We Think It's Stormy Now.....1968 Was Far Worse....And We Survived

Historians have long written about inflection points in history. In American history, events surrounding the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War & Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, and WWII, are all such points.

It’s arguable that we may very well be living though another one right now. But clearly the last great historical inflection point came exactly fifty years ago, and reached its apogee in the year of 1968. Lyndon Johnson was President, and a series of events led us to believe like Yeats, “that the center cannot hold, and that mere anarchy was loose upon the land.”

The Tet Offensive, MLK and RFK assassinations, the Praque Spring, racial conflicts, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Lyndon Johnson's decision not to seek reelection and the election of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, made 1968 quite a year.

Lyndon Johnson presided over it all and that's the story that historian Kyle Longley tells in LBJ's 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America's Year of Upheaval

My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Kyle Longley:

A President Who Really Got Things Done

Elections do have consequences and leaders really do matter. Grassroots voices and organizing can bring attention to a problem, but it’s the job of government, of our constitutional process, to put those policies in place.

As modern history tells us, it’s no easy task. This week we watched a State of the Union speech devoid of ideas, or programs or lofty goals to lift people up, or in the parlance of our times, to solve problems.

It was a far cry from Bill Clinton’s laundry list of small ball in his ‘95 SOTU and even further from the goals once set out by Lyndon Johnson.

So much of the legislative battle today is not about, as some commentators have said, undoing the New Deal, but undoing the remarkable achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It’s a remarkable list that includes medicare, medicai
d, public radio, public television, the voting right act, federal aid to education, consumer protections, creating the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the great 1964 Civil Rights Act. All done in five years, while struggling with the disaster that was Vietnam.

Johnson did it all not through executive orders, but through the simple Article One powers of the Constitution. That’s the story that Joshua Zeitz tells in Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House

My conversation with Joshua Zeitz:

LBJ, Selma and the Great Society

Our mission statement as a country tells us we are a government of laws, and not of men. Yet without great men, including Adams, who said this, we would not have the laws that have provided the framework for our greatness.

Today, the laws that shape our contemporary society, civil rights, the environment, the social safety net, head start, and college loans, were in large measure the result of the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson.

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Johnson. Recently the movie Selma reignited the debate about Johnson’s role in Civil Rights legislation.

But Johnson, like all Presidents, was a flesh and blood human being. While we may understand and/or debate the history of his Presidency, Joseph Califano Jr. in his book The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years, gives us a look inside the man himself.

My conversation with Joseph Califano:

Congress then and now....Lyndon Johnson and the Battle for the Great Socieity

American political history is a complex and dynamic process. In that process, there have been periods of entropy and period of great progress and imagination. Both have been a function of a political system designed by our founders.

But also, the temper and tenor of the times and the degree to which individual leaders have known how to work those levers of power has also shaped our political destiny.

The period of the Johnson Presidency, post 1964, is one of those periods. The Great Society, The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and medicare, are all just a part of an agenda that reshaped America

Today as we face congressional gridlock, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the apogee of the civil rights movement and as the President goes before Congress tonight, we reassess our politics and institutions. In doing so, it's well worth the time to look at that unique and politically bountiful period of the Johnson Presidency.

That is what historian Julian Zelizer does in his new book The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.

My conversation with Julian Zelizer:

An Idea Whose Time Had Come

Few events truly define the complexity of the American experience. Yet the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, comes very close.

At its core, it address the founding flaw in the American republic, in taking up the issue of race itself. It incorporates the moral underpinnings and power of religion, faith and morality in the American character. And further, its shows the best in the system of self government, designed by our founders, to allow conflict, and compromise and the better angels of our nature to foster action that may not be politically expedient.

In this sense, our focus on this Act, fifty years ago, is not so much nostalgia, but perhaps longing for what we once were able to do.

This is the zeitgeist that Todd Purdum captures in his new book An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

My conversation with Todd Purdum: