The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society

by Julian E. Zelizer,
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 18, 2015

A few months after he became president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson told Bill Moyers, his speech writer and adviser, that he had precious little time to enact his legislative agenda. “In an ideal world,” Mr. Johnson explained, a president would have two, four-year terms. “I won’t make it that far, of course, so let’s assume we have to do it all in 1965 and 1966, and probably in 1966 we’ll lose our big margin in Congress. That means in 1967 and 1968 there will be a hell of a fight.”