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1960s Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society Essay

Successes and Failures of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society Plan Successes of President Johnson's Great Society Concept

President Lyndon B. Johnson's political beginnings coincided with FDR's New Deal in the 1930s, and in many respects, its principles and goals were more a part of his lifelong political agenda than they had been his predecessor's, President John F. Kennedy (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger & Argersinger, 2005, 339). Therefore, when Johnson assumed the presidency after Kennedy's tragic assassination in Dallas, Texas in 1963, he immediately set about implementing a very aggressive domestic political agenda whose focus was to improve life for as many Americans as possible, mainly through better educational opportunities, health care availability and affordability, fairness in taxation, and improvement in urban affairs on a national level (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger & Argersinger, 2005, 340).

One of the most essential components of Johnson's vision of a Great Society was one in which all people were treated equally and in which the opportunity to live well and prosper were equally available to all, particularly in relation to racial equality. Perhaps Johnson's two greatest successes in that regard was (1) his masterful use of political maneuvering and pressure tactics by which he finally overcame the longstanding conservative resistance...

Some of the other most notable successes of Johnson's Great Society concept included the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs under the Medical Care Act, and the Appalachian regional Development Act that provided badly-needed economic assistance to one-dozen states from Georgia to New York (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger & Argersinger, 2005, 342).
Failures of President Johnson's Great Society Concept

By far, the greatest failure of Johnson's Great Society concept was the manner in which his decisions and those of his executive staff eroded respect for the office of the President…

Sources used in this document:
Goldfield, D., Abbot, C., Argersinger, J. And Argersinger, P. Twentieth-Century

America: A Social and Political History. 2005. New Jersey: Pearson-Prentice

Hall.
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