Category: USH: New Frontier & Great Society
The story behind LBJ's pursuit of the civil rights bill
President Lyndon Johnson, domineering and manipulative, lives on in American memory as the classic power broker. He bullied opponents, sweet-talked skeptics, and chewed out subordinates. He oozed confidence as he passed one piece of landmark social legislation after another, even as his cockiness helped to mire the country in Vietnam. Yet this is not the Johnson who emerges from volumes seven and eight of The Presidential Recordings, a transcription of his phone conversations from June 1 to July 4 of 1964.
T.R. Reid: Looking Overseas For 'Healing Of America'
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
Tales Of The LBJ Tapes
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
Truncated Lecture Notes: Did the Great Society Fail or Succeed?
The Legacy of the Great Society
“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?”