Synopses & Reviews
Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Michael Beschloss, in
The Los Angeles Times, said that it "succeeds brilliantly."
The New York Times called it "rock solid" and
The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in
The Boston Globe wrote that it was "dense with astonishing incidents."
Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, 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 and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam.
In these pages Johnson emerges as 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." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this
Review
"Robert Dallek is a gifted biographer, and he is also an astute observer of politics and foreign policy. In
Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President, he writes of a president trying to sustain a war in a far-off place, a war that is growing progressively unwinnable and unpopular, a war the flimsy legal authority for which rests on a congressional resolution that the public has come to understand was exaggerated at best, trumped up at worst.... This biography is timely. However you view the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, you can't read this book and not feel they are with us."--
Boston Globe"This abridgement of Dallek's masterly two-volume biography, Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant, is a welcome addition to the literature...excellent for all readers who want a refresher or introduction to Lyndon Johnson."--Library Journal
"In Dallek's hands, Johnson is complex, deceitful, and idealistic, and the author shows why the man's legacy, both positive and negative, will always command interest and debate."--Booklist
About the Author
Robert Dallek is Professor of History at Boston University. He is the author of the definitive study,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, which received the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the best-selling
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. A frequent commentator on radio and TV, he lives in Washington, D.C.