Book Review

Thirty years after Lyndon B. Johnson abandoned his five-year roller coaster ride as president, his failures obscure his successes. Conservatives disdain his Great Society while liberals excoriate his Vietnam policy. Reaganites group Johnson's tenure with the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations in a quartet of presidential failures that precipitated their "revolution," while Clintonites clump LBJ with John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt in a trio of presidential philanderers, confirming their "everybody does it" defense.	1
Yet Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the great "liberal nationalists" of the American Century. In Congress, by crossbreeding southern populism with northeastern progressivism, he harnessed federal largess and power to modernize the South. As president, he soothed a nation reeling from Kennedy's assassination, fathered landmark civil rights legislation, and crusaded to "conquer poverty" in his quixotic attempt to become "the greatest presidential reformer in the country's history."	2
In Flawed Giant, Robert Dallek paints a judicious, compelling, and towering portrait of a wild, fascinating, and "outsized" man. The book solidifies Johnson's reputation as a domestic revolutionary, a far-seeing and generous politician who hoped to redeem the disenfranchised, feed the poor, heal the sick, teach the ignorant, and house the indigent. Dallek, a liberal nationalist himself, praises Johnson and Johnson's hero Franklin D. Roosevelt as singular "visionaries who helped advance the national well-being and fulfill the promise of American life."	3
As the title suggests, this larger-than-life figure had enormous faults. After researching for fourteen years and producing two seven-hundred-page books each subtitled Lyndon Johnson and His Times, Dallek is well acquainted with those shortcomings. "Urinating in a sink, inviting people into the bathroom, showing off a scar, exposing his private parts—after a while nothing surprises the biographer," Dallek sighs at the start of this second and final volume. But, characteristically, Dallek adds an insight that both complicates and deepens, noting that Johnson wielded his volcanic unpredictability with the skill of a samurai swordsman "to shock and confuse and leave him in control."	4
Johnson may be an extreme case, but Dallek's analysis proves that a president's personality cannot be easily divorced from his record as a politician or a policy maker. This appreciation of the links between the personal and the political helps solve the great Jekyll-Hyde mystery of the Johnson administration—how could the same man nurture the Great Society lifeline and mastermind the Vietnam bloodbath? Dallek roots both initiatives in Johnson's emotional emptiness, which fed his grandiosity. Fearing rejection, Johnson minimized the commitment required to achieve either goal. Herein, Johnson recognized the true character of Cold War America's have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too political culture, whereby Americans dreamed of spreading prosperity and freedom throughout the world at no cost. But in failing to build the necessary consensus and in refusing to admit that Americans might have to sacrifice to succeed, Johnson doomed his efforts.	5
The gap between Johnson's understanding of both situations and his actions is particularly shocking in light of Dallek's conclusion that Johnson was "far more anguished" and confused about Vietnam from the start "than we have previously thought." Tragically, the chasm between Johnson's soaring expectations and the sobering realities helped spawn his "credibility gap" and today's corrosive cynicism.	. . .