Review: The Choices We Face

The Choices We Face by Lyndon B. Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

LBJ seems to me to have two goals in this post-presidency missive

(1) justify the Vietnam war suggest as by showing Domino Theory effects in Laos, etc. and
(2) promote his progressive approach to America life Medicare and other benefits. Here is one key point he has to argue on how the immense wealth of this nation did not sufficiently find its way to those that need it the most:

After the Civil War our growth in wealth and power was simply fantastic. The world had seen nothing like it before. Between Appomattox and the turn of the century, we hewed out of the wilderness enough new farms to fill twice the combined areas of Britain and France. We transformed ourselves from a minor industrial power into one that could produce in 1900 twenty times as much steel as the entire world had produced thirty years before.

If our development in those days could be likened to a prairie fire of growth, it has in the present century taken on aspects of an explosion of growth. Barbara Ward, the British commentator and economist, noted that in the four years of World War II "the Americans built on top of their old economy another one of almost equivalent size." And in the quarter century that followed, we built on top of that old economy another twice as big again.

We have created a prosperity that no people before us have known, but two facts mar it.

One is that our phenomenal progress brought its own problems, and we did not pay enough attention to them while they were developing.

Perhaps the clearest case of neglect and delay was in our response to the tremendous migration of rural Americans many of them Negroes to the cities, beginning in the 1940s. In the 1950s alone, nearly ten million people made that move. Many lacked the skills that city life requires. They thought they were moving from hopelessness and discrimination to prosperity...

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