Word: lyndon
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...programs that the elderly are fighting to preserve were created a generation ago, when the reform-minded leaders of the 1960s vowed to protect senior citizens from the shameful destitution that had terrorized earlier generations. At the time that Lyndon Johnson launched his immense rescue mission, the Great Society, more than a quarter of all old people lived below the poverty line. In the popular imagination, being old usually meant a frail and lonely dependency, in which old women lived on cat food in spartan apartments and relied on busy children or social workers for a ride to the doctor...
Some good folks have been stirring on this problem under the guidance of Harvard's Carl Brauer, a student of presidential transitions. He tapped 150 people from the past nine Administrations, Roosevelt to Reagan, to recommend how Presidents should go about getting the right people to serve and stay. Lyndon Johnson's senior appointees hung around only 2.8 years on the average. The Reagan average is down to two years. One-third of all the senior appointees of the past 20 years served a mere 1.5 years or less. Even a casual observer must ask just what they...
...occurred in some other year. The events were significant but not central to the drama. For the essential 1968 was mythic. It proceeded chaotically and yet finally had the coherence and force of tragedy. And if it was the end of some things (of the civil rights movement, of Lyndon Johnson's generous social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement, the environmental movement, the complex reverberant life that the '60s would have in the American mind long after the melodrama was over and those...
...American young from their elders -- and, in equally tragic ways, from one another. The war was the dark hallucination, the black magic that would come and take the young and bear them off to the other side of the world and destroy them, for reasons progressively more obscure. Lyndon Johnson had campaigned for the White House in 1964 by promising that "we are not about to send American boys 10,000 miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves," but he ! ended by treating the war as a crusade for freedom and squandering his presidency...
Sudden, colossal vacancies: Lyndon Johnson capitulated and removed himself from the melodrama. The nation had barely absorbed that event when, five days later, Martin Luther King Jr. leaned over the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in a black neighborhood of Memphis and was hit in the neck by a rifle bullet. He was pronounced dead an hour later...