Review:
Irwin Unger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, suggests in The Best of Intentions that you think of the Great Society the next time you fasten a seat belt, visit a national park, or switch on "All Things Considered." Unger notes that while the sweeping social reforms begun under the Kennedy administration have been seen primarily as benefiting the poor---as the recent debates on welfare have made clear---much of the so-called Great Society initiative was in fact intended for the advantage of the middle class. Under the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, he writes, the talents of government were put to solving social problems and to establishing what Johnson called "a creative federalism between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities." These programs reflected a post-scarcity sensibility, the idea that within the vast riches of America lay the possibility that each citizen could have an equitable share, and Unger points to some unlikely heroes in the campaign to make them a reality---among them the since-discredited legislator Wilbur Mills, who shepherded Medicare through Congress, and Nixon himself, who took time during Watergate to sponsor a series of far-reaching environmental and social initiatives. At a time when the last vestiges of Great Society federalism are under siege in Washington, this well-written book is of special interest.
From Booklist:
Unger reminds us that to assess Lyndon Baines Johnson's legacy justly, we must remember not only Vietnam but also his other war: the War on Poverty through which he hoped to forge a Great Society. Unger chronicles the way a confident and poised LBJ reassured a stunned and mourning people and then rallied them in support of a progressive social agenda more daring than anything since the New Deal. But when former supporters turned against him because of his policy in Vietnam, Johnson evolved into a new personality. Unger deftly probes this new personality, identifying the self-doubts and paranoia that prompted LBJ's surprise decision not to run for reelection. With the same deftness, Unger scrutinizes LBJ's baffling successor, Richard Nixon, who relied on conservative rhetoric as a candidate but metamorphosed into a pragmatist in office and so left most of the Great Society programs intact. But because neither Nixon nor any of his successors have renewed the political vision LBJ articulated in promoting the Great Society, its merely bureaucratic machinery, still grinding, has yielded many unintended and costly outcomes. Sympathetic to its objectives but mindful of its unresolved contradictions, Unger summons us to a necessary reconsideration of how LBJ's unfinished Great Society defines our current perplexities. Bryce Christensen
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