Mr. Richard Goodwin’s attempt a couple of weeks ago to explain the meaning of The Great Society deserves more attention than it has gotten because indeed it was, as the New York Times said, “the most sophisticated and revealing commentary to date.”
Mr. Goodwin is the bright young thing inherited by President Johnson from President Kennedy. He rose to prominence from the ashes of the Bay of Pigs as an expert, nobody knew exactly why, in Latin American affairs. It is he who reputedly conceived the idea of the Alliance for Progress, and who paused at a meeting of the Organization of American States in 1961 at Punta del Este to chat with Che Guevara, causing the eyebrows to lift in all the chancelleries of the world. He could get away with that kind of thing because he is very young, and his brashness is one of his most engaging weapons. At one point he is said to have overdone it with JFK, who put him in the deep freeze, whence he emerged, leaving Latin America to Thomas Mann, as big-thinker for Lyndon Johnson.
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