The younger Johnson had an affectionate reverence for Franklin D. Roosevelt based on the days of his Congressman father's friendship with the then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy (the families' children knew each other).

Johnson played a prominent role in trying to prevent James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss in 1962, physically blocking (for the benefit of photographers) the federal marshals who were escorting the African-American veteran.

During the campaign, he asked voters to "Stand tall with Paul" against those wanting to change Mississippi's "way of life", in reference to his confrontation with federal marshals at Ole Miss.

He was the first strong Republican candidate for Mississippi governor since the end of Reconstruction in 1876, as the party was hobbled after the state passed a disfranchising constitution in 1890, effectively barring most blacks from the political system.

Phillips worked to convince voters that he and GOP lieutenant governor candidate Stanford Morse, a state senator from Gulfport, represented the best hope for preserving Mississippi's traditional "way of life", while at the same time making overall progress.

[6]In his inaugural address in 1964, Johnson chose the "Pursuit of Excellence" as his term's theme and said, "Hate, or prejudice, or ignorance, will not lead Mississippi while I sit in the governor's chair."

He wrote of the governor: Probably satisfying no one, Johnson kept his own counsel, and his mouth closed to demagogic outbursts, while treading the uneasy path between the demands of the Citizens Council (which had helped elect him) and the imperatives of the situation.

As one astute observer saw it, the governor was "tempering political expedience with common sense, yet still attempting to ease down the more radical, emotional, ignorant groups without losing those votes."

He criticized civil rights workers and refused to meet with major African American leaders, but supported law enforcement and ending violence in Pike County.

In the meantime, the old "watchdog of segregation", the State Sovereignty Commission, lapsed into desuetude from deliberate withholding of gubernatorial appointments, and the Citizens Council prepared its own death watch.

In addition, his 1966 fight to repeal the prohibition on alcohol, a state law which for 48 years had been largely ignored by moonshiners, was another issue that gained him popular appeal.