August 11, 2006

LBJ's Waning and Waxing Reputation

By MICHAEL NELSON

The presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson marked a sharp turn in the history of presidential scholarship. From FDR's New Deal 1930s until the mid-1960s, when the Johnson administration's main story line shifted from civil rights and the Great Society to its deepening and disastrous prosecution of the war in Vietnam, historians and political scientists had grown comfortable with the idea that the presidency was a powerful, benign force in American society. As Thomas E. Cronin concluded after