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Eugene
McCarthy dies, aged 89
Former
Senator Eugene McCarthy (Democrat, Minnesota) died November 10, 2005.
McCarthy's surprising success in the 1968 presidential primaries,
running on a stridently anti-Vietnam War platform, helped convince
President Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the 1968 presidential
election.
McCarthy and Johnson
had long sparred on the Vietnam issue. In this February 1966 call,
President Johnson tried to convince McCarthy to tone down his public
attacks. He wanted an end to the war, Johnson said, but "I just can't
be the architect of surrender."
From the LBJ Tapes:
Other resources:
From
the White House to the Supreme Court
On
September 3, 2005, President Bush nominated White House Counsel Harriet
Miers to become Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Over the past
decade, Bush has appointed Ms. Miers to several positions, and at one
point retained her as his personal attorney.
Forty
years ago, President Johnson nominated his longtime attorney and
confidant to replace Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg. Fortas
demurred, but Johnson was not deterred. While he considered several
other candidates, including a number of Republicans, Johnson did not
stop pressuring Fortas and eventually got his man.
From the LBJ Tapes:
Other resources:
Fly
Me to the Moon
On
September 19, 2005, NASA unveiled a program to carry out President
Bush's earlier promise to return to the moon before the end of the next
decade. The announcement comes at a time of intense debate and scrutiny
of federal government spending, especially with large expenditures on
the Iraq War and the redevelopment of the Gulf Coast region in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina.
On May 25,
1961, John F. Kennedy made the bold promise that Americans would go to
the moon before the end of the decade. Acknowledging that his interest
in the space program was fueled more by the political motives,
especially the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, than any
scientific gains, Kennedy struggled to justify the expense of NASA's
Apollo lunar landing program in the context of other needs.
"We've
wrecked our budget on all these other domestic programs," Kennedy
complained in a meeting on November 21, 1962, "and the only
justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion
is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind it
[them], as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them. I think
it would be a helluva thing for us."
From the JFK Tapes:
Prelude to Faith-Based Initiatives?
In
late 2002, President George W. Bush issued an executive order that
expanded federal funding for faith-based social programs. This
presidential action marked a new stage, if perhaps not the conclusion,
of a dispute that has simmered for much of the last decade regarding
the appropriate role of religious organizations in the delivery of
federally supported social services.
The
contemporary debate over the expansion of federal funding for
faithbased social services, however, has proceeded on an assumption
that such initiatives represent a clear break from past patterns of
American social policy. During the debate overthe Economic Opportunity
Act (EOA) of 1964, which formed the legislative cornerstone of the War
on Poverty, President Johnson, his key domestic policy advisers, and
leading members of Congress engaged in an intense series of discussions
and political maneuvers that eventually defined the conditions of
participation for church-affiliated organizations and programs.
From the LBJ Tapes:
LBJ,
Louisiana, and Hurricane Betsy, September 1965
On
the evening of September 9, 1965, Hurricane Betsy came ashore near
Grand Isle, Louisiana, as a Category 4 storm, with the National Weather
Service reporting wind gusts near 160 mph. As the storm tracked inland,
the city of New Orleans was hit with 110 mph winds, a storm surge
around 10 feet, and heavy rain. Betsy devastated low-lying areas on the
eastern side of the city and eventually led to the expansion of an
already impressive levee system to protect a city that lay mostly below
sea-level. After the storm passed, Louisiana Senator Russell Long
called President Johnson to get the President to tour the devastated
areas.
From the LBJ Tapes:
Chief
Justice William Rehnquist
On
September 3, 2005, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died. He had served
for 33 years on the Supreme Court, having been nominated by President
Richard Nixon in late 1971 to fill the vacancy left by the retirement
of John Marshal Harlan, II. Rehnquist had been diagnosed with thyroid
cancer in late 2004.
From the Nixon Tapes:
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