Let's remember LBJ and Nixon were running things in the midst of the Cold War. Arguably, this is why their domestic agenda records are better than Clinton's - neither proposed to shred the social safety net.
To quote the forceful language of Christopher Hitchens:
<quote> ...No matter how fanicful or budget-busting the concept, from the B-1 bomber upwards, Clinton always relaxed his commitment to trimming government spending and invariably advocated not only a welfare "safety net" for the likes of General Dynamics and Boeing, but a handout free and clear.
This had been standard practice among Democrat aspirants during the haunted years of the contest with Soviet Russia, where "softness" was at an understandable discount among sophisticated and ambitious liberals. However, Mr. Clinton was the first postwar and post-Cold War president. His "watch" occurred during a unique and unprecedented period of military and political relaxation, when the totalitarian codes of "launch on warning" and "balance of terror" had been abandoned even by many of their former advocates. Let the record show, then, that the Clinton White House took no step of any kind to acknowledge, much less take advantage of this new reality, and always acted as if the most paranoid predictions of John Foster Dulles were about to be fulfilled. With the help of a tremendous lobbying effort from the aerospace and other defense conglomerates, the NATO alliance was "enlarged," at least partly to furnish a sales market for those in "the contractor community" who would otherwise have had to close production lines. The budget of the Central Intelligence Agency was increased, while democratic "oversight" of its activity was held to a myopic level and even the records of its past activities in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran were shrouded or shredded (illegally at that) without demur. The Clinton administration contrived the feat of being the only major government in the West to make no comment on the arrest of General Pinochet, despite the existence of outstanding cases of American citizens murdered on his direct instructions. The promiscuous sale of arms and technology to other countries, including existing dictatorships as well as potential ones, was enthusiastically pursued. Not an eyebrow was raised when the "special forces" of the Indonesian army, trained and equipped for the sole purpose of combating malcontent Indonesian civilians, were found to have been supervised by United States authorities in open defiance of a supposed congressional ban.
Conducting relations with the bankrupt and humiliated "former superpower," Clinton and his understrappers Strobe Talbott and Sandy Berger followed a policy which history may well remember, of always covering up for their diseased autocratic marionette Boris Yeltsin when he was wrong (in Chechnya and in Bosnia and in Mafia matters) and always weakening him when he was in the right (as in their breaches of promise about the expansion of NATO and the demolition of the ABM treaty). No doubt they considered his bleary, raging, oafish conduct to be a "private" issue, kept as it was from being investigated by any legal authority in the new Russia. </endquote> from _No One Left to Lie To_