Great Society Launched: Johnson Fights Poverty

Lyndon Johnson stood before Congress on January 4, 1965, and turned the phrase "Great Society" from campaign rhetoric into a governing agenda. He had first used the term at Ohio University eight months earlier, but on this night, riding a landslide election victory that gave Democrats their largest House majority since 1938, he laid out the most ambitious domestic program since Franklin Roosevelt''s New Deal. What followed was a legislative blitz without parallel in American history. In 1965 alone, Congress passed Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Higher Education Act, and the establishment of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Johnson had served in the Senate for twelve years before becoming vice president. He knew every procedural trick, every pressure point, every vulnerable committee chairman. His former colleagues learned to dread his phone calls. Johnson understood he had a narrow window. The 1964 landslide had brought dozens of liberal freshmen into Congress, many from districts that would revert to Republican control in the next cycle. His chief of staff later recalled Johnson making 85 phone calls in a single evening, cajoling, threatening, and trading favors with the methodical intensity of a man who knew the clock was running. Many of these programs had originated in John F. Kennedy''s unfinished New Frontier agenda, but Kennedy had lacked both Johnson''s legislative skills and his overwhelming congressional majority. Vietnam eventually consumed the presidency. Anti-war Democrats complained that military spending starved domestic programs. Johnson chose not to run for reelection in 1968. But Medicare now covers over 65 million Americans. Medicaid covers 90 million more. Federal education funding transformed schools nationwide. The window Johnson saw on January 4, 1965, lasted roughly eighteen months. He ran through it at full speed.