THE GREAT SOCIETY
Lyndon Johnson and the War on Poverty, 1963-1969By Carol Beatrice Fontaine
Length6h 23m
About this audiobook
The complete narrative history of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society — Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, and the unfinished fight to build a just America, 1963-1969.
On the evening of July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the East Room of the White House, handing out seventy-two pens as souvenirs. Afterward, he told an aide that he believed he had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a generation. He signed it anyway. That gesture — triumph shadowed by political reckoning — captures the man and the era this book chronicles.
This is the story of how Lyndon Johnson, Sargent Shriver, Lady Bird Johnson, Robert McNamara, Hubert Humphrey, and Martin Luther King Jr. built and then watched fracture the most ambitious domestic legislative program since the New Deal. Across twenty-four chapters in six parts, historian Carol Beatrice Fontaine traces the full arc of the Great Society from Johnson's oath of office aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963, through his anguished withdrawal from the 1968 race — and forward to Medicare's sixtieth anniversary, when the program covers sixty-seven million Americans.
Inside this Great Society history:
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — how Johnson deployed the "Johnson Treatment" and a sixty-day Senate filibuster to pass the most sweeping civil rights law since Reconstruction, knowing it would cost his party the South (Chapter 3)
• Medicare and Medicaid — Johnson's trip to Independence, Missouri to enroll Harry Truman as Medicare's first beneficiary, and the AMA's record starring Ronald Reagan that tried and failed to stop him (Chapter 5)
• The War on Poverty — Sargent Shriver's OEO, Head Start classrooms, and the memory of Cotulla, Texas, where a young LBJ taught hungry Mexican American children whose faces drove every poverty program he signed (Chapter 9)
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 — Selma, the Pettus Bridge, and the legislative response that transformed Black voter registration across the South within a single election cycle (Chapter 6)
• The Urban Rebellions — Watts, Newark, and Detroit; the Kerner Commission's verdict that America was dividing into two societies; and the long hot summer that consumed Johnson's domestic coalition (Chapters 14-15)
• Vietnam's fatal intrusion — the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the sixteen thousand advisors Johnson inherited from Kennedy, and the war that destroyed the presidency that built the Great Society (Chapter 13)
• The honest reckoning — Reagan's assault, the survival of Medicare's core constituency, and why sixty years of conservative politics has not undone what Johnson built in 1965 (Chapters 22-23)
The Great Society left behind institutions that still govern American life — the Medicare card in every senior's wallet, the Head Start classroom in every state, the civil rights enforcement framework that protects millions. It also left behind the question Johnson asked himself in Cotulla: can democratic government make real the promise of equal opportunity, or does inequality always reconstitute itself? His answer was partial. The argument continues.
For readers of Robert Caro's THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON and Doris Kearns Goodwin's LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE AMERICAN DREAM.
Audiobook details
GenreBiography and Memoir, Other
Length6 hrs 23 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJun 2, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Prologue: All We Have Inherited
3PART ONE: LBJ'S AMERICA (1963-1964)
4Chapter 1: From the Hill Country — Lyndon Johnson's Texas Roots and Political Rise
5Chapter 2: November 22, 1963 — Johnson Takes the Oath
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6Chapter 3: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — Johnson's First Great Achievement
7Chapter 4: The Election of 1964 — The Landslide and Its Mandate
8PART TWO: BUILDING THE GREAT SOCIETY (1965)
9Chapter 5: Medicare and Medicaid — Health Care for the Elderly and the Poor
10Chapter 6: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 — Selma and the Legislative Response
11Chapter 7: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act — Federal Aid to Schools
12Chapter 8: Immigration Reform — The Hart-Celler Act and Its Consequences
13PART THREE: THE GREAT SOCIETY IN FULL (1965-1968)
14Chapter 9: The War on Poverty — OEO, Head Start, and Community Action
15Chapter 10: Public Housing and Urban Renewal — The Cities and Federal Intervention
16Chapter 11: Environmental Legislation — Clean Air, Clean Water, and Wilderness
17Chapter 12: Arts and Culture — the NEA, NEH, and Public Broadcasting
18PART FOUR: THE WARS — FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
19Chapter 13: Vietnam Intrudes — The Gulf of Tonkin and Escalation
20Chapter 14: The Urban Rebellions — Watts, Newark, Detroit, and the Long Hot Summer
21Chapter 15: The Kerner Commission — Race, Poverty, and American Cities
22Chapter 16: 1968 — The Year That Broke Lyndon Johnson
23PART FIVE: THE GREAT SOCIETY'S PEOPLE
24Chapter 17: Sargent Shriver — The War on Poverty's General
25Chapter 18: Robert McNamara — The Defense Secretary and the Vietnam Trap
26Chapter 19: Lady Bird Johnson — Conservation, Beautification, and First Lady Power
27Chapter 20: The Reformers — Social Scientists, Activists, and the Great Society's Staff
28PART SIX: LEGACIES
29Chapter 21: What the Great Society Achieved — Poverty, Health, and Education
30Chapter 22: The Conservative Backlash — Reagan and the Assault on the Great Society
31Chapter 23: Medicare at Sixty — Health Care and the Great Society's Longest Legacy
32Chapter 24: Lyndon Johnson's Place in History — Tragedy, Greatness, and Vietnam
33Epilogue: The Unfinished War
34Acknowledgments
35Selected Bibliography
36About the Author
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