| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light. Ed. by Mitchell B. Lerner. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. viii, 303 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-1384-6.)
For several years, the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson appeared to have turned into one of those frustrating topics on which there was nothing much left to discover. It seemed that historians would have to resign themselves to covering familiar ground with varying emphases and new interpretations.	1
But thanks to the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, that has not been the case. When Congress deemed that all records under the control of the federal government would be made public over time, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum started to release troves of tapes of phone conversations and meetings that Johnson recorded as president.	2
The recordings have been breathtaking, the kind of material that is capable of transfixing the feistiest or least interested undergraduates. Listening to the tapes allows us to become flies on the walls of the White House. We hear the president as he verbally twists and turns the arms of legislators, administrators, activists, interest group representatives, and foreign leaders. The material that has started to emerge from the recordings is allowing scholars to rethink conventional assumptions about 1960s politics. One of the first products of these new archives was Robert Dallek's masterly account of the Johnson administration (Lyndon B. Johnson, 2004).	. . .

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