Few leaders have been granted the ability to generate change long after their tenure of leadership has passed. The leadership approach taken by Lyndon Johnson was instrumental not only in creating the Great Society in the 1960s to combat racial and financial inequality, but also in generating government programs that continue to be a driving force in the 21st century. His plan as the 36th U.S. president was linked to the New Deal ideology of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with goals to aggressively wage a war on the state of poverty and unemployment in a time when the threat against democracy was surging to become one of the world’s most significant political issues of the 20th century.

Lyndon Johnson brought to fruition the final government programs ...