Nice post, and here's a bit of an addendum:"LBJ's Guns and Butter"...and if anyone wants even more food for thought, search out LBJ's "Great Society" speech.....after 40 years, most of which was under a solid Democratic Congress, and Billions of Dollars (yes BIG CAPITAL B)....that have been poured into this society so that everyone would have a fair chance...WHY had not much changed....I just looked at the speech on the web, and Gore could have used the same words as LBJ....Following is a review of the Guns and Butter idea that was the seed of today's deficit problems....
Guns or Butter: the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson by Irving Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), $35.00 ISBN 0 19 506312 0
americansc.org.uk
Warfare, rioting, assassinations: mayhem continues to be the dominant image of America in the mid-1960s, with Lyndon Johnson presiding. This book is intended to redress an 'unfair balance' in the treatment of the man and his time in office, which has skewed our perception almost exclusively to what went wrong. The tragedy of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, according to the author of this new political biography, was that Johnson believed that he could have both guns and butter - that his vision of the United States as a 'great society' could be fulfilled alongside the waging of war in southeast Asia. It was to be a tragedy of epic proportions. In the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, and especially after the Democrats' landslide victory in the presidential election a year later, Johnson set about the task of continuing and extending his predecessor's liberal reform programme. Legislative achievements included the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and a series of progressive measures relating to immigration, education and conservation. Together they constituted a new 'New Deal': FDR was LBJ's political hero. With rapid economic growth in the mid-1960s, the Democrats could have looked forward to a lengthy stay in office during which Johnson's vision of the 'great society' might have been made still more a reality. But his decision to engage US military forces in the long-running conflict in Vietnam changed everything. Bernstein has produced a very readable narrative of the domestic triumphs and foreign travails of the Johnson administration, richly documented from the archives of the LBJ presidential library in Austin, Texas. His book gives fascinating insights into the American political process, and into Johnson's complex personality. Despite the author' s hope to rehabilitate LBJ's reputation by focussing on the domestic accomplishments, it is the descent into the quagmire of Vietnam that comes to dominate his account. The style of writing is often vivid, sometimes colloquial, always lucid. There are useful historical backgrounds given to all the issues under discussion, and brief biographical sketches of the principal policy-makers in the Johnson administration. The book is generously illustrated, and is a storehouse of material from which teachers and students can draw readily for a better understanding of those dramatic years of American hope and despair, dream and nightmare, over which LBJ presided.
Mike Pudlo Liverpool John Moores University |
