In The Presidency by Michael Nelson, a photograph of President Lyndon B. Johnson presenting members of the 101st Airborne with their service medals for fighting in the War of Vietnam is used to describe how he fulfilled his term as president (see Appendix 1 for a photo). The photograph was taken in July 1966 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and it is a black and white photo showing President Lyndon B. Johnson walking down a line of soldiers, stopping in front of each to shake their hands while they received their medals. Behind the soldiers, many American flags are raised by another row of soldiers. The photograph effectively depicts Johnson's presidential term because Johnson actively supported sending hundreds of thousands of troops to aid the South Vietnamese army against North Vietnam, and he made many military decisions regarding actions throughout while serving as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army. Shaking hands with soldiers after combat symbolized Johnson's support for Vietnam because it showed his appreciation for their war efforts, but I think the photograph has a deeper meaning. Showing the racial prejudices that still remained in the United States after the official end of segregation two years earlier, in 1964, is another meaning of photography. One reason why the persistence of racial prejudice after the legal end of segregation appears in the photograph is because black soldiers are segregated from other soldiers. In the photograph, the line of soldiers shaking hands with Lyndon B. Johnson is distinctly divided into two sides, white soldiers and black soldiers. White soldiers were the first to shake the president's hand, followed later by black soldiers. The order in which the soldiers' hands were shaken demonstrates a belief middle of paper...a judicial belief that it was appropriate to separate whites and blacks for the benefit of whites. While the photograph was used to good effect by Michael Nelson in The Presidency to depict Lyndon B. Johnson's tenure as president, the photograph has a deeper and perhaps more controversial meaning in showing the persistence of racial prejudice after the end of segregation. The racial bias in the photograph can be seen in the soldier's surprised expression, the larger than usual gap between the black and white soldiers, and the white soldiers receiving their medals and shaking the president's hand in front of the black soldiers . The end of racial prejudice was supposed to end two years before this photo with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the signs in the photograph show its continued presence. References Nelson, M. (1996). The presidency. London: Salamander Books.