and maybe it would help them believe they could as well.”

The Fighting Corpsman was a heavy underdog on January 22, 1973 as he challenged Joe Frazier for the world heavyweight championship in Kingston, Jamaica.  Most boxing reporters and students of the game thought that the match wouldn’t last very long and they were correct.  Foreman dominated Frazier, knocking him down six times in two rounds before the referee finally stepped in and stopped the beating.  As millions watched the fight on television, sportscaster Howard Cosell made one of the most famous calls in history, “Down goes Frazier!  Down goes Frazier!  Down goes Frazier!”.  At just 24 years old, George Foreman — the Fighting Corpsman — was the heavyweight champion of the world.

The victory was George Foreman’s, but no one would have taken more pride in the results of that fight than the architect of the program that turned Foreman’s life around, Lyndon B. Johnson.  Sadly, Johnson never saw the fight.  Just hours earlier on the very day that Foreman won the title in Jamaica, Lyndon Johnson suffered a fatal heart attack at the LBJ Ranch near Johnson City, Texas.  As fans were filing into the arena in Jamaica, Lyndon Johnson died en route to a hospital in Texas.

For the new champion, the victory was bittersweet.  “I felt robbed that night while winning it as I had hoped he would be able to read what happened in Jamaica which could never have been possible had he not had that Job Corps idea and that it would include me.”  In 1983, George Foreman donated the championship belt that he won on the day of LBJ’s death to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas where it is on display today — a memento from a coincidental day 38 years ago when two Texans were united by accomplishment and cemented in history.

“There are no favorites in my office.  I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.” — Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), 36th President of the United States (1963-1969)