![]() And some historians have argued that in this realm as well, LBJ indeed pursued a course that JFK had already plotted. On foreign policy, too, Johnson at first strove consciously to follow his predecessor. ![]() The details might have been different-and Kennedy might well have had more trouble than Johnson passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965-but historians generally agree that if Kennedy had lived out his first term and won a second, America would have witnessed something similar to the early years of Johnson's Great Society. Similarly, many of the things that Johnson pushed through Congress in his first two years as President-such as an $11 billion tax cut, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the 1965 laws that brought Medicare and Medicaid into existence and that poured billions of federal dollars into primary and secondary education-can readily be seen as extensions of the avowed policies of the Kennedy Administration. Not long before his death Kennedy had scrawled the word "poverty" on a piece of paper and circled it multiple times this note fell into the hands of his brother Robert and became a symbolic justification for Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty, early in 1964. ![]() ![]() Kennedy, in November of 1963, he knew that in order to accrue political capital he would initially need to champion goals and policies that Kennedy had already been pursuing. When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency, after the assassination of John F. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |