Word: lyndon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Roosevelt was enormously popular (hence the fourth term), and later administrations have tried to associate themselves with his early success. "Jerk out every damn little bill you can," President Lyndon Johnson reportedly commanded his strategist Larry O'Brien in 1965. "Put out that propaganda ... that [we've] done more than they did in Roosevelt's hundred days." Propaganda or not, Johnson actually had a very effective 100-day run: after being sworn in as Kennedy's sudden and unexpected successor, he advanced the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, established the Warren Commission to investigate J.F.K.'s assassination...
...assessed in a mere 100 days is a journalistic conceit. Most presidencies evolve too slowly to be judged so quickly. Roosevelt set the initial standard in 1933, overpowering Congress and passing a slew of legislation to confront the Great Depression during his first three months in office. "Lyndon Johnson had two 100-days periods," says historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "one after the Kennedy assassination and another after he was elected in 1964." Indeed, Johnson's legislative haul dwarfs anything before or since; he quickly got Congress on track to pass landmark civil rights bills and create Medicare, among other things...
...idea that it's O.K. to be a single mom. I'm not talking about women who lose a husband for one reason or another. We're talking about the idealization of a single mom. I believe that the worst thing the liberals did in this country was the Lyndon Johnson welfare system, which broke up millions of marriages by funneling taxpayers' money solely to the woman. That made the father and husband irrelevant. (See more about gay marriage...
...will occur in the future. But such events, far from home and with few if any independent eyewitnesses, can quickly escalate into more serious confrontations - as in the case of the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" by North Vietnamese patrol boats against a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers that President Lyndon B. Johnson used as a pretext to win congressional support for his war in Vietnam. (See pictures of China's border war with Vietnam...
...fishing together and singing duets. The closeness of their friendship was a significant factor in the eventual signing of NAFTA. But Lester Pearson, Prime Minister in the '60s, delivered a scathing antiwar speech in Washington at the height of the Vietnam War. The next day at the White House, Lyndon Johnson issued a stern reprimand: "You peed on my rug!" Relations between the two never recovered. And Richard Nixon once famously called Pierre Trudeau a "pompous egghead," to which Trudeau replied, "I've been called worse things by better people...