Monday, October 12th, 2009
Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of President Johnson delivers the keynote address in the Kennedy Library’s ongoing examination of 20th century presidents. He is joined by Jack Valenti, who served as Special Advisor to President Johnson; Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Anthony Lewis; and Boston University historian Bruce Schulman to discuss President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s legacy. Harvard University historian Lizabeth Cohen moderates the discussion.
Watch it Here (90 minutes)
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Friday, September 18th, 2009
Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors’ offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.
Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus.
Listen to this Fresh Air Episode
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Sunday, August 24th, 2008
When Lyndon B. Johnson took office as president, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he began making daily recordings of his private conversations.Historian Michael Beschloss transcribed and edited the tapes’ contents and provided commentary on them in his book Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964.
The book sheds light on Johnson’s thoughts during the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the creation of the Warren Commission to investigate it, the progress of the civil rights bill and the Gulf of Tonkin attack. And it illuminates Johnson’s decision-making process during his administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War.
Listen to the interview with Terry Gross
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
“It is not the purpose of this paper to evaluate the original legislation with respect to its successes or failures. This type of analysis has been repeated over and over in conferences and congressional hearings over the past 30 years. Such an exercise is fraught with difficulty as the original goals and objectives of each program were not completely clear and, as mentioned above, the details and implementation of each program were not set out in the original legislation. It was Johnson’s belief that these details would be worked out later. It is shown here that the debates about how to improve or change these programs continue to the present. It is the purpose of this paper to determine what, if anything, remains of the “Great Society” legislation in the 1990s. What is its legacy?”
The Legacy of the Great Society
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