how does kennedy think these similarities and differences affect the american commitment to human rights?

Only five days after John F. Kennedy was killed in November 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson went to the congress and told the nation that he was still stunned by the events that had impacted the world.

Johnson made it clear that he would continue with the president's agenda, particularly a bill that Kennedy had sought but faced a strong and vehement opposition from powerful southern Democrats.

"No speech or panegyric could have honored President Kennedy's memory as eloquently as a passage from the proposed civil rights law he had fought for so long," Johnson told lawmakers.

Then, he told his fellow countrymen in the south that they would have to fight and said: "We have talked a lot in this country about equal rights. We have talked for about a hundred years or more. It is time to write the next chapter and write it in the law books.

The chapter became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Forty years ago, Johnson set out to carry out what he had done in 1957 and 1960 as the majority leader, to direct a proposed civil rights law through a congress controlled mostly by southern Democrats who strongly opposed. But he was no longer a majority leader and could not hook undecided members into the wardrobe or make deals with them to achieve their goal or promise rewards or punishments.

This is the story of how Lyndon Johnson paved the way for this legislation years before and how to choreograph that this historical event happened in 1964, a year in which the human rights movement was rapidly gaining movement and when there was race-based concern by playing a role in the presidential campaign.

The story is often told, but this time it will be supplemented with details discovered from recent years with the opening of the Johnson White House telephone records with excerpts from the Lyndon B. Johnson Library's oral history collection in Austin, Texas.