Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and his Times 1961-1973
Robert Dallek
Oxford University Press £12.99, pp754
'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?' Few Americans now approaching 50 or beyond, from whichever side of the draft-dodging fence they came, will not have a ringing memory of hearing that chant - and feeling it in their solar plexus - while the United States tried to bomb, gas and shoot communist Vietnam into oblivion in the Sixties.
As John Kennedy's running mate in the 1960 Presidential election, Lyndon Baines Johnson was thrust into office with the events on that grassy knoll in Dallas in November 1963 that left JFK dead from an assassin's bullet.
The only American President to have been sworn into office aboard an aircraft, Johnson was at the centre of further tumbling American electoral records when he trounced Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential poll that gave him what he thought was a massive mandate for his subsequent domestic and foreign policies.
The only problem, as Robert Dallek's monumental concluding volume of Johnson's life points out, was that LBJ had never effectively spelled out, then or subsequently, what he was going to do. And so, in four short years - but 48 long months - Johnson blew all of his huge popular support and left the White House a broken man when Richard Nixon busted him out of office in 1968, leaving a confused and divided United States in his wake.
Exploiting American openness, Dallek draws on an immense amount of material - official papers as well as oral history from some 10,000 tapes of recorded conversations - to show in readable and scholarly detail, devoid of partisan profiling, how Johnson could have been a contender for one of America's greatest statesmen.
In civil rights and other social policy aimed at alleviating poverty and ignorance, LBJ was a visionary. His idea of the 'Great Society' resulted in some of the most forceful social legislation since FDR's New Deal of the Thirties, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 attacking racial segregation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which outlawed literacy tests aimed at preventing Afro-Americans voting, and the Medicare bill also of 1965 which still provides the basis of American healthcare policy.
But his nemesis was the Vietnam war, exposing not just his flaws as a President but the dark complexities of his personality, which by the end amounted virtually to a clinical paranoia, according to Dallek. This is the second volume of Dallek's life of LBJ, and as such steals a march on the brilliant work of Robert A. Caro, whose first two volumes of a promised four-part Johnson biography, the Path to Power and the Means of Ascent end with his controversial election to the Senate in 1948.
For now, though, to read Dallek is to be transported back with startling clarity to those tumultuous years of pride and protest, whether or not one had been there at the time.
