That was pure Johnson: worldly, canny and wise enough to see that a politician without a survival instinct and one without ideals are equally worthless. And it’s that canny LBJ that emerges from Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908-1960 (721 pages. Oxford. $30), historian Robert Dallek’s massive new biography. This is not the one-dimensional rascal who has become comfortably lodged in the conventional wisdom. As venal and ambitious as ever, Dallek’s LBJ is also an idealist, a man “with considerable vision that he carried to fruition during a long career.”
In all likelihood, this new, improved version should serve to close LBJ’s credibility gap. Dallek cites a 1988 Harris poll on modern American presidents that puts Johnson at or near the bottom in 11 categories. Not even Richard Nixon fares so poorly. What’s been written about LBJ is even less flattering, the most famous example being Robert Caro’s voluminous biography. In his first two published volumes, Caro has savaged Johnson–and Dallek is no Caro fan. In the notes to his own book, he challenges Caro’s version no fewer than 15 times, exasperatedly writing at one point, “Ever ready to put Johnson in the worst possible light, Caro emphasizes.”
Dallek’s book is only one sign that the tide may be turning against Johnson-bashing. Caro’s second, particularly acid volume was coolly received. A four-hour PBS documentary on Johnson to be aired this fall is hard-nosed yet refreshingly sympathetic. But if Johnson’s reputation is to be truly rehabilitated, Dallek will deserve most of the credit. In “Lone Star Rising,” one of the most evenhanded pieces of scholarly revisionism since T. Harry Williams’s landmark biography of Huey Long, Dallek argues persuasively that looking down our noses at Lyndon is at best dangerous fun. It does a disservice to the man, but, more important, it distorts our understanding of the times in which Johnson lived. “We would do well to remember Charles de Gaulle’s comment when he came to the United States for Kennedy’s funeral in 1963,” Dallek writes. “This man Kennedy, de Gaulle said, was the country’s mask. But this man Johnson is the country’s real face.”
Dallek agrees with de Gaulle. “Johnson was a representative figure,” he writes. “His election campaigns, accumulation of wealth, and manipulation of power speak volumes about the way American politics and business worked in the four decades after 1930.” Dallek’s LBJ is a protean creature, as complicated as they come. A staunch ally of Southern Democrats in Congress for two decades, in 1957 he pushed through the first civil-rights legislation since Reconstruction. A mouthpiece for big business, particularly the oil and gas barons of his native Texas, he also protected the programs of the New Deal long after they had ceased to be fashionable. Loving husband and philanderer, bully and steadfast friend of the underdog–the contradictions multiply like jack rabbits.
Unfortunately, Johnson was also living proof that a man who connives habitually in the service of good sooner or later will connive for the sake of conniving. Dallek, as generous a biographer as Johnson could hope for, records enough Johnsonian skulduggery to fill a dozen trashier biographies. Campaign-law violations, a pirated Senate election, a grossly inflated war record, influence peddling, questionable dealings on his radio and television stations–the list is long. Even his beloved LBJ Ranch was acquired in an underhanded way.
No true estimation of Johnson can be had by winking at those transgressions. But as Dallek so insistently proves, they tell only part of the story. Johnson’s ambitions for his country were no smaller than those for himself. As Dallek writes, “He had genuine and extraordinary compassion for the disadvantaged - not simply when it became politically convenient in the late fifties and early sixties, but dating from the thirties when he drove himself day and night to help black, Hispanic, and poor white Texans, and secretly aided Jewish refugees from the Nazis to enter the United States.”
All his life, Johnson drove himself and those around him unsparingly. To merely list his accomplishments is a herculean chore. To shape that list and sift its meaning is even more daunting. Some of the time it is all Dallek can do to trot along behind his subject, jotting down in briefest outline what Johnson was up to. For the most part, however, “Lone Star Rising” is immensely readable. Even the dishwater-dull Eisenhower years are exciting when seen from Johnson’s corner. Dallek’s description of Senate Majority Leader Johnson’s transforming emergence as the point man on the 1957 Voting Rights Act is the author’s most splendid illustration of the Texan’s genius for serving his own ends and the greater good all at once.
Dallek stops after the 1960 election, with Kennedy headed for the White House and Johnson only a heartbeat away from the presidency he craved so fiercely. It is an unsettling ending, with Johnson’s ascendancy to power so suddenly and rudely checked, the man himself left wallowing in uncertainty about his future. But it is also a fine place to stop, largely because we know how it will end, with the tragedy of Vietnam gumming up the triumphs of the Great Society. By isolating Johnson’s pre-presidential years, Dallek allows himself and his readers a chance to study them away from the furor of the ’60s, to see how the seeds of those years were sown in Johnson’s soul–and in the nation’s–over the course of four decades. If he maintains the standard in his concluding volume that he has set with the first, Dallek’s life of Johnson promises to be the most lucid and levelheaded look at this great and contrary figure that we are likely to have for a long time.
