A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson's vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country.

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished.

Just when you think this war has taken everything you loved, you meet someone and realize that somehow you still have more to give.

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer?" You know the answer, of course.

Registration is a World War II response, and we need a 1980 solution.