The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)

by Robert A. Caro

Taken as a whole, the bills passed between the beginning of 1964 and the end of 1968 make the Johnson presidency one which saw the legislative realization of many of the noblest aspirations of the liberal spirit in America. Not only the two great civil rights measures but Medicare and Medicaid, and the sixty separate education laws, including the Act that created Head Start—however inadequately thought through and in some cases flawed and contradictory some of these measures might have been, due to the haste with which he pushed them through, they were laws of which liberals had dreamed for decades, laws that embodied government’s responsibility to fulfill what Johnson’s father, the Populist legislator, believed was the highest duty of government: to help people caught in “the tentacles of circumstance.”