DIARY ENTRIES

Diary Page:
May 27, 1963
President Johnson announced a set of domestic programs in the United States. Although there were many goals, two of the main social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. With the nation still shocked about president Nixon’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson boldly proposed the Great Society. His plan for these social reforms was to form three sets of programs concerning education, the environment, and the cities. He promoted that we should seek both utility and beauty in these areas. As a president, Johnson should’ve focused on the problems at hand, instead of forming a new social and economic reform. The wake of President Kennedy’s assassination was still very large. President Johnson should’ve focused on fixing the problems Kennedy didn’t get a chance to. Although the Great Society could’ve worked and been very beneficial, the time in which it was presented caused it to not work out. The Great Society had a chance at being successful, but unfortunately President Johnson was too driven to push these reforms. Not everyone can agree on one form of government, but many people disagreed with points of The Great Society. Johnson mixed idealistic visions with ideas borrowed from Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism. These ideas formed a type of rule that would not work. With the nation already stressed about losing their president, the last thing they wanted to be worried about were these new ideas of government rule. In conclusion, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was a failed attempt at changing the views of the nation.

June 4, 1963
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but differed sharply in types of programs enacted. Some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. Johnson’s success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democratic landslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938. Anti-war Democrats complained that spending on the Vietnam War choked off the Great Society. While some of the programs have been eliminated or had their funding reduced, many of them, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Older Americans Act and federal education funding, continue to the present. The Great Society’s programs expanded under the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

April 3, 1963
President Lyndon B. Johnson challenged his fellow citizens to build a Great Society based on traditional conceptions of American identity. Johnson’s cultivation of a personal identity as a Texan, rather than a southerner, strengthened his determination to promote the Great Society as an American policy. A disciple of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Johnson targeted civil rights, poverty, education, healthcare, and the general quality of life in the Great Society’s domestic programs. Such massive liberal reforms proved controversial and divisive. Likewise, the Vietnam War, which Johnson often compared to World War II, provoked divisions and questions over America’s true identity and purpose, despite his promotion of the war as an effort to build the Great Society abroad. Those divisions and questions, mirroring the complexities of the 1960s, affect Americans today and burden Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, and the Vietnam War with complex historical legacies.