WITH JOHN F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960, Amity Shlaes recounts, Americans developed a growing urge for a “big change that blasted like a space rocket.” By 1972, when the smoke from that rocket had somewhat cleared, they had acquainted themselves with the New Frontier, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, two landmark civil rights acts, Medicare, Medicaid, the New Federalism, the “urban disorders” of Watts and Detroit, and the severing of the last feeble tie between the dollar and gold. But it was President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that gave the era the appellation of “the Great Society.”
In Great Society: A New History, Shlaes describes the actors, events, and outcomes of those years. The book is a fast-moving and entertaining read, rich in interesting details…
