Great society

[W]ith […] your desire, we will build the Great Society. It is a Society where no child will go unfed [or] unschooled. Where no man who wants work will fail to find it. Where no citizen will be barred from any door because of his birthplace or his color or his church. Where peace and security is common among neighbors and […] nations.

We built the campaign strategy around a progressive program, the program that formed the framework of the Great Society. The Great Society was never, in my mind, just a visionary Utopian ideal. I considered it a realistic outline of what this nation could achieve in a limited period of time if we marshaled our will and committed our resources.

[…] The Great Society was given a blank check. It bounced. While some of the poor advanced over the last twenty-five years, most who did so succeeded the old-fashioned way—by their own efforts. Most inner-city poor are worse off today than they were before President Johnson launched the Great Society.

This required a legislative program, the Great Society, that would complete the New Deal and earn LBJ a place alongside FDR in the pantheon of heroic Democratic reformers.