The Goods

By Donald Morrison

THE POLITICIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LYNDON JOHNSON by Ronnie Dugger Norton; 514 pages; $18.95

Let history record that in 1967, at the height of the Viet Nam War, President Lyndon Johnson was visited several times in the White House by God. As Ronnie Dugger reports in this scrupulous, generally disapproving account of the 36th President's rise to power, the Creator would appear around 2 or 3 a.m. when Johnson received his daily reports from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Dugger does not disclose what the Commander in Chief was told by his Commander in Chief, but he does recount that on one occasion Johnson "prayed on his knees for an hour and a half, and he said how goddamn sore his knees got."

That is about the only L.B.J. boast left unquestioned by Dugger, a respected publisher of the muckraking semimonthly Texas Observer. Every other Johnsonian swagger, pronunciamento and claim is held up to the light for flaws and cracks. According to The Politician, Johnson had a million of them. Dugger interviewed the President at length in 1967 and 1968 but broke off their sessions when L.B.J. began pressing for a puff piece. No one can accuse the author of delivering one. His book is very light on endearing anecdotes, and it is unlikely to match in sweep and detail the first volume, to be published next fall, of a mammoth Johnson trilogy by Pulitzer Prizewinner Robert Caro. But Dugger is a digger--wide-ranging, thorough, judicious. He deserves an award for footnotes alone (69 pages of them, in tiny, tiny type). He has the goods on his man.

Dugger takes the Johnson saga from the great-great-grandfather who did not fight at the Alamo as Johnson once boasted, through Grandfather Sam E. Johnson, who did not found Johnson City, Texas, as L.B.J. once claimed, to Father Sam Jr., a progressive state legislator who never realized his ambition of becoming a Congressman. Young Lyndon learned the art of the possible by tagging along as his dad cut deals and pulled strings, and when the older man turned to drink, Lyndon's iron-minded mother lashed the boy onward. She had him, at age four, reciting the Preamble to the Constitution for a visiting Texas Governor; when he was in college she wrote Lyndon's term papers.

At the beginning of his career, says Dugger, Johnson was a fawning sycophant on the lookout for a useful mentor. He used his role as editor of the campus paper at Southwest Texas State Teachers College to flatter the school's president, who had made Johnson his assistant. Winning a Senate seat in 1948 by 87 votes out of nearly 1 million cast, "Landslide Lyndon" set about cultivating Georgia's powerful Richard Russell. He would invite Russell to dinner and coach his daughters to call the man Uncle Dick. That campaign paid off. When Russell was in line to become Senate majority leader, mentor graciously stood aside for protege.

Dugger's best reporting job is a rollicking account of how Johnson himself stole the 1948 Texas Democratic primary--with 200 ballots that materialized in the week following the election. Though Dugger struggles to be matter of fact about Johnson's rise, outrage keeps seeping through. He cannot forgive L.B.J. for abandoning his early New Deal progressivism, turning against organized labor and becoming a strident antiCommunist.

Indeed, from his spot on the Armed Services Committee, Johnson seemed determined to go to war with the Soviets -- he advocated nuking them in 1951-52 -- and Dugger blames him for reinforcing the foundations of the cold war from the Senate floor. The sulfurous, debatable conclusion: "If the holocaust comes and if there is still a human history, the global American hawkery of the Johnson Period will be understood as a principal cause of World War." Soon or late, the glow of revisionism has a way of ennobling most of those who have occupied the presidency. As long as Ronnie Dugger is at work, Lyndon Johnson will remain in the shadows. --By Donald Morrison

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