It was Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater who said the 1964 election offered Americans "a choice, not an echo." Unfortunately for him, America's choice, overwhelmingly, was his opponent, incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson—and the vast expansion of government power and activism that LBJ represented.
"Few presidents aspired to do more in office than did Lyndon Johnson," writes political scientist Alvin Felzenberg in The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't). "A man of gargantuan appetites and ambitions, Johnson wanted nothing less than to break the record of his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had greatly expanded the role of the federal government in American life. Johnson wanted to pick up where FDR had left off."
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