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: