Best lbj biography
April 10,
Books of the Times
'Flawed Giant': A Minutely Detailed Portrait of LBJ
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
FLAWED GIANT Lyndon Johnson and His Times, By Robert Dallek Illustrated. pages. Oxford University Press. $ |
n light of the current White House sex scandals, renewed attention is being paid to the character question.
Lyndon b johnson bio: He doesn't hide anything and he also doesn't take an overly negative tone or a positive one. Jeff said: January 10, at pm. Although the reader eventually deduces the author is a fan of LBJ, Dallek seems earnest in his effort to maintain appropriate distance from his subject. However the size of the offensive shook US public opinion
Just what bearing does the character of a president have on his ability to govern? Can personality be separated from policy; morality and temperament from governance?
In the case of Lyndon Baines Johnson, scholar Robert Dallek argues, the private and the political were inextricably intertwined.
In "Flawed Giant," the second and concluding volume of his monumental life of Johnson, Dallek suggests that the 36th president's outsize, conflicted personality -- at once grandiose and insecure, idealistic and self-serving, visionary and petty -- played a major, perhaps even pivotal, role in shaping both his achievements and failures in office.
Lyndon b johnson biography book We say this about all politicians, but it isn't true for all of them. January 6, at am. His mother was a teacher from a family of Baptist ministers. Frank Theising.Dallek, professor of history at Boston University, suggests that Johnson's ambitious Great Society programs and commitment to civil rights were firmly rooted in his own sense of self as an underdog, a "poor boy from Texas struggling to emerge from the shadows and win universal approval."
"As with all the major reforms he backed throughout his political career, he was most ardent and effective when he could see a public problem as an enlargement of a personal concern," Dallek writes.
He continues: "A war on poverty, government programs to eliminate individual and family need, resonated with his own memories and enduring feelings of deprivation; equal rights and opportunities for minorities were an indirect assault on prejudice against a Lyndon Johnson, the Southerner or Southwesterner from rural Texas whose regional identity partly kept him from a presidential nomination in ; federal aid to education meant increased opportunity for the schooling Lyndon had used to pull himself up the economic and social ladders."
Yet if Johnson's domestic reforms owed a debt to his own identification with the disenfranchised, Dallek also suggests that his tragic mishandling of Vietnam stemmed from his need to see the war as a personal test of his judgment.
Even as Johnson's "lifelong compulsion to be the best, to dominate and win" made him reluctant to become "the first American president to lose a war," his deep-seated insecurities (combined with his competitive mistrust of Robert F. Kennedy) compelled him to demonize critics of his Vietnam policy and cut off reasoned debate.
"Though no one can say with certainty what Johnson's fundamental motives were, including Johnson himself," Dallek writes, "it is not too much of a stretch to conclude that the Johnson personality was inhibiting him from a more realistic and sensible resolution of a war policy that seemed certain to lead to more losses, more domestic divisions and greater limitations on his capacity to lead at home and abroad."
Drawing upon hours of newly released White House tapes and dozens of interviews with people close to Johnson, Dallek has created, in this volume, a minutely detailed portrait of Johnson as a contradictory and larger-than-life figure, a Shakespearean character: needy, driven, devious, magnanimous and explosive.
There is little about this portrait that is really new; in the last six months alone, Michael R. Beschloss' "Taking Charge" (an annotated collection of Johnson's White House tape transcripts) and Jeff Shesol's "Mutual Contempt" (an analysis of his rivalry with Robert F. Kennedy) have given us similar portraits of Johnson.
But Dallek most persuasively shows how Johnson's personality informed his policy making and day-by-day decisions.
Lyndon b johnson biography reviews and complaints Richard said:. However, with LBJ I took a different course. 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. Maybe Dallek figured that so much had been written about those events already that it was superfluous, but David Halberstam wrote it better in "The Best and the Brightest".His book may not be as fluently written, or dramatically engaging, as Robert A. Caro's continuing biography of Johnson ("The Path to Power" and "Means of Ascent"), but it's considerably more evenhanded. We are left with a picture of a man who is less evil than fatally flawed, and less hateful than erratic, self-deluding and troubled.
Because Johnson, his presidency and his prosecution of the Vietnam War have been dissected so frequently, much of "Flawed Giant" is devoted to retracing familiar ground. Once again, we are treated to discussions of Johnson's efforts to establish his administration in the shadow of John F.
Kennedy's assassination. Once again, we are treated to a chronicle of Johnson's legislative prowess in getting his Great Society bills passed. Once again, we are treated to an extended account of his escalation of the war in Vietnam and the growing protest against his administration.
In Dallek's opinion, Johnson could not have walked away from Vietnam in , given existing assumptions about the Cold War and his own unproven record as an unelected president.
Lyndon b johnson biography reviews Caro does an outstanding job of analyzing events, and has an easy, accessible writing style. May 12, at am. LBJ was a born politician. He flirted with running again but the protests at the DNC convention eliminated any last ideas about thatHe also argues that Johnson made two crucial mistakes in his later handling of the war. By failing to openly discuss his policy of escalation, Dallek contends, Johnson failed to "build the necessary consensus for the fighting"; and by late , when he could have used antiwar sentiment at home and political developments in Vietnam to cut his losses and get out, he instead "stayed the course," having become blinded by his own rhetoric and wishful thinking about the progress of the war.
There are tidbits of news scattered throughout "Flawed Giant." Dallek contends that Johnson seriously considered getting back in the presidential race in , after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; that he was reluctant to support his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, against Richard M. Nixon because of Humphrey's doubts about the war, and that he declined to damage the Nixon-Agnew campaign with accusations about their campaign financing because he wanted to have some political ammunition in the bank for possible future use against Nixon.
In the end, Dallek's most serious charge against Johnson is that his paranoiac tendencies raised "questions about his judgment and capacity to make rational life and death decisions."
"Who then is to say when a president has passed the bounds of rational good sense?" he writes. "Certainly in Johnson's case, for all the cranky nonsense he espoused about his enemies, he remained largely in control of his faculties and more than capable of functioning as president.
Still, no one should make light of how much his suspicions and anger toward his domestic critics distorted his judgments in dealing with Vietnam. It may be that he would have pursued the war as avidly even without his personal antagonisms. But it is clear that his personal quirks in dealing with war opponents contributed nothing constructive to the national dialogue on a failing war."
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