Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream Book

What Doris Kearns Goodwin does well here:

1) She digs deep into LBJ's personality. She knew him professionally, working in his White House, and quotes extensively from his direct conversations with her. He wanted her assistance in writing his memoirs, a project which never got off the ground.

2) She pinpoints his skillsets, what he's good at and deficient at, and how these skillsets help or hamper him in different institutional settings. She explains how his talent in one-on-one interactions and his ability to manipulate and coerce individuals help him attain power and accomplish things in the Senate. LBJ's penchant for secret dealmaking does not hamper him in the Senate. But in the presidency, a different type of leadership is called for. A president's constituents are many and widely-varying groups; they go beyond the one hundred Senators that a Senate Majority Leader has to please and cajole.

Where the book falls short:

1) Explaining personality and character is important in biography, but Goodwin goes overboard, using psychoanalytic theory (in easy-to-understand language for the masses) to explain nearly everything. As we know, viewing all a person does through the prism of his relationship to his parents is outmoded. There's nothing that dates a book more than references to Freud, Karen Horney, and Erik Erikson.

2) There's not enough delving into LBJ's accomplishments in the arenas of civil rights and the Great Society, particularly the latter. Martin Luther King, Jr. gets two lines in the index, five mentions in the book. What did LBJ think of MLK, and vice versa? How did these two leaders interact? Reading this book, we have no idea. There's also surprisingly little exploration of LBJ's personal and political interactions with JFK. Medicare, which today we think of as one of LBJ's signature achievements, and something that altered the American landscape forever, gets two superficial mentions. Yet "Psychoanalytic insights into" various things comprise 42 lines in the index. LBJ's dream "of being caged" is discussed on three different pages.