1960s Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society

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 among the southern Democrats (in particular) to passing the Equal Rights Act originally envisioned by JFK; and (2) his self-coined "unconditional war on poverty" (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger & Argersinger, 2005, 340).

To achieve victory in the war on poverty, Johnson established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which oversaw and funded numerous Community Action Agencies and Jobs Corps, and Peace Corps; by the end of his administration on 1968, such agencies numbered more than 500 and fulfilled the core elements of Johnson's Great Society by improving the lives of many millions of Americans lifted from poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger & Argersinger, 2005, 340).

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 of the United States. Specifically, Johnson and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara made the fateful decision to escalate the nation's involvement in South Vietnam and orchestrated arguably deceitful and false excuses for doing so in connection with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964 (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger & Argersinger, 2005, 342).

Ironically, given Johnson's commitment to democratic ideals, he allowed the U.S. To become embroiled on behalf of a corrupt South Vietnamese government.