The Best of Intentions

Publishers Weekly - Cahners\\Publishers_Weekly

Highly relevant to today's debate over Newt Gingrich's 'Contract with America,' Unger's incisive reassessment of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs helps explain why the middle class lost faith in the campaign to rescue the poor. A Pulitzer- winning historian at New York University, Unger believes that President Kennedy's New Frontier masked a weak commitment to domestic reform, and he considers JFK's record barren compared with Johnson's pivotal legislation creating Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the war on poverty and other programs. But black-militant excesses, misspending, pork-barrel projects and a perceived lack of results alienated the middle class, in Unger's analysis. He portrays Nixon as a bigot who considered the Great Society a payoff to blacks and Hispanics but who nevertheless was unable to dismantle it. In Unger's estimation, the Great Society's antipoverty drive largely failed as LBJ envisioned it-as a means of creating opportunity-but he emphasizes that insufficient funding of education, antipoverty and other programs may have been responsible for its poor results.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Highly relevant to today's debate over Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," Unger's incisive reassessment of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs helps explain why the middle class lost faith in the campaign to rescue the poor. A Pulitzer- winning historian at New York University, Unger believes that President Kennedy's New Frontier masked a weak commitment to domestic reform, and he considers JFK's record barren compared with Johnson's pivotal legislation creating Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the war on poverty and other programs. But black-militant excesses, misspending, pork-barrel projects and a perceived lack of results alienated the middle class, in Unger's analysis. He portrays Nixon as a bigot who considered the Great Society a payoff to blacks and Hispanics but who nevertheless was unable to dismantle it. In Unger's estimation, the Great Society's antipoverty drive largely failed as LBJ envisioned it-as a means of creating opportunity-but he emphasizes that insufficient funding of education, antipoverty and other programs may have been responsible for its poor results. (Apr.)

Library Journal

In Turning Point: 1968 (LJ 10/15/88), Unger focused on how the significant events of one year, such as the Civil Rights movement, student demonstrations, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War, affected American society. Here he examines the "Great Society" programs of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including the Economic Opportunity Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Head Start, Job Corps, Medicare, and VISTA, among others. Most of the enabling legislation was passed in the first session of the 89th Congress (1965). While conservative critics tend to see such federal programs as misguided and/or as financial burdens that should be ended, Unger looks at the positive motivations and intentions of those involved in setting them up and at some of the by-products we enjoy today, such as safer automobiles. The details of legislative history make for tedious reading, but Unger's academic thoroughness will help anyone understand this interesting period in American history. Charles A. Murray's Losing Ground (LJ 10/1/84) offers a conservative critique of the same period. Recommended for academic libraries.-Gary D. Barber, SUNY at Fredonia Lib.

Bryce Christensen

Unger reminds us that to assess Lyndon Baines Johnson's legacy justly, we must remember not only Vietnam but also his "other" war: the War on Poverty through which he hoped to forge a Great Society. Unger chronicles the way a confident and poised LBJ reassured a stunned and mourning people and then rallied them in support of a progressive social agenda more daring than anything since the New Deal. But when former supporters turned against him because of his policy in Vietnam, Johnson evolved into a new personality. Unger deftly probes this new personality, identifying the self-doubts and paranoia that prompted LBJ's surprise decision not to run for reelection. With the same deftness, Unger scrutinizes LBJ's baffling successor, Richard Nixon, who relied on conservative rhetoric as a candidate but metamorphosed into a pragmatist in office and so left most of the Great Society programs intact. But because neither Nixon nor any of his successors have renewed the political vision LBJ articulated in promoting the Great Society, its merely bureaucratic machinery, still grinding, has yielded many unintended and costly outcomes. Sympathetic to its objectives but mindful of its unresolved contradictions, Unger summons us to a necessary reconsideration of how LBJ's unfinished Great Society defines our current perplexities.