"Johnson ran as the peace candidate in 1964, promising to get us out of Vietnam or at least to stop any escalation of American involvement there. The opposite happened. Johnson promised that Medicare would be efficiently run and financially self-sustaining. The opposite happened. Johnson said that his Great Society programs would usher in a new kind of America, one in which government-directed investments in anti-poverty campaigns and educational projects would not only lift up the poor but would, by helping them to maximize their own economic value, lift the entire country, too. The opposite, or something close to it, happened there, too. Johnson, who in Congress had opposed not only a great deal of civil-rights legislation but even anti-lynching bills, would in 1964 reinvent himself as a civil-rights champion. It is pleasant to think that, in whatever afterlife he finds himself in, he is both amused and pleased to see himself politically reincarnated as a black man."
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Presidents of the United StatesPoliticians from TexasMembers of the United States SenateUnited States presidential candidates, 1968United States presidential candidates, 1964
Original Language: English
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Sources
Kevin D. Williamson in Obama’s Last Report Card (1 January 2017)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson
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