Remarks of U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell at the Centennial Celebration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson
Statuary Hall, U.S. Capitol, May 21, 2008
“This summer, America observes the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial and celebrates his American spirit.
“Of the many titles Lyndon Johnson once held, the one I’m most qualified to speak about goes with one of the hardest jobs in the U.S. Senate: ‘Mr. Leader.’
“President Johnson was widely acknowledged as one of the Senate’s most powerful floor leaders. In fact, when he ran for president in 1960, some joked that as the Democratic leader under Eisenhower, Johnson had already served eight years as president and was therefore ineligible to run.
“A man of outsized ambition, accomplishments, and defeats, Lyndon Johnson knew to amass power and how to use it, and he did so at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Of his many successes, he once named the passage of the Voting Rights Act as his greatest. I was lucky enough to be present at that Act’s signing ceremony in 1965, held just down the hall in the Capitol Rotunda, at the invite of Senator John Sherman Cooper, my boss, mentor and friend.
“But Johnson’s leadership on civil rights began years earlier. In 1957, he led the Senate’s passage of the first civil-rights legislation since Reconstruction.
“Speaking on that bill on the Senate floor, he foreshadowed the president he was to become, saying ‘Nothing lasting, nothing enduring, has ever been born from hatred and prejudice—except more hatred and more prejudice.’
“Lyndon Johnson’s legacy still endures, long after much of what he fought against has been broken and swept away.
“I welcome you to our Nation’s capital—the site of his most historic battles—to celebrate that important legacy today.”
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