His Great Society

An epic biography makes the case that Lyndon Johnson was a towering president.

LBJ

Architect of American Ambition

By Randall B. Woods

Free Press. 1,007 pp. $35

Almost 40 years after he left the White House, public perceptions of Lyndon B. Johnson remain shrouded in myth and caricature. Several generations of spinmeisters have hammered in the idea that this deeply flawed but extraordinarily gifted president represented only disaster: Vietnam, urban riots, failed anti-poverty programs, the unfettered growth of big government. LBJ himself contributed generously to his cartoon image as a bombastic Texas wheeler-dealer.

But in his masterful new biography, Randall B. Woods convincingly makes the case for Johnson's greatness -- as the last American president whose leadership achieved truly revolutionary breakthroughs in progressive domestic legislation, bringing changes that have improved the lives of most Americans. In this compelling, massive narrative, Woods portrays Johnson fairly and fully in all his complexity, with adequate attention to flaws in his character and his tragic miscalculations in Vietnam. Considering today's vitriolic polarization, it is instructive to learn how Johnson skillfully won broad public and bipartisan support to break the gridlock associated with the controversial, historic 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts and more than a score of other major initiatives.

Yes, LBJ was a legendary master of political arm-twisting and favor-trading. But Woods -- a distinguished professor of history at the University of Arkansas and the author of a widely praised biography of J. William Fulbright -- shows that Johnson's success in winning public and congressional support more often depended on his guiding liberal vision, his wise choice of mentors, his encyclopedic knowledge of people and issues, his dedication to consensus and his ability to persuade others to rise above their parochial interests to support the finest ideals of American democracy. In illuminating detail, Woods describes the enormous political skills with which Johnson, in quiet partnership with civil rights leaders, persuaded Congress to secure the basic freedoms of African Americans. Woods reminds us that dozens of government benefits and protections that Americans take for granted today were won in the 1960s principally because of LBJ's vision, legislative mastery and determination. Without Johnson, Woods insists, the nation would not then have adopted such basic federal programs as medical care for the elderly and poor, college loans and grants for needy students, the nation's first basic environmental and consumer-protection laws, and an immigration policy that has enriched America with talent from all over the world.

Woods follows in the footsteps of LBJ's most reliable earlier biographers -- Ronnie Dugger, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Robert Dallek -- but makes his own unique contribution to the Johnson literature with a fresh, probing interpretation of the influences and ideals that shaped Johnson and his presidency. Woods's subtitle, "Architect of American Ambition," captures LBJ's expansive concept of what a progressive and activist government could and should accomplish for its people. LBJ emphasizes values and motives quite different from those stressed to excess by Robert Caro, whose volumes portray Johnson as driven principally by an insatiable urge for personal aggrandizement and power.

Woods also explains more fully the influence of Johnson's Western frontier heritage, taking a different approach from other writers who have stressed the primacy of simple patriotism and rugged individualism in Western culture. Instead, Woods portrays the young Johnson as most deeply influenced by the prairie populist politics of his grandfather, Samuel Ealy Johnson Sr., and his father, Samuel Ealy Jr. (both members of the Texas legislature), and by the liberal Christian social activism of his mother, Rebekah. "The Johnson family's patriotism was the patriotism of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, not Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge," writes Woods. "Their liberalism was the 'positive' liberalism of the Progressive Era presidents, who saw the federal government as an active agent dedicated to conserving natural resources, regulating big business to insure a modicum of social justice."

The book's strengths include a balanced narrative, graceful prose and Woods's nuanced understanding of Southern politics and culture. Its imperfections include a series of careless minor errors, such as placing former Senators John Stennis (D-Miss.) and Frank Lausche (D-Ohio) in the wrong states and making Stewart Udall a member of the Senate, rather than the House.

Woods appears to empathize deeply with Johnson, feeling the tragedy of a disdained president. To sum up the ironic ending to Johnson's career, Woods quotes the columnist Charles Roberts: "The most militant civil-rights advocate ever to occupy the White House, reviled by Negro militants; a Southerner scorned by Southerners as a turn-coat; a liberal despised by liberals despite the fact he achieved most of what they sought for thirty years; a friend of education, rejected by intellectuals; a compromiser who could not compromise a war ten thousand miles away." But not all is tragedy. Woods concludes his memorable biography by turning to Ralph Ellison, the distinguished black intellectual. As Johnson was spurned by "conservatives and cosmopolitan liberals," Ellison predicted, LBJ would "have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American President for the poor and for the Negroes, but that, as I see it, is a very great honor indeed." ·

Nick Kotz is the author of five books on American public policy, including, most recently, "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws that Changed America."