President Lyndon B. Johnson

Johnson, trying to address the social inequality and economic problems of the poor and chronocally unemployed, created THE GREAT SOCIETY. He got the congress to pour Billions of Dollars into social welfare programs to make life easier and many cases sustainable, for the poor. His intentions were good but the program actualy created a, more or less, permanent underclass of welfare recipients which was perp[etuated from generation to generation.

Rather than promoting work and education the programs simply paid people to stay at home, have babies and take tax money.

Johnson was, apparently, unfamiliar with the old saying that If you give a man a fish he will have something to eat but if you teach a man to fish he will be able to feed himself forever.

It was not until the 1990's that Congress faced the failures of the welfare system and started to replace welfare with work training, etc.

Johnson found himself involved in the Vietnam War in which Kennedy had involved us. Johnson brought Robert McNamara ( former head of Ford Motors) aboard as Secretary of Defense and Dean Rusk as Sec'y of State and these guys decided to micromanage the war from Washington. Their decisions and instruction were disasters

for the military and they, in order to make the war more palatable to the citizenry, kept emphasizing body count, the

number of menemy dead, and they prevented the Generals from handling the war as they wanted.

It was so badly mishandled by Johnson and his Cabinet that we , eventually, had to pull out of Vietnam with a perceived defeat when actually we had just about defeated the enemy militarily. The Vietnam War sharply divided the US people and was really the beginning of the uncivil manner in which we practice politics today. It created an angry divide between the left and the right and that divide still exists.