Christmas, 1963. Just four weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas Lyndon Johnson has come to his ranch outside Austin, Texas, for the holiday. He and his closest advisers are discussing ways of concluding the work that JFK left unfinished…particularly the implementation of the Civil Rights Act. The bill is stuck in Congress and may never be signed unless the new President intervenes – and soon.
They were the best of years and the worst of years. Remembered only as the President who took America deeper and deeper into a war it could not win, we have all forgotten that Lyndon Johnson was the man who championed two laws that changed America and the world - the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Now, exactly sixty years later, personal testimony of those who were there, rarely-seen film and secret White House recordings show how LBJ took on the legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy after he was gunned down in Dallas.
Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it's a fascinating story of political intrigue involving a president who knew how to harness the nation’s revulsion at JFK's brutal assassination, who knew how to twist arms and, ultimately, get his way. And all this from a Texan who, at first glance, shared all the bigotry and hatred of his fellow southern senators.
But his actions, and the telephone conversations that he secretly taped - many never heard before - tell a different story.