On 15 March, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to plead for passage of the Voting Rights Act. A member of the audience, enthralled by what he heard, later called it “Johnson’s finest hour,” a “great moral statement against discrimination.” According to McGeorge Bundy and George Ball, however, that day LBJ's mind was.elsewhere; Bundy and Ball conversed on the phone in the afternoon and concurred that the president was fixated on Vietnam.
