The Great Society at 50: Lyndon B. Johnson’s cultural vision mirrored his domestic one

The Washington Post: On May 22, 1964, in a University of Michigan graduation speech filled with references to excellence, inspiration and enrichment, Lyndon B. Johnson interspersed the word “beauty” or “beautiful” five times. It was not the first mention of the term “Great Society” — the phrase had been used as the title of a commission report on the humanities five years earlier. But more powerfully than anything Johnson had said before, it connected the quality of American intellectual, aesthetic and artistic life with the basic aspirations of a prosperous, democratic nation.