Reviews for Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

The average rating for Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-22 00:00:00 Jon Fournier This was Goodwin's first major historical work. "I was a twenty-four-year-old Ph.D. candidate at Harvard selected as a White House Fellow, a program designed to let young people work with the President and members of his cabinet. While I strongly opposed the war in Vietnam, I wholeheartedly supported the vast and innovative domestic programs of the Great Society. Little did I know then that I would struggle to come to terms with this conflict for the rest of my personal and professional life." It's a good book, but not great when measured against her later works or as in depth as Caro's multi-volume examination of LBJ. Yet, those that would dismiss this book as having too much sycophantic content or subject to unbridled hero-worship are, perhaps, a bit misogynistic. Here is an example of helpful insight. "Unlike Kennedy, he had not spent time in the states learning who the important powers were, who controlled the delegations. And without personal knowledge and touch his usually acute powers of perception were substantially reduced, leading him to the mistaken notion that the leaders of the Senate were also the leaders of the delegations, that if he could round up the Senators from Arkansas and Idaho, for example, he would secure their delegations." Goodwin continues to give us great historical works. This book is worth reading but if you go elsewhere, at least read her new forward, something that can be downloaded for free.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-17 00:00:00 Paul Pace 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.