The Vietnam War Impacted President Johnson’s Realization

of the Great Society

Nancy Merriman, Mike Barrett, and Michele Brigham

Topic

• The Great Society was the greatest domestic program since the New Deal. Johnson was desperate to be remembered for the work he did for the poor. Johnson and many of his sympathizers believed that the Vietnam War high -jacked his program and eventually forced Johnson from office.

Questions

• What do you see? (Close Reading)• What words do you notice? (Close Reading)• Who are the people? (Close Reading)• Who is the author? (Sourcing)• What is his point of view? (Sourcing)• Who is the audience? (Contextualizing)• When was the cartoon drawn? (Contextualizing)• What else is going on at this time?

(Contextualizing)

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

http://www.choices.edu/resources/documents/TAH_race4_1.pdf

Questions

• What words do you notice? (Close Reading)• What is the tone? (Close Reading)• What kind of document is this? (Sourcing)• Who is the author? (Sourcing)• Why was it written? (Contextualizing)• Who is the audience? (Contextualizing)

Corroborating Questions

• What viewpoints do these documents reflect?

• What can you know about this topic given these two documents?

Description of the Activity

• A transition from the discussion of the programs of the Great Society and the involvement and escalation of the war in Vietnam. We would use this after instruction on the Great Society as a warm-up leading into lessons on Vietnam.