Medicare and Civil Rights---he was an underrated President---a great man

Great strengths and great weaknesses. About average overall.



 Entropy ain't what it used to be.

His economy was great too.

He wasn't a good president, although, I'll concede, he came along at a very difficult time. This film is a fluff piece.

Escalation of the Vietnam War was only one of his faults.

LBJ's War on Poverty essentially created the welfare state, which has destroyed the African American family unit. Black folks are only now beginning to recover from it, so there's that.

Yes, in hindsight, the Vietnam escalation was a huge mistake. However, I shudder to think what Goldwater would have done.

As for the destabilization of black families, that was as much Nixon's fault as Johnson's. At least Johnson's motivation was altruistic. Nixon was the one that started the "war on drugs" which led to the mass incarceration of young black men.

Then the crack cocaine epidemic during the Reagan administration incarcerated even more blacks, with minimum sentences of 5 years for possessing 5 grams of crack. You had to possess 500 grams of powder cocaine to get 5 years, but powder was the drug of preference for rich whites

Why do you say the war on poverty was a failure? Because there are still poor people? Well, there are a lot of reasons for that. And it's not necessarily the same people that stay poor. Many rise out of poverty thanks to getting some help. Other's fall into poverty because we still have an economic system that concentrates the money into a very few hands.