I shall not see and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

By the time he called it quits in March 68, Lyndon Johnson was a broken man.

Sick, isolated, and defeated by a war he didn't start and couldn't end. I can't get out. I just can't be the architect of surrender.

50 years on, it's Vietnam that Johnson is most remembered for.

Hey, LBJ, only gets you killed today.

But here's the thing.

Before he lost his way and came to grief in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson had a

legislative run that altered the American political landscape more profoundly and with more enduring

consequence than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a world without Medicaid, without Medicare, without a voting rights act, without a civil rights act.

Imagine a world without head start.

The Johnson administration's domestic policy legacy is one of the most underappreciated stories in modern American history.

Now, just to be clear, LBJ's Great Society had and still has its detractors.

People who believe his big government programs did more harm than good.

The war on poverty didn't work. The great society didn't work.

But my former boss thought otherwise.

Half a century later, the laws LBJ passed are now as fundamental to our conception of ourselves

and our democracy as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I'm Melody Barnes.

As President Obama's Director of Domestic Policy, I saw just how difficult it is to move the

needle on anything of real importance.

My White House experience left me with an itch to understand who Lyndon Johnson was,

...