Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President

Robert Dalleks 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 Johnsons 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 singular biography reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of the most extravagant characters ever to step onto the presidential stage.