Transcript: LBJ's Great Society

NARRATOR: It was a legislative avalanche. No president had ever put so many bills before Congress. Funds for education, elementary, secondary and college, and, for preschool children, Head Start; funds for conservation, clean air and clean rivers, national parks; funds for consumer protection, truth in labeling and packaging, automobile safety. There was urban renewal and housing, public television, the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts. The list goes on and on.

LYNDON JOHNSON: I have had butone objective-- to be the president of all the people; not just the rich, not just the well-fed, not just the fortunate, but president of all of America.

R. SARGENT SHRIVER: You could see the great progress which was being made for poor people. The transformation of young men and women who were in the Upward Bound program-- you could see them going to universities when they never had anybody in their family ever went to a college in their whole life. You could see that. You could see what was happening to the mothers-- not just to the children, but to the mothers of the children in the Head Start program.You had mothers who were illiterate and never been to school suddenly starting to learn themselves because they were learning simultaneously with their child who was in Head Start. I want economic opportunity to be spread across this land--north, south, east and west, to all people, whatever their race, whatever their work, wherever they live.

REBECCA DOGGETT: Certainly this was a great opportunity for minorities, for women. I very early had an opportunity to become an administrator of a very large corporation, a multimillion-dollar corporation, which, of course, was really unique in those days. We were young, we were gifted, we were black, and we saw national will and there was certainly this local energy of people who wanted to make a change in their lives. And it came together all at the same time.

NARRATOR: The president never asked for a declaration of war, but on July 28, 1965, Lyndon Johnson went to war in Vietnam. He kept the risks and costs of war hidden from the American people. He never told them he'd been warned that hundreds of thousands of soldiers might be needed.

LARRY BERMAN: He doesn't tell the American people what's really going on because he fears that's the end of the Great Society. That's the end of the one thing he cares about more than anything.

NARRATOR: Just two days after his decision to commit America to a land war in Asia, he traveled to Independence, Missouri and signed into law Medicare. Johnson continued to pass legislation. Only the president knew that his Great Society was in jeopardy. He hid the costs of the war from Congress and signed more bills.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: The bombs in Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America. It is estimated that we spend $322,000 for each enemy we kill in Vietnam while we spend, in the so-called War on Poverty in America, only about $53 for each person classified as poor.The country began to get out of control, and President Johnson was no longer in control of the Congress. The economy was creating problems for him, the war in Vietnam was being lost.

NARRATOR: By 1966, hundreds of thousands of Americans were in Vietnam. Thousands were dead. Johnson's dream of a Great Society was in danger... and the end was nowhere in sight.