The Great Society: 50 Years Later
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Lyndon B. Johnson’s unprecedented and ambitious domestic vision in the 1960s changed the nation. It unraveled and restitched the very fabric of the American life. It knocked down racial barriers, provided health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and museums in cities across the country, and put seat belts and padded dashboards in every automobile. But it also carved the deep philosophical divide that has come to define the nation’s harsh politics.
Half a century later, the policies of Lyndon B. Johnson continue to define politics and power in America. The Great Society: 50 Years Later is a series from the Washington Post that examines the legacy—and limits—of Johnson’s deeply humanistic, and profoundly revolutionary social agenda.
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The Great Society - The Washington Post
The Great Society
The Washington Post
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2014 by The Washington Post
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com
First Diversion Books edition September 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-410-3
The Great Society at 50
By Karen Tumulty
May 17, 2014
One day shortly after starting his new job as presidential adviser and speechwriter, Richard N. Goodwin was summoned to see the boss. Not to the Oval Office, but to the White House swimming pool, where Lyndon B. Johnson often went to ruminate.
Goodwin found the leader of the free world naked, doing a languorous sidestroke. Johnson invited him and top aide Bill Moyers to doff their own clothes: Come on in, boys. It’ll do you good.
It was an unorthodox manner of conducting official business. As they bobbed in the tepid water, the president began to talk as if he were addressing some larger, imagined audience of the mind,
Goodwin later wrote in his memoir.
The 32-year-old speechwriter forgot his chagrin as he was drawn by "the powerful flow of Johnson’s will, exhorting, explaining, trying to tell me something about himself, seeking not agreement — he knew he had that — but belief."
This happened in early April 1964, just a little more than four months after a tragedy in Dallas had made Johnson the 36th president of the United States.
I never thought I’d have the power,
Johnson told Goodwin and Moyers. I wanted power to use it. And I’m going to use it.
We’ve got to use the Kennedy program as a springboard to take on the Congress, summon the states to new heights, create a Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive,
he said. Hell, we’ve barely begun to solve our problems. And we can do it all.
Johnson’s vision would come to be known as the Great Society — the most ambitious effort ever to test what American government is capable of achieving. And in doing so, to discover what it is not.
In laying it out, LBJ even set out a specific time frame for it to come to fruition — 50 years, a mark that was reached on May 22, 2014. Johnson launched his program with a University of Michigan commencement address, delivered on the clear, humid morning of May 22, 1964, in Ann Arbor.
Today, the laws enacted between 1964 and 1968 are woven into the fabric of American life, in ways big and small. They have knocked down racial barriers, provided health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and museums in cities across the country, put seat belts and padded dashboards in every automobile, garnished Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington with red oaks.
We are living in Lyndon Johnson’s America,
said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was LBJ’s top domestic policy adviser from 1965 through the end of his presidency. This country is more the country of Lyndon Johnson than any other president.
The backlash against the Great Society has been as enduring as its successes.
Virtually every political battle that rages today has roots in the federal expansion and experimentation that began in the 1960s. It set terms of engagement for ideological warfare over how to grapple with income inequality, whether to encourage a common curriculum in schools, affirmative action, immigration, even whether to strip federal funding for National Public Radio. (Yes, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is another Great Society program.)
Many Great Society programs are now so popular it is hard to imagine the country as we know it without them. Others — including some of its more grandiose urban renewal efforts — are generally regarded as failures. Poverty remains with us, with the two parties in deep disagreement over whether government has alleviated it or made it harder to escape.
When Johnson spoke that day in Michigan, before a crowd of 70,000, the country was enjoying unprecedented affluence.
So he beckoned Americans to consider what they could do with their riches, to imagine ahead — to today — a time that many who heard his words have lived to see.
The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life and to advance the quality of our American civilization,
the president said. Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time, we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society.
The import of that pronouncement