On the evening of July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the East Room of the White House, handing out seventy-two pens as souvenirs. Afterward, he told an aide that he believed he had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a generation. He signed it anyway. That gesture — triumph shadowed by political reckoning — captures the man and the era this book chronicles.
This is the story of how Lyndon Johnson, Sargent Shriver, Lady Bird Johnson, Robert McNamara, Hubert Humphrey, and Martin Luther King Jr. built and then watched fracture the most ambitious domestic legislative program since the New Deal. Across twenty-four chapters in six parts, historian Carol Beatrice Fontaine traces the full arc of the Great Society from Johnson's oath of office aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963, through his anguished withdrawal from the 1968 race — and forward to Medicare's sixtieth anniversary, when the program covers sixty-seven million Americans.
Inside this Great Society history:
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — how Johnson deployed the "Johnson Treatment" and a sixty-day Senate filibuster to pass the most sweeping civil rights law since Reconstruction, knowing it would cost his party the South (Chapter 3)
- Medicare and Medicaid — Johnson's trip to Independence, Missouri to enroll Harry Truman as Medicare's first beneficiary, and the AMA's record starring Ronald Reagan that tried and failed to stop him (Chapter 5)
- The War on Poverty — Sargent Shriver's OEO, Head Start classrooms, and the memory of Cotulla, Texas, where a young LBJ taught hungry Mexican American children whose faces drove every poverty program he signed (Chapter 9)
- The Voting Rights Act of 1965 — Selma, the Pettus Bridge, and the legislative response that transformed Black voter registration across the South within a single election cycle (Chapter 6)
- The Urban Rebellions — Watts, Newark, and Detroit; the Kerner Commission's verdict that America was dividing into two societies; and the long hot summer that consumed Johnson's domestic coalition (Chapters 14-15)
- Vietnam's fatal intrusion — the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the sixteen thousand advisors Johnson inherited from Kennedy, and the war that destroyed the presidency that built the Great Society (Chapter 13)
- The honest reckoning — Reagan's assault, the survival of Medicare's core constituency, and why sixty years of conservative politics has not undone what Johnson built in 1965 (Chapters 22-23)
The Great Society left behind institutions that still govern American life — the Medicare card in every senior's wallet, the Head Start classroom in every state, the civil rights enforcement framework that protects millions. It also left behind the question Johnson asked himself in Cotulla: can democratic government make real the promise of equal opportunity, or does inequality always reconstitute itself? His answer was partial. The argument continues.
For readers of Robert Caro's THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON and Doris Kearns Goodwin's LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE AMERICAN DREAM.