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More than a decade after LBJ left office, researchers began to open up the Johnson administration as an important area of scholarly study. Exploring the Johnson Years is an invaluable introduction to that administration and to the LBJ Library’s more than thirty million separate documents. The contributors cover every major aspect of the Johnson presidency, from Vietnam (George C. Herring) to the War on Poverty (Mark I. Gelfand), including coverage of Latin American policy (Walter LaFeber), education (Hugh Davis Graham), civil rights (Steven F. Lawson), the nature of the White House staff (Larry Berman), and Johnson’s stormy relationship with the media (David Culbert). The essays illuminate some of the most important files and show how they can be used to further historical understanding of the Johnson years. As a result, scholars who plan to use the library will have a useful guide before they begin, while general readers will be able to discover the ways in which the library’s holdings relate to the existing body of literature on the Johnson administration.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE, THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE, THE AMERICAN HISTORY BOOK PRIZE Book Four of Robert A. Caro’s monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating insight that led the Times of London to acclaim it as “one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. A masterpiece.” The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark. By 1958, as Johnson began to maneuver for the presidency, he was known as one of the most brilliant politicians of his time, the greatest Senate Leader in our history. But the 1960 nomination would go to the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Caro gives us an unparalleled account of the machinations behind both the nomination and Kennedy’s decision to offer Johnson the vice presidency, revealing the extent of Robert Kennedy’s efforts to force Johnson off the ticket. With the consummate skill of a master storyteller, he exposes the savage animosity between Johnson and Kennedy’s younger brother, portraying one of America’s great political feuds. Yet Robert Kennedy’s overt contempt for Johnson was only part of the burden of humiliation and isolation he bore as Vice President. With a singular understanding of Johnson’s heart and mind, Caro describes what it was like for this mighty politician to find himself altogether powerless in a world in which power is the crucial commodity. For the first time, in Caro’s breathtakingly vivid narrative, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how within weeks—grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery—he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of Kennedy’s death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam. In its exploration of this pivotal period in Johnson’s life—and in the life of the nation—The Passage of Power is not only the story of how he surmounted unprecedented obstacles in order to fulfill the highest purpose of the presidency but is, as well, a revelation of both the pragmatic potential in the presidency and what can be accomplished when the chief executive has the vision and determination to move beyond the pragmatic and initiate programs designed to transform a nation. It is an epic story told with a depth of detail possible only through the peerless research that forms the foundation of Robert Caro’s work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman’s verdict that “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”
Stretching from November 1963 to January 1969, the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson was marked both by division and tumult and by significant accomplishments. In this volume, Robert Divine has brought together seven senior scholars who, in new essays, explore aspects of domestic and foreign policy during the Johnson years. This collection is a sequel to Divine’s earlier volume (originally published as Exploring the Johnson Years). The seven essays that compose Volume Two, together with Divine’s incisive and perceptive historiographical overview, offer new insights into Johnson’s complex character and leadership style. The LBJ that emerges from these pages is a very human figure who understands the corrosive, pervasive impact of the Vietnam War on his administration and who struggles to try to preserve the domestic programs he fought so long and hard to achieve. In exploring the antiwar movement, tax and foreign economic policies, environmental and health care questions, and the space program, these essays demonstrate how domestic issues were critically affected by the Vietnam War and provide a fuller understanding of Johnson’s vital but flawed legacy to the nation.
Master of the Senate, Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. It was during these years that all Johnson’s experience—from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine—came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term-the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate’s hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the “unchangeable” Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control. Caro demonstrates how Johnson’s political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust—or at least the cooperation—of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson’s ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson’s amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875. Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro’s peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself—the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing—and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.
The third volume in the author's monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, following The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, describes the future president's career in the U.S. Senate, from breaking the southern control of Capitol Hill to passing the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. 200,000 first printing. First serial, The New Yorker.
One of “Five Best Books about Wartime Presidents”—Michael Bechloss, The Wall Street Journal From Lyndon Johnson’s closest domestic adviser during the White House years comes a book in which “Johnson leaps out of the pages in all his raw and earthy glory” (The New York Times Book Review) that’s been called “a joy to read” (Stephen Ambrose, The Washington Post Book World). And now, a new introductory essay brings the reader up to date on Johnson’s impact on America today. Califano takes us into the Oval Office as the decisions that irrevocably changed the United States were being crafted to create Johnson’s ambitious Great Society. He shows us LBJ’s commitment to economic and social revolution, and his willingness to do whatever it took to achieve his goals. Califano uncorks LBJ’s legislative genius and reveals the political guile it took to pass the laws in civil rights, poverty, immigration reform, health, education, environmental protection, consumer protection, the arts, and communications. President Lyndon Johnson was bigger than life—and no one who worked for him or was subjected to the “Johnson treatment” ever forgot it. As Johnson’s “Deputy President of Domestic Affairs” (The New York Times), Joseph A. Califano’s unique relationship with the president greatly enriches our understanding of our thirty-sixth president, whose historical significance continues to be felt throughout every corner of America to this day. A no-holds-barred account of Johnson’s presidency, The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is an intimate portrait of a President whose towering ambition for his country and himself reshaped America—and ultimately led to his decision to withdraw from the political arena in which he fought so hard.
Transcribing and selecting the most stunning moments from hundreds of hours of newly released LBJ tapes, Beschloss has added another permanent treasure to the American historical record. Throughout this incredible narrative, he provides keen commentary and historical contexts, revealing just how profoundly LBJ changed the presidency--and America itself.
Seven leading Johnson scholars provide a revealing new look at LBJ's role in domestic and foreign policy. They examine his obsession with the Vietnam War; his commitment to the Great Society and civil rights; his failure to deal with radical civil-rights leaders and the crisis in the ghettos; his limited knowledge of Europe and his dealings with NATO; his Middle East policy; his views on Strategic Arms Limitations; his contribution to the decline of the Democratic party in the sixties; and his reactive rather than proactive response to women's issues.
In exploring the antiwar movement, tax and foreign economic policies, environmental and health care questions, and the space program, these essays demonstrate how domestic issues were critically affected by the Vietnam War and provide a fuller understanding of Johnson's vital but flawed legacy to the nation.