The Fierce Urgency of Now

Julian E. Zelizer has established himself as one of the most prominent public interpreters of American political history. In this new book he addresses Americans' appetite for “great man” history with a corrective to the broad public understanding of the nature of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society—and to the public's expectations of contemporary presidents and their ability to bring about significant political change. Writing into a mass market dominated by Robert Caro's and Robert Dallek's multivolume biographies of Johnson, the thrust of Zelizer's book is that without denying Johnson's understanding of the machinery of Congress and his extraordinary ability to manipulate individuals and procedures to advance his goals, none of that would have mattered without two critical but short-lived conditions: the mass mobilization and moral clarity of the civil rights movement, peaking in 1964, and the bumper crop of Democratic liberals (and cowed conservatives) in Congress in the wake of Johnson's rout of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Both of these factors made possible advances that had stymied Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and even LBJ. Absent these conditions, no amount of “the Treatment”—LBJ's physical and political coaxing and intimidation of his allies and enemies—would have moved the needle on legislation such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With pressure from the streets, from churches, and from polls showing voters horrified by televised violence in the South; with the assiduous lobbying of organized labor and of Clarence Mitchell and the Leadership Council on Civil Rights; and with a growing number of congressional liberals, LBJ and his allies were able to overcome the procedural hurdles that had kept civil rights and other progressive legislation bottled up in Congress. That condition did not last; while the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Medicare and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed in that window, it closed, for the most part, after white backlash against urban unrest reinvigorated the conservative coalition after 1966, and after the Vietnam War eroded Johnson's ability to push for broad domestic programs

Battle · Democracy · Legislation · Mass mobilization · Political science · Politics · Politics of the United States · Presidential system · Public opinion · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society