Annotations for Lbj: Great Society

The way in which ordinary behavior, if carried out by African-Americans, was criminalized, the way in which there was actually a deliberate turn from, you know, thinking of African-Americans as stupid and lazy, which was the stereotype during slavery days, to thinking of them as criminals. All the way through, you know, redlining and the ways in which people of color were barred from getting mortgages, were barred from getting Social Security.

I think Reagan's election was very significant, but not quite for the reason that people think. There's this kind of assumption that you even hear political historians make, which is that the Republican Party became conservative when Barry Goldwater got that presidential nomination in 1964, and it's remained conservative ever after. And to quote George Will's witticism, Barry Goldwater did win the presidential election in 1964. It's just that they didn't get around to counting the votes until 16 years later. But in fact, the Republican Party did not become conservative after Goldwater's victory. In fact, the conservatives had a real demotion within the party because not only did Goldwater lose in a landslide, but he really took down so many Republicans on the ballot below him, not just in Congress, but also at the levels of state legislatures and governors and even local authorities because his conservatism was simply that unpopular. And that is what gave Lyndon Johnson the ability to pass what amounted to a second New Deal.

But that kind of progressive overreach that you saw in the Great Society was part of what led to a rapprochement between conservatives and moderates, and gradually building strength in both factions. Now, it happened that Ronald Reagan was the most talented political performer of his era, and he came pretty close to toppling Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. Ford, of course, was the incumbent after Nixon had resigned in the wake of Watergate. And then Reagan won outright in 1980. But Ronald Reagan, in 1980, was not campaigning as Barry Goldwater reborn. Barry Goldwater's political platform was much further to the right than Reagan's was. Barry Goldwater wanted to abolish the social safety net that had come into being with the New Deal, and wanted to get rid of Social Security, for example. Wanted to give battlefield commanders access to nuclear weapons. Derided Americans' craven fear of death, it being unwilling to go to nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Reagan was none of those things. And in fact, he was a big tent Republican. He had a lot of support from moderates, and he made it very clear to his conservative allies that they were not to purge these moderate Republicans whom the party needed. They were not to deride them as RINOs, "Republicans In Name Only." And there, in fact, was a great deal of cooperation between the moderate faction and the conservative factions on issues like supply-side economics, which at that time were thought to be the remedy to economic dislocation under Jimmy Carter. So when people talk about Reagan, they're really remembering an idea that they have about Reagan as the pure culture warrior that actually wasn't the case.

I want us to come back to the Obama package soon. But I think it's good to start with the New Deal, which you mentioned. What have we learned about the positive effects that came out of the New Deal? And maybe you want to take us also into the Great Society as well. What have we learned historically that we should know today when we discuss these issues?

The Great Society is different in that economic times are pretty good. And the whole premise of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s was that when the economy was growing, and when income was rising, there was no reason not to use a moment like that to address many problems which had been ignored, whether you're talking about entrenched poverty in this country, or the struggles of elderly Americans, who had no health insurance, and often were living in an incredibly vulnerable state, based on the health that they had or didn't have. And so that was less of a stimulus. But again, a very important economic intervention that stabilized key parts of American society, like the health insurance that older Americans now have.

Well, I think it was two histories that were influencing Obama in 2009. One was he is someone and was someone who was very cognizant of the importance of those interventions. He was not hesitant or torn up about the idea that government was essential as the economy was plummeting when he took office. Even before he was president, he had been very important to helping President Bush push through his stimulus package in 2008, which many Republicans opposed. But the candidate Obama giving support to that already indicated he understood that government mattered. He understood his New Deal history. He understood his Great Society history. And he very much came from that tradition.

That's exactly where my mind was going, my hopes were going, Julian. And I think that's an appropriate place for us to ask our closing question. Roosevelt, in particular, and to some extent Lyndon Johnson, if we take the Vietnam War out of things, which of course we really can't do, but certainly Franklin Roosevelt establishes a new consensus in American politics, to the point where Republicans have to start supporting New Deal policies because they're so popular. Is that a possibility?

So it's tough. I think the way that it can happen isn't through persuasion. It isn't through President Biden being able, through fireside chats or televised addresses, to convince Republicans to think in a different way. It's only if the case is made by government policy itself. It's kind of like Medicare, which was controversial when it started. It was hated by a lot of people in the Republican Party and the medical community but ultimately within a decade of its creation in 1965, lots of Americans, red and blue, love the program and had no interest in ever letting it go because they saw what it could do. And they saw how it could heal some of the problems American families faced.

It's always downhill after Zachary's poem, Mark. But Mark, you have, especially in this recent book, you've really delved into the ways in which the effort to build utopia, or a Great Society as Lyndon Johnson called it abroad in Vietnam, really distorted American thinking and American society. First of all, why was the United States trying to do this in Vietnam? Why were we looking to build this utopia, as Zachary put it, in a place so far away that so few Americans could even identify?

Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.

Well, I think one of the things that makes American foreign policy so difficult to understand sometimes is the ways in which self-interest and altruism blend in the way Americans think about the world. The old adage was, what's good for General Motors is good for the world. And I think that there's something really important in that kind of comment. Right? So many American policymakers believe that the United States was on the side of righteousness and had the keys to assuring progress and uplift for the whole world. But they had no doubt at the same time that the same policies would also serve the United States. So I think this distinction between self-interest and the larger global interest is clearer in retrospect than it was in the minds of the people who tended to make policy in the United States. And that was certainly true, I would say, during the 1960s.

He doesn't accomplish a great deal in the presidency, particularly compared to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who was a legislative genius and promulgated the Great Society, which fundamentally changed America. But those ideas that Kennedy put forth so artfully, so elegantly in the speeches he gave made us believe in ourselves as a nation, and I think made citizens of the world believe in the United States as a leader, as a beacon of freedom. He goes on this rhetorical hitting streak at a last year of his life that is tantamount to Ted Williams in 1941. It's remarkable, all these speeches back to back to back in different areas that fundamentally change who we are in many respects.

It goes beyond that. And because in the 1960s, the criticism, one of the criticisms lodged at the Birchers was that they were alien, right? As I think one senator at the time said, they're a weird presence in America. And, you know, my argument is no, actually they're not. They're deeply, they're kind of endemic to the country and to its traditions. They're not necessarily the majority of the country, but they're a powerful tradition. And I think it's a tradition that since, especially the New Deal and then the Great Society and civil rights movement that many people have thought, many, especially liberals, but also some conservatives too, a tradition had thought had really just been marginalized, right?

Well, Truman blows hot and cold in a way that reminds me a lot of Lyndon Johnson. People compare LBJ to Franklin Roosevelt, and I think that's an apt comparison on the domestic agenda of the Great Society legislation, but on civil rights, Johnson reminds me a lot more of Truman. They're both from border states. They both, in their public life, had been perfectly fine with segregation for a long period of time, but they both had some kind of deep reservoir of personal decency that was offended. As we know from Robert Carroll's magisterial work and also people like Robert Dallek and Nick Kotz, when young Lyndon Johnson teaches at a Mexican-American school in the Rio Grande Valley, he's appalled at just a primordial level by the poverty and the racism he sees.

And so for the Kennedys, who are very reticent about not allowing civil rights to upend the administration and especially the administration's legislative agenda, which is the state of the union, as I show early, they want a tax cut. They want a big tax cut so that they can get portions of what become the Great Society past, including Medicare. That's what they want.