How We Lost the War on Poverty.

• Author: McClaughry, John

WITH JOHN F. Kennedy's election to the presidency in 1960, Amity Shlaes recounts, Americans developed a growing urge for a "big change that blasted like a space rocket." By 1972, when the smoke from that rocket had somewhat cleared, they had acquainted themselves with the New Frontier, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, two landmark civil rights acts, Medicare, Medicaid, the New Federalism, the "urban disorders" of Watts and Detroit, and the severing of the last feeble tie between the dollar and gold. But it was President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty that gave the era the appellation of "the Great Society."

In Great Society: A New History, Shlaes describes the actors, events, and outcomes of those years. The book is a fast-moving and entertaining read, rich in interesting details and extraordinary in the author's marshalling of the history. Shlaes, an experienced journalist, has a gift for leading the reader through subjects that initially seem only marginally related, tying them together in the service of her narrative.

As one who lived through that era, most of it in Washington, I appreciate how Shlaes has shone her reportorial light into many fascinating corners and upon a marvelous and frequently flawed cast of characters. Besides Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, this cast includes poverty czar Sargent Shriver, his brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy, presidential wordsmith Richard Goodwin, United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther, Fed Chairman Arthur Burns, radical activists Tom Hayden and Michael Harrington, California Gov. Ronald Reagan, Michigan Gov. George Romney, black power leader Nathan Wright Jr., and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (I had encounters with all of them except Shriver.)

The overarching theme of the Great Society was a massive social project announced by Johnson in a 20-minute address at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964. He told the graduates that "far from crushing the individual, government at its best liberates him from the enslaving forces of his environment." His administration, Johnson said, had assembled "the best thought and the broadest knowledge to find answers to society's problems." Those answers would be implemented by a "fighting and aggressive" federal government dedicated to winning a war against poverty and against the "loneliness, estrangement, and isolation" that were its consequences.

"The men around Johnson," Shlaes observes, "felt the weight of this faith in them, and...