What a President Needs: Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society

On the first day of this conference, Julian E. Zelizer of Princeton University will discuss his book, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. Between November 1963, when he became president, and November 1966, when his party was routed in the midterm elections, Lyndon Johnson spearheaded the most transformative agenda in American politics since the New Deal. In just three years, he drove the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the War on Poverty, and Medicare and Medicaid, among a raft of other progressive initiatives. Dubbed the Great Society, it was an agenda whose ambition and achievement have never been matched, and it remains largely intact fifty years on.

Zelizer provides unprecedented insight into the battles that raged inside Congress and the administration, and examines the often bitterly divided forces at play in the country—from religious groups and civil rights activists to labor unions and the media—during the tumultuous years when our political sights were set on the ideal of a Great Society.

Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a fellow at New America.

The Center for Presidential History: http://www.smu.edu/CPH

This recording is the property of the SMU Center for Presidential History and may only be used for research and teaching purposes. It cannot be copied or reproduced for profit. © 2016

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