Forum Network

Gioia served as the chairman of the NEA from 2003 to 2009 where he helped create the largest programs in the agency's history. He also led the US cultural delegation to UNESCO. He is the author of numerous books, including Interrogations at Noon (2002), which won the American Book Award in poetry, and Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was short listed for the National Book Critics Circle Prize. A translator and opera librettist, Gioia has also edited over two dozen literary anthologies. Before becoming a full time writer in 1992, Gioia worked for 15 years in the corporate world as vice president of Marketing for Kraft General Foods, while continuing to write during nights and weekends. He has been a visiting writer at Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Colorado College, Wesleyan, and other universities, and has also been an American cultural commentator for BBC Radio. He served on numerous boards and has 10 honorary doctorates.

Dr. Philip A. Cunningham is professor of Catholic-Jewish Relations and director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations of Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, PA. He also serves as a member of the Advisory Committee on Catholic-Jewish Relations for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, secretary-treasurer of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, and a vice-president of the International Council of Christians and Jews. Interested in biblical studies, religious education, and theologies of Christian-Jewish relations, he is the author of numerous book and articles on these subjects. Dr. Cunningham is also the North American coordinator of the Christ and the Jewish People consultation, an international collaboration among five Catholic universities to explore a key theological question concerning the church's relationship to Judaism.

Formerly a professor of government at Harvard University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Hugh Heclo is a recognized expert on American democratic institutions as well as the international development of modern welfare states. He has received national awards for his books including *Comparative Public Policy*, *A Government of Strangers*, and *Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden*. Professor Heclo is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Hugh Heclo is senior editor and contributor to the 2003 volume, *Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America* and a member of the Scholar's Council advising the Librarian of Congress. In 2002 he received the American Political Science Association's John Gaus lifetime achievement award honoring exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University. Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts. Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall Prize, the International Poetry Forum, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Wittner Bynner Fellow. In 1988 she received The Academy of American Poets' Lavan Award, selected by W. S. Merwin. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas.

"A Great Society" for the American people and their fellow men elsewhere was the vision of Lyndon B. Johnson. In his first years of office he obtained passage of one of the most extensive legislative programs in the Nation's history. Maintaining collective security, he carried on the rapidly growing struggle to restrain Communist encroachment in Viet Nam. Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, in central Texas, not far from Johnson City, which his family had helped settle. He felt the pinch of rural poverty as he grew up, working his way through Southwest Texas State Teachers College; he learned compassion for the poverty of others when he taught students of Mexican descent. In 1937 he campaigned successfully for the House of Representatives on a New Deal platform, effectively aided by his wife, the former Claudia "Lady Bird" Taylor, whom he had married in 1934. During World War II he served briefly in the Navy as a lieutenant commander, winning a Silver Star in the South Pacific. After six terms in the House, Johnson was elected to the Senate in 1948. In 1953, he became the youngest Minority Leader in Senate history, and the following year, when the Democrats won control, Majority Leader. With rare skill he obtained passage of a number of key Eisenhower measures. In the 1960 campaign, Johnson, as John F. Kennedy's running mate, was elected Vice President. On November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson was sworn in as President. The Great Society program became Johnson's agenda for Congress in January 1965: aid to education, attack on disease, Medicare, urban renewal, beautification, conservation, development of depressed regions, a wide-scale fight against poverty, control and prevention of crime and delinquency, removal of obstacles to the right to vote. Nevertheless, two overriding crises had been gaining momentum since 1965. Despite the beginning of new antipoverty and anti-discrimination programs, unrest and rioting in black ghettos troubled the Nation. President Johnson steadily exerted his influence against segregation and on behalf of law and order, but there was no early solution. The other crisis arose from Viet Nam. Despite Johnson's efforts to end Communist aggression and achieve a settlement, fighting continued. Controversy over the war had become acute by the end of March 1968, when he limited the bombing of North Viet Nam in order to initiate negotiations. At the same time, he startled the world by withdrawing as a candidate for re-election so that he might devote his full efforts, unimpeded by politics, to the quest for peace.

Eisenhower commanded the Allied Forces landing in North Africa in November 1942; on D-Day, 1944, he was Supreme Commander of the troops invading France. After the war, he became President of Columbia University, then took leave to assume supreme command over the new NATO forces being assembled in 1951. Republican emissaries to his headquarters near Paris persuaded him to run for President in 1952. "I like Ike" was an irresistible slogan; Eisenhower won a sweeping victory. Negotiating from military strength, he tried to reduce the strains of the Cold War. In 1953, the signing of a truce brought an armed peace along the border of South Korea. Eisenhower was elected for his second term. In domestic policy the President pursued a middle course, continuing most of the New Deal and Fair Deal programs, emphasizing a balanced budget. As desegregation of schools began, he sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to assure compliance with the orders of a Federal court; he also ordered the complete desegregation of the Armed Forces. "There must be no second class citizens in this country," he wrote. Before he left office in January 1961, for his farm in Gettysburg, he urged the necessity of maintaining an adequate military strength, but cautioned that vast, long-continued military expenditures could breed potential dangers to our way of life. He concluded with a prayer for peace "in the goodness of time." Both themes remained timely and urgent when he died, after a long illness, on March 28, 1969.