Presidential historian Dallek (History/Boston Univ.; Hail to the
Chief, 1996) has all the dogged persistence of the scholar, but
little of a master biographer's panache. Yet even in his
conventional telling, LBJ emerges as a Texas-tall-tale hero who
walks improbably into an almost Sophoclean tragedy. LBJ's probably
apocryphal rejoinder to German chancellor Ludwig Erhard's query on
whether he had been born in a log cabin - "No . . . I was born in a
manger" - captures the Texan's grandiosity, yet Dallek also reveals
a politician of surpassing intelligence and drive undone by raging
insecurity. Picking up where his 1991 volume Lone Star Rising left
off, Dallek begins with a chapter on Johnson's two years of
frustration and irrelevance as vice president. John Kennedy's
assassination filled him with "the guilt of a competitive older
brother . . . who suddenly displaces his younger, more successful
rival," but also catapulted him into the only suitable outlet for
his whirlwind energy. Dallek offers a comprehensive account of how
LBJ masterminded epochal reform measures that affected nearly every
American, including civil rights, Medicare, federal aid to
education, consumer protection, and environmentalism. Yet he also
acknowledges that Johnson spent millions on the war on poverty in
what really was an experiment. Few Oval Office occupants had more
extensive pre-presidential experience in foreign affairs than
Johnson, but Dallek demonstrates that, as early as his response to
anti-American agitation in Panama in 1964, LBJ behaved erratically.
In Vietnam, his confusion reflected both a sincere commitment to
halting communism and a mounting paranoia that Dallek says "raises
questions about executive incapacity that can neither be ignored
nor easily addressed." Dallek's extensive use of oral histories and
interviews has uncovered some fascinating details (e.g., Johnson
favored Nelson Rockefeller as his successor), but ultimately does
little to encourage new understanding of LBJ. But this remains a
fair, impressively researched reassessment of this most complicated
of presidents. (Kirkus Reviews)
Lone Star Rising, the first volume in Robert Dallek's biography of
LBJ, was hailed as `a triumphant portrait of Lyndon Johnson as rich
and oversized and complex as the nation that shaped him'. Now, in
the final volume, Dallek takes us through Johnson's tumultuous
years in the White House, his unprecedented accomplishments there,
and the tragic war that would be his downfall. In these pages
Johnson emerges as a character of almost Shakespearean dimensions,
a man riddled with contradictions, a man of towering intensity and
anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a
man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate,
overbearing, driven: `A tornado in pants.' Drawing on hundreds of
newly released tapes and extensive interviews with those closest to
LBJ - including fresh insights from Ladybird and his press
secretary Bill Moyers - Dallek takes us behind the scenes to give
us a portrait of Johnson that is at once even-handed and completely
engrossing. We see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his
will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a
range of crucial legislation, from Medicare, environmental
protection, and the establishment of the National Endowment of the
Arts and Humanities to the most significant advances in civil
rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see for the first
time the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became
increasingly ensnared in Vietnam, a war he did not want to expand
and which destroyed his hopes for The Great Society and a second
term. Exhaustively researched and gracefully written, Flawed Giant
reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of
the most extravagant characters ever to step on to the presidential
stage.
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