In enthralling ‘Great Society,’ LBJ’s victory lap is cut short

Robert Schenkkan’s Tony Award-honored play All the Way ends with President Lyndon Baines Johnson triumphant. He has inspired and demanded, threatened and cajoled Congress to get a landmark civil-rights bill passed. And in his election to the post he inherited in 1963 from his assassinated predecessor, John F. Kennedy, the liberal Johnson has crushed conservative Republican contender Sen. Barry Goldwater. But in The Great Society, the second half of Schenkkan’s panoramic, instructive and generally enthralling LBJ saga (which opened Sunday at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), civil disruptions at home and a war abroad cut short LBJ’s victory lap. And his steep fall from grace after many progressive achievements links to a troubling current dilemma: With entrenched, competing internal and international agendas and tectonic political divisions, is our nation governable? And if so, by what kind of leader? Schenkkan, the Seattle writer who walked away from this year’s Tony Awards with a best-new-play win, embodies that overarching theme in the complex character and momentous single term of one of our most effectual and yet maligned modern presidents.