Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream

Rating:
Summary: LBJ was, or tried to be, a good compassionate man. But not
Review: always. Doris Kearns does a find job exploring the psyche of this most complex, conflicted man. She had a unique opportunity, spending unlimited time with LBJ at his ranch after he had retired from public life. She is in fact his very personal
biographer, this being a task he didn't want to do himself.
There is great reliance on his dreams & the interpertation of what they mean. The answers are simple & so pat that it is doubtful they were dreams at all but merely a vehicle for LBJ to explain his actions .
To her credit Ms. Kearns does not dwell on Vietnam. Important to be sure but this was a whole life biography & she did cover the war adequately.
Cultivation of mentors was a method used by LBJ throughout his life to better himself & led to his sucesses. However, by the time he became vice president he was own his own, isolated for maybe the first time in his life.
Like presidents before him & since LBJ labored in the shadow of FDR. Few presidents, Jefferson & T. Roosevelt excepted, have attained greatness without winning a major war. This sad fact was apparent to LBJ even as we got caught in the quagmire of Vietnam with no honorable way out. Vietnam is how LBJ will be defined in the future.[...]

Rating:
Summary: Good non-fiction book, okay biography
Review: LBJ and The American Dream is really not to be compared with other LBJ bios. While Dalleck and Caro described LBJ's early years through his Congressional service in one and two volumes respectively, Kearns summarized his entire pre-presidential career in a little over one hundred pages. While her one volume tried to span his entire life like Unger's, it left out some very important milestones.

Kearns was too close to LBJ, both in terms of her personal contact and in terms of her historical perspective, for a true bio (note I had the 70s edition and there is a second 1991 edition). Although she dutifully recorded his thoughts and reminiscing of his career, and while in many cases, she corroborated his words with evidence, she seemed to introduce little other third party data from any research she might have done. And despite the coverage of the presidential years, she uncovers little about his relationship with Humphrey, Hoover, Jackie Kennedy, McNamera, and his aids like Jenkins and Connely.

Kearns writes from the perspective of a 1960s Harvard liberal arts grad and that biases her writing. She gives an inordinate amount of copy to Oedipal theories and interpreting LBJ?s dreams, the latter of which one gets the sense that LBJ made up to entertain his subject. This book would have been better titled "Analyzing Lyndon Johnson".

All that said, this bio has actual experience with its subject that other authors do not have. Mrs. Kearns had unfettered personal access to LBJ for the last few years of his life. Accordingly, she uncovered some interesting facts about his childhood, college life, and professional career. This work is about as close to LBJ's memoirs as we will ever get, as he had apparently intended Kearns to ghost-write them. And she includes some analysis of presidential history which provides a context to LBJ's policies. She provided a good analysis of why LBJ continued with his Vietnam policy, dissecting the influence of his personality, ego and paranoia.

It's a worthwhile read for an LBJ enthusiast, but I recommend a more modern bio for a reader wanting a quick history. Also, for even more insight into LBJ without the third party bias, I strongly recommend Beschloss' production of the LBJ tapes.