Beschrijving

THE GREAT SOCIETY — Audiobook · Narrated by Theo Nguyen. Listen time: 5 hours 20 minutes The complete narrative history of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, and the unfinished fight to build a just America, 1963-1969. On the evening of July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the East Room of the White House, handing out seventy-two pens as souvenirs. Afterward, he told an aide that he believed he had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a generation. He signed it anyway. That gesture — triumph shadowed by political reckoning — captures the man and the era this book chronicles. This is the story of how Lyndon Johnson, Sargent Shriver, Lady Bird Johnson, Robert McNamara, Hubert Humphrey, and Martin Luther King Jr. built and then watched fracture the most ambitious domestic legislative program since the New Deal. Across twenty-four chapters in six parts, historian Carol Beatrice Fontaine traces the full arc of the Great Society from Johnson’s oath of office aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963, through his anguished withdrawal from the 1968 race — and forward to Medicare’s sixtieth anniversary, when the program covers sixty-seven million Americans. Inside this Great Society history: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — how Johnson deployed the \