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Turmoil, Hubris, and Hope: Recent Retrospectives on the Great SocietyREFORMERS TO RADICALS: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty. By Thomas Kiffmeyer. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 2008.BLOODY LOWNDES: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt. By Hasan Kwame Jeffries. New York: New York University Press. 2009.THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION: How 1965 Transformed America. By James T. Patterson. New York: Basic Books. 2012.BENDING TOWARD JUSTICE: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. By Gary May. New York: Basic Books. 2013.THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. By Julian E. Zelizer. New York: Penguin Press. 2015.The current round of fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the events of the 1960s are a reminder that the American civic conversation is still framed in Great Society terms. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society effort-comprised of nearly two hundred major domestic measures during his five years in office-restructured policy in the areas of health, education, immigration, urban governance, mass transit, public housing, and the stewardship of natural and cultural resources, in addition to epochal civil rights reforms. Whether viewed as the point at which the American experience veered off course or as a moment when the nation renewed its commitment to equality and civic excellence, the Johnson years identified goals and launched programs that remain at the center of domestic policy arguments. We delve into the Great Society record in hopes of understanding what produced the Sixties' great burst of political creativity and what led it to fade and also to seek a basis for judging the value of the effort. The five works reviewed here inquire after the social and political conditions that made enactment of the Great Society program possible and, ultimately, led the policymaking enthusiasm to subside. They explore the intertwined roles of activism at the grassroots and in Washington, first in facilitating the passage of the landmark legislation of those years (paying particular attention to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965), and then in working out its implementation in American communities.James T. Patterson's The Eve of Destruction reminds readers of the tumult of 1965, the year in which the Eighty-Ninth Congress convened and Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society in earnest. The year opened with the fulsome promises of LBJ's first State of the Union address as president in his own right. It was darkened by the February launch of Operation Rolling Thunder (the U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnam), the first landing of U.S. Marine combat forces at Da Nang in March, and the fateful decision to escalate American involvement in the Asian ground war in July. The year saw the assassination of Malcolm X in February, the mauling of civil rights activists in Selma the next month, and the explosion of Watts in August. Yet the same year also witnessed federal legislative achievement of a magnitude not seen since the heyday of the New Deal, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, passage of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education (ESEA) and Voting Rights (VRA) acts, and enactment of fundamental immigration reform.Patterson describes 1964 as "a buoyant time . . . a prosperous year that promoted extraordinarily high expectations about the future" (1). They were "the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born" in Johnson's own illadvised Christmas 1964 phrasing (ix). Against this rosy background, Patterson sees 1965 as a "hinge" year, the year "when America's social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called 'the Sixties' broke into view" (xi). What evaporated over those twelve months was, essentially, that broad public consensus on American goals at home and abroad which is the condition precedent for national policymaking. …