The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

By the summer of 1966, it was evident that the two Johnson wars, on poverty and in Vietnam, were set to open up a vast deficit that would make inflation inevitable. Johnson, with his cabinet’s help, bought time with various accounting tricks and falsifications. A year later, McNamara, speaking privately to Tom Wicker of the New York Times, was unrepentant. “Do you really think,” McNamara asked, “that if I had estimated the cost of the war correctly, Congress would have given any more for schools and housing?” Such attitudes clarify the Vietnam War’s relation to the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s agenda. It was the war itself, and not the protests against it, that was the sister movement to the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society.