Even later, as Johnson made his decision to have both the Great Society and the war, the war for the conservatives, the Great Society for the liberals, he would be giving the latter something that much of the American liberal intellectual community was no longer interested in; indeed, as Gene McCarthy noted in 1968 after he made his challenge against Johnson, “he keeps going to them with the list of bills he’s passed—the laundry list, and he doesn’t know that they aren’t interested any more.”
