The "Great Society"

A tough politician from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson ("LBJ") became President immediately upon the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. LBJ became known for two things: pushing through the "Great Society" programs, and starting the Vietnam War. We review each.

The "Great Society" was an attempt by the Democrats who controlled both the White House and Congress from 1963 through 1968 to expand government in order to "end poverty." Also known as the "War on Poverty," Johnson started pushing his vast new and expensive federal government programs through Congress in 1964. This established the modern "welfare state," giving people millions of taxpayer-funded programs without requiring them to work for it. It was a massive and permanent expansion of the approach taken by the New Deal. The "Great Society" or "War on Poverty" included:

Office of Economic Opportunity: a program consisting of President Johnson giving $1 billion for poverty relief

Medicare and Medicaid (1965): establishing almost free medical care (at taxpayer expense) for everyone over 65 (Medicare) and for the poor (Medicaid)

Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education Acts (1965): establishing federal funding for public school districts, and also the "Head Start" preschool program for the poor

Department of Housing and Urban Development (1965): establishing housing for the poor in cities

Jesus said that "you will always have the destitute with you."^[12] But President Johnson promised that his programs would eradicate and eliminate poverty. Jesus was right and most of the programs of the Great Society are failing today. In fact, many concluded that the "Great Society" did more harm than good, as in giving people an incentive not to work and even for mothers to divorce so they could claim welfare. Future Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York, who had served as an assistant secretary in the Labor Department of the Johnson Administration,^[13] was later critical of the Great Society. Moynihan's later message "to messianic Great Society liberals - we thought we could do anything" but "the central psychological proposition of liberalism is that for every problem there is a solution."^[14]

Rather than achieving "an end to poverty as we know it," as Johnson promised, thirty years later it became necessary to repeal some of the Great Society. Public outrage at welfare grew so great that fellow Democratic President Bill Clinton felt compelled to sign a partial repeal passed by the conservative Congress in 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Clinton's press secretary (the official who addresses the media for the president) quipped, this "ends welfare as we know it."^[15]

But in February 2007, Barack Obama began his campaign for president by declaring, "Let's be the generation that ends poverty in America."^[16]

The Vietnam War

President Lyndon B. Johnson ("LBJ") was a very powerful, arrogant and intimidating politician who quickly rose to power as a United States Senator in the 1950s before becoming Vice President and then President in the 1960s. He is considered by his biographer to have been the most effective Senate Majority Leader in history in the late 1950s, and his ability to manipulate the legislative process enabled him to pass his "Great Society" program when he later became President.

Johnson was a tough Texan used to giving orders and destroying anyone who got in his way. His tricks included personal accusations and threats, and even sending opponents on foreign trips at a time when a key vote was scheduled, so they could not vote against it. Johnson became so famous for his confrontational tactics that it even acquired a name: "The Treatment," which consisted of Johnson confronting an adversary and berating him with Johnson's face only inches from his opponent.

But Johnson's own arrogance, manipulation and intimidating tactics became his undoing. In the fall of 1964, Johnson was up for reelection and, like many presidents before him, he became paranoid about the possibility of defeat. The Republican Party nominated the conservative Barry Goldwater, and he was delivering tough, uncompromising speeches against Johnson. Johnson, who was completely self-centered, watched public opinion polls closely.

Johnson then sparked and exaggerated a conflict in Vietnam in order to increase public support for his leadership. The popularity of a president always increases when America is attacked. The problem was the facts: the American destroyer USS Maddox attacked three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats before they could attack us. Days later a completely false report of an attack on the Maddox by the North Vietnamese was publicized. Johnson presented this false information to Congress in order to obtain passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted Johnson the power to assist South Vietnam against communist aggression. This was not a declaration of war, but Johnson used it to support injecting the United States into the Vietnam War and to win reelection in 1964 in a landslide.

Vietnam is a huge country: 81 million people, more than North and South Korea combined. Vietnam is also a jungle. The communists had planted land mines everywhere. A substantial percentage of our casualties in the Vietnam War were from stepping on land mines. Between 1964 and 1975, when our last troops left, 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives and hundreds of thousands were severely injured. Unlike today, the mandatory draft was used to compel these young men to fight in this war.

The United States entered this war on the side of South Vietnam against the communist North Vietnamese, who were backed by China and the Soviet Union. America won every battle we fought. But in the jungle warfare, we were not any closer to winning the war after years of struggle.

President Johnson mishandled everything about the war. He became obsessed with bombing North Vietnam, but would not let our generals win the war completely. Instead, LBJ insisted on ordering some bombing raids here and there without doing what was necessary to win the war. Later politicians swore that we should never repeat the mistake of Vietnam, which means we should never enter a war unless we are committed to doing what is necessary to win it. Later Presidents also avoided Johnson’s mistake of dictating detailed military strategy from the White House.

We did not run the war any better under President Richard Nixon, who was the next president after Johnson. We would win a battle and then our leaders, particularly Nixon's top adviser and future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, would call for a "cease-fire" to discuss settlement. But the communists had no intention of settling, and they would just use the cease-fires to obtain replacement of all their ammunition and supplies from China and the Soviet Union. Some of our military leaders could have done better also. Many of our planes were shot down early in the war, including the one carrying John McCain, and it took years before we improved and better protected our pilots. We did not anticipate or sweep the territory for land mines as well as we do today, although the jungle in Vietnam made that more difficult than in a desert.

The war, and particularly the draft, became hugely unpopular. Americans, particularly students, began protesting the war. They caused disruption at colleges. The protests became bigger and bigger. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, hippies caused massive riots that were brutally suppressed by the tough Chicago Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, which was a political disaster for the Democratic Party. The "Chicago Seven," the hippie ringleaders of the riots, were convicted for disrupting the convention but their convictions were overturned on appeal. Democrats had hoped to nominate Robert Kennedy, the brother of the late President John Kennedy, but Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June by a disgruntled immigrant from the Middle East (Jordan). The Democrats then nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey instead. (President Johnson himself had pulled out of the race after the first primary in New Hampshire, when he fared poorly due to unhappiness within his own Party about the war.)

The United States began looking for ways to get out of the war. When we finally pulled out completely in 1973, the South Vietnamese clung to the wheels or landing gear of the last airplanes and helicopters, begging to leave with us. North Vietnam eventually conquered South Vietnam after we left (Saigon fell to the communists in 1975), and created the new communist country of Vietnam that exists to this day.

Humphrey lost the presidential election to Republican Richard Nixon, who was nominated at a peaceful convention in 1968 in Miami (which your teacher attended, and where he met Nixon in person).

President Nixon did not handle the war any better than Johnson had. In 1969, Nixon tried "Vietnamization", which consisted of America giving planes to South Vietnam so it could defend itself against the communists; this strategy was unsuccessful. Also in 1969, news reports from Vietnam shocked the nation with a story about how American soldiers had murdered villagers in the "My Lai Massacre." The story was that our soldiers would unsuccessfully look for North Vietnamese, known as "Viet Cong," but in their frustration with trying to find the real enemy would allegedly kill innocent people instead.

At Kent State University in 1970, peaceful protesters were shot at by National Guardsmen and several were killed. Unrest continued. The United States began looking for ways to get out of the war in any way possible.

Henry Kissinger, a foreign-born adviser to Nixon who essentially ran the Nixon Administration, settled the war in the Paris peace talks in 1972 and 1973 on terms that required the United States to pull out and let Vietnam fall to the communists. A decade later, a memorial was built in D.C. that commemorates those who gave their lives. Some say that the fighting was not in vain, because it slowed down the growth of communism long enough to save the neighboring countries until the Soviet Union itself collapsed.

To avoid a repeat of involvement in a war without a formal declaration of war, as happened in the Vietnam War (and in the Korean War), Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973. It requires that the President obtain the approval of Congress within 60 days of using troops in battle in a foreign conflict.

All legal challenges to the draft failed during the war. However, African American boxer Cassius Clay converted to Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and then refused to be drafted because he did not consider the Vietnam War to be a "holy war." In other words, Ali asserted a "conscientious objection" that is rarely granted to any religious belief except the most established (such as the Amish). "War is against the teachings of the Holy Qur'an. I'm not trying to dodge the draft. We are not supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or The Messenger. We don't take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers," Ali declared in refusing to be drafted. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in Muhammad Ali's favor on a technicality, in an unsigned (per curiam) opinion. The decision did suggest, however, that adherents to Islam may be considered conscientious objectors exempt from the draft: "For the record shows that the petitioner's beliefs are founded on tenets of the Muslim religion as he understands them. They are surely no less religiously based than those of the three registrants before this Court in Seeger," a rare decision in 1965 that upheld a claim of conscientious objection against the draft.

Debate: Should Muhammad Ali have been allowed to avoid the draft?

In 1971, in New York Times v. U.S., the Supreme Court denied President Nixon the power to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers, which was a secret document prepared by the government which had been leaked to the press. It contained an embarrassing study of the American involvement in Vietnam.