ABSTRACT
John F. Kennedy is often cited as the spur for young people's political commitment in the 1960s, but the point can be fairly made that Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) became the object by which that commitment was spelled out and acted on. LBJ was satirized on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a "counterculture" show, breaking a taboo on negatively representing, a sitting president on television, and preparing the way for the full-blown practice on Saturday Night Live. This chapter shows, specifically, how representing LBJ converted the political agnosticism of the aesthetic New Left into something near a programmatic class politics. The historical difference between George Lucas's LBJ movie and Philip Kaufman's LBJ movie, The Right Stuff, is obviously great, it being the difference between their generation in training and their generation empowered. LBJ has failed an image event, but the irony of the standoff is that only by his politicking has the infrastructure been funded and built for John Glenn's astronaut authority.
