Lecture Outline:

• Election of 1964
• War on Poverty
• Education
• Urban Renewal
• Health Care
• Civil Rights

Enjoy!

Karen Tumulty at WaPo offers this four part critical reflection on the Great Society

Part 1: The Great Society at 50

Part 2: The legacy — and limits — of the Great Society in Prince George’s County, Md.

Part 3: Job Corps is very popular. But does it work?

Part 4: Lyndon Johnson’s lasting impact on the arts

President Johnson called the Haggar clothing company to order some new pants, providing specific (and sometimes graphic) instructions on how they should be customized for him.

50 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 59 percent of Americans still believe it was the work of a conspiracy. I was once among them…

Then, one day, I looked up the footnotes in those books, most of them leading me to the multivolume hearings of the Warren Commission. I was shocked. The authors had taken witnesses’ statements out of context, distorted them beyond recognition, and in some cases cherry-picked passages that seemed to back their theories while ignoring testimony that didn’t. It was my first brush with intellectual dishonesty.

But it’s worth recounting the conspiracy buffs’ arguments that I found most persuasive—and why they collapse under scrutiny.

In the spring of 1962, President John F. Kennedy launched a bold effort to provide health care for the aged—later to be known as Medicare. It culminated in a nationally televised presidential address from Madison Square Garden, carried on the three television networks. It was a flop. The legislation foundered amid charges that it was an attempt to socialize medicine and a threat to individual liberty—the same charges President Obama encountered over the Affordable Care Act five decades later.
 

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss why the Kennedys still loom so large in the American imagination, what would have happened if JFK had lived, and whether JFK’s Washington was more or less desirable than today’s.

A contentious and clever discussion on the 50th of the JFK assassination.

Lecture Outline:

• 1960 Election
• Civil Rights
• Women’s Rights
• Economic Rights
• Apollo Mission
• Peace Corps
• Assassination

Here is my Power Point for your studying pleasure.

The weeks after the assassination may have been the “finest moment” in Johnson’s life, argues Robert Caro in this fourth—but not final—volume of his defining series on one of America’s most complex and compelling politicians.

By blending the outpouring of goodwill from the tragedy with his own legislative mastery, Johnson had got Kennedy’s stalled programme of legislation moving again in less than two months. That included the landmark civil-rights bill, which would forever bar discrimination in hotels and other public venues.

Johnson, Mr Caro writes, refused to campaign actively until it was too late because, much as he desired the presidency, deep down he feared the humiliation of losing—and not trying meant not losing. And so, indeed, he lost out to Kennedy, a man he described at the time as a “little scrawny fellow with rickets”.

Indeed, writes Mr Caro, in 1960 he told his staff to look up how many presidents had died in office. The answer was seven out of 33—and several more vice-presidents got elected in their own right after their predecessor left office.

Johnson took the odds, but the nearly three years he spent under Kennedy were sheer misery. He gave up enormous power as Senate majority leader to assume the sideline role of vice-president.

But the Kennedys shut him out. He became mocked around Washington as “Uncle Cornpone” and was left off the invitation lists for Camelot’s decadent parties (thrown by the “Harvards”, as Johnson called the Kennedy set).

Johnson in the vice-presidency is described as a “bull castrated very late in life” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan), a “great horse in a very small corral” (Bill Moyers), and a “cut dog” (Johnson himself).

By November 1963 things looked especially dire for Johnson. A former aide was under investigation for bribery, and journalists had begun looking into Johnson’s own business dealings. Washington chatter held that Kennedy might drop him from the 1964 ticket.

But when the president was shot, Johnson took over with preternatural calm.

He made a huge effort to retain Kennedy’s advisers, even those who had previously spurned him. And he gave new hope to black leaders, who emerged from his office amazed (and heartened) that a Texan would be so committed to desegregation. The odds against passing civil-rights legislation had been high because of the chokehold Southern senators had on Congress, yet Johnson schemed and cajoled and threatened, and in the end got it done—something Kennedy, for all his eloquence, had not managed.
From book review of The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Jacqueline Kennedy wears her pink Chanel suit, still stained with the blood of her husband, as Lyndon Johnson takes the oath of office in Air Force One.

According to Lady Bird Johnson, who was also present:

“Her hair [was] falling in her face but [she was] very composed … I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood – her husband’s blood. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights – that immaculate woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”

Harvard Crimson Book Review: Morrow probes dirty details of White House occupants’ tactics—and sex lives…

He goes to great length to find similarities among the three main characters. Both Kennedy and Nixon had siblings who died young, for example. JFK and Johnson both had voracious sexual appetites—as Morrow reminds us time and time again. Kennedy said he could not sleep without having had sex. While his wife Jacqueline was delivering their first child stillborn, JFK and a fellow senator were entertaining women on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

Johnson too had many affairs, but he stands out more for his trademark crudeness. “[H]e liked to discomfit ‘the Harvards’… by forcing them to confer with him while he sat on the toilet, and he was a lifelong exhibitionist who in college had dubbed his penis ‘Jumbo,’” Morrow relates.

Nixon, like Johnson, had a habit for making those around him uncomfortable. While drinking cocktails with the owners of the Los Angeles Times in 1967, Nixon blurted: “I probably shouldn’t tell this…But…Why did the farmer keep a bucket of shit in his living room?”

The punch line: “Because he wanted to keep the flies out of the kitchen!” A shocked silence ensued. The hostess said: “You’re right, Dick, you shouldn’t have told that.”