LBJ
THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS
On his sixtieth birthday, the president is joined in the ranch pool by his grandson Lyn and friend Yuki.
Photographs by Yoichi Okamoto.
LBJ: The White House Years, on view at
the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential
Library from December 14, 1990 to May
19, 1991, commemorates the 25th anniversary
of Lyndon Johnson's inauguration
as thirty-sixth president of the United
States. This unique exhibition provides a
more complete and more intimate visual
record of the presidency than we have ever
had before. It reveals the 1960s from a
unique perspective-that of the largerthan-life-size
man who helped shape a
tumultuous era.
6 HERITAGE * WINTER 1991
The 120 black and white photographs,
many previously unpublished, present a
kaleidoscopic view of some of the historic,
victorious, comic, and anguished moments
of Johnson's public and private life. The
images are primarily the work of Yoichi
Okamoto, principal photographer and
head of the White House photo office
during the Johnson years. Granted unprecedented
and almost unlimited access to
the president, his family and staff,
Okamoto and his team of White House
photographers captured Johnson as he
forged civil rights legislation, sought to
create "the Great Society," and in the
decade of Vietnam, decided in 1968 not to
seek re-election.
The photographs of LBJ bear witness to
some of the country's moments of peril and
triumph. They portray a president visiting
Appalachia to assess the conditions of poor
families in the region, in preparation to
wage a "war on poverty," at work on the
passage of the Voting Rights Act,
appealing to black leaders in the wake of
the Detroit riots, and responding to the Tet
