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"For half a century," he said then, "we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all. The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization." He called upon the graduating class to move "not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society," and he listed three places where they could begin to -"in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms."
If anything is to have a priority, it is the classrooms. Johnson's mother was a teacher and he himself taught grade school for a year in Cotulla, Texas, to help pay his way through Southwest Texas State Teachers College, later taught public speaking in high school. He says he would like to be remembered as a great President who has really furthered the cause of U.S. education.
"The Great Society already is born," said he recently. "It's not a long way off. But it's got to be improved as we go along. The big job is education."
Getting Things Done. Above all else, Johnson believes that the surest way to move forward is one step at a time, achieving agreement at every step along the way, pausing to consolidate, then stepping out once more. It sounds dull, but it minimizes conflict and it gets things done, and as Dean Acheson once said of Johnson: "He understands that government is not a matter of posturing but of getting things done."
Once, when scolded by an unhappy supporter for not reshaping the country fast enough, Thomas Jefferson offered a well-reasoned rejoinder. "When we reflect how difficult it is to move or to infect the great machine of society," he wrote, "we see the wisdom of Solon's remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear."
The 36th President of the U.S. has reached much the same conclusion.
"Let's keep our eyes on the stars," he once said, "and do the possible."
*Tennessean Andrew Johnson never was elected in his own right; Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson left the South at 26; Texas-born Ike, as a career soldier, never really had a home, but gave Kansas as his address.