Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream covers a pivotal point in American history, from dreams of the Great Society to the despair of Vietnam precipitated by McCarthyism’s obsessions that derailed it all.
This is a history we all need to scrutinize, ponder, and learn from.
I lived through this era and appreciated the opportunity to get this insightful overview the book presented.


Excerpts:
The needs of blacks, would offer the civil rights bill; as panacea to the nation’s need, offer the Great Society; and, amid the final crisis of his career, use Rebekah’s lessons’”almost her words” to justify America’s involvement in Vietnam: “There is,” he told the country, “a great responsibility on the strong.“ When I thought about the kind of Congressman I wanted to be,” Johnson said much later in life, “I thought about my Populist grandfather and promised myself that I’d always be the people’s Congressman, representing all the people, not just the ones with money and power. “My grandfather taught me early in life that neither misery nor squalor is inevitable so long as the government and the people are one” so long as the government assumes the positive role of eliminating the special interests that cause most of our problems in America” particularly the moneylenders largely confined to New York, and those who had the money supply and knowledge and possessions in New York, Chicago, and Boston. They’d always been paid proportionately a far higher percentage of the total end product than they deserved. They lived off our sweat, and even before air conditioning they didn’t know what sweat was. They just clipped coupons and wrote down debentures we couldn’t spell and stole our pants out from under us.”



Johnson spoke in his peroration:”Let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation’s bloodstream.”Defeating the Southern filibuster and opening the way for Congress to pass the most sweeping civil rights bill in history. On July 2, 1964, in the presence of the leaders of all the major civil rights groups, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.



“We have enough to do it all.” We’re the wealthiest nation in the world. And I cannot see why, if we have the will to do it, we can’t provide for our own happiness, education, health, and environment.
I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion. I want to be the President who educated young children; who helped to feed the hungry; who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.”
In speeches, legislation, and continuing proposals, Johnson took the most advanced position on racial issues of any President in American history; appearing, at times, ahead of the civil rights movement itself, until, sadly, the war in Vietnam extended its paralyzing hand to this as to his other domestic ambitions.
Every story is always slanted to win the favor of someone who sits somewhere higher up. There is no such thing as an objective news story. There is always a private story behind the public story. And if you don’t control the strings to that private story, you’ll never get good coverage no matter how many great things you do for the masses of the people.