Political Science Quarterly
Volume 116 No. 2 (Summer 2001)

 

Johnson's War/Johnson's Great Society
By Jeffrey W. Helsing. Westport, CT, Praeger, 2000.
Reviewed by Joseph A. Califano, Jr.

 

The central tension of Lyndon Johnson's presidency was his determination to build the Great Society programs in the face of the escalating Vietnam War. LBJ believed that World War II had stunted Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Korea had gutted Harry Truman's Fair Deal. He was not about to let Viet-nam destroy his Great Society.

That accounts for much of the way the war was waged-authorized by the congressional Tonkin Gulf Resolution, military actions tightly controlled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Johnson himself, costs hidden as long as possible. This strategy helped Johnson drive through Congress pro-grams like Medicare and Medicaid, the first Aid to Elementary and Secondary Education Act, clean air and water legislation, the last massive housing pro-gram, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Endowment for the Arts, Office of Economic Opportunity poverty programs, and three monumental civil rights acts (employment and public access in 1964, voting rights in 1965, and fair hous-ing in 1968).

In a detailed narrative of paper trails and meeting memos, the author chronicles the impact of Johnson's guns and butter commitment on economic policy. The president and Defense Secretary McNamara would have to accept the author's charge that by withholding information on the cost of the Vietnam War they seeded the inflation that eventually overtook the economy in the Nixon administration.

Unfortunately, the book is written in a vacuum that fails to capture the social and political context of these decisions: the civil rights movement; urbanization and mobility, which required creation of two new cabinet departments; national-ization of industry and finance, which made legislation (auto safety, truth in lending and packaging, wholesome meat, toy and other product safety) essen-tial to protect the consumer; lack of health care for the elderly and poor. Nor does the author understand the race against time that the Great Society's crackle of hope set off. What the poor and black once accepted as inevitable became intolerable when LBJ showed them there was light at the end of the tunnel of their oppression.

The author naively upbraids Johnson for not seeking a tax increase when key congressional leaders repeatedly made it clear the Congress would never pass one. At one meeting I attended, when House Majority Leader Carl Albert told Johnson he could not get more than fifteen votes for such a measure, Mi-nority Leader Gerald Ford snapped, "Not even that many!"

The book's fatal flaw is its conclusion that LBJ ended up "losing the war and his Great Society" (p. 256). Where does Jeffrey Helsing live? The civil rights laws have reshaped the nation; affirmative action, still controversial, nev-ertheless guides much academic and commercial activity; Medicare and Medic-aid help millions of Americans; 60 percent of college students have grants and loans seeded in the 1965 Higher Education Act; public television and radio flourish; eleven of the twelve Office of Economic Opportunity programs are alive, well, and funded at $10 billion annually; each year more Head Start pro-grams and community health centers are opened.

The political debate today is not whether to continue Great Society pro-grams, but how to make them more effective. It's hard to think of any president who has left as enduring a mark on the nation. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith said in a speech at the LBJ Library on 23 November 1999, "Next only to Roosevelt, and in some respects more so, Lyndon Johnson was the most effective advocate of humane social change in the United States in this century."

Joseph A. Califano, Jr.
New York, N.Y.