A president who inherits the office by tragedy and then wins it back by the largest popular-vote landslide in a century uses the mandate to declare “unconditional war on poverty” — building Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, and a sprawling new federal anti-poverty bureaucracy almost from scratch, only to watch Vietnam’s cost crowd out his own vision and his successor spend years trying to dismantle what was left of it. (The same years’ landmark civil-rights legislation is covered in full in this archive’s Free at Last volume.)