| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Randall B. Woods. LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. New York: Free Press. 2006. Pp. x, 957. $35.00.
Randall Bennett Woods's biography of Lyndon B. Johnson enters a crowded field that includes works by Doris Kearns, Paul Conkin, and Robert Dallek, and Robert Caro's ongoing multivolume study. So the first question confronting any reviewer is: do we need another book on LBJ? Woods merits a positive response because he presents a fresh portrait of an altruistic liberal in contrast to the manipulative, power-hungry politico served up by Caro in particular. His book also benefits from research into recently declassified documents, Oval Office tapes, and interviews with top Johnson aides.	1
The tone of this biography is set by its exploration of the shaping influences on Johnson's politics and the eulogy with which the author chooses to end it. Woods shows LBJ as molded by the prairie populism-progressivism of his grandfather and father (Samuel Ealy Johnson Sr. and Jr.) that regarded an activist state as a force for public good. He gravitated naturally into the orbit of New Deal liberalism in the 1930s, to whose values he hewed throughout his political career. For Woods, Johnson's greatest achievement as president was to improve the lives of Americans whom the New Deal had bypassed. He ends the book by quoting Ralph Ellison, who observed that Johnson was unloved by liberals and would have to "settle for being recognized as the greatest American President for the poor and the Negroes" (p. 884).	. . .

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