This administration today, here and now,

declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

Even for Lyndon Johnson, with his outsized great society ambitions,

the war on poverty was a stretch.

Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it, and above all, to prevent it.

Everything about Johnson had to be larger than life.

This is historian Josh Sites.

So Johnson delivers his first State of the Union address,

and he declares an unconditional war on poverty.

Now, this was not a line that was uniformly loved within his White House.

There were members of his administration who thought that this was raising expectations wildly beyond what the government was capable of delivering on.

The doubters had a point. Poverty had been a stubborn fact of American life from the earliest days of the Republic.

Now, here was a new president, barely five weeks in office, vowing to end it for good.

It will not be a short or easy struggle.

No single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won.

50 years later,

LBJ's declaration of war on poverty remains something of a conundrum.

By nearly all accounts,

Lyndon Johnson was the canniest political operator of his time.

And yet, here he was, in an election year, tying his political

fortunes in a very public way to the country's poorest and least powerful citizens. In strictly

political terms, poverty was a losing cause and LBJ knew it. So what drew him to this fight?

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