* Contents * Prologue * Roots * Growing Up * College * The Secretary * Lady Bird and the NYA * Congress * Pappy * War * Truman and the Coming of the Cold War * Coke * A Populist Gentlemen's Club * Leader * Passing the Lord's Prayer * Back from the Edge * Containing the Red-Hots: From Dulles to the Dixie Association * Lost in Space *1960 * Camelot Meets Mr. Cornpone * Hanging On * Interregnum: Death and Resurrection *"Kennedy Was Too Conservative for Me" * Free at Last * Containment at Home and Abroad *"The Countryside of the World" * Bobby * Barry * A New Bill of Rights * The Crux of the Matter * Daunted Courage * Castro's and Kennedy's Shadows * A City on the Hill * Balancing Act * Divisions * Civil War * Battling Dr. Strangelove * The Holy Land * Backlash * Of Hawks and Doves, Vultures and Chickens * Tet * A Midsummer Nightmare * Touching the Void * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index
Randall B. Woods is John A. Cooper Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. He is also the author of the widely praised Fulbright: A Biography.
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… 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… 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… The book’s strengths include a balanced narrative,
graceful prose and Woods’s nuanced understanding of Southern
politics and culture.
*Washington Post Book World*
In writing LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, Woods has produced
an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the
best of the Johnson studies yet to appear. He is more sympathetic
and nuanced than Caro, more fluid and (despite the significant
length of his book) more concise than Dallek—and equally scrupulous
in his use of archives and existing scholarship. Even readers
familiar with the many other fine books on Johnson will learn a
great deal from Woods. Unlike all but a few Johnson biographers,
Woods is himself a Southerner, and has a particularly good
understanding of the nexus of race, class, family and religion that
shaped Johnson’s life… Among Woods’s many achievements in this fine
biography is to allow us to see not only the enormous, tragic flaws
in this extraordinary man, but also the greatness.
*New York Times Book Review*
This is an absorbing portrait of a man who was as stand-and-deliver
as his plain-speaking persona suggested but also a highly complex,
driven individual who not only sought power but sought to do
something with it.
*The Age*
Lyndon Baines Johnson was a complex man who helped shape
extraordinary times… Woods has created a full and well-balanced
biography of an icon that manages to feel fresh… The LBJ of this
book has more light than darkness—a contrary but deeply
compassionate individual who was often two steps ahead of everyone
else in the room, and who was undone by the times in which he
lived.
*Boston Globe*
In little more than five years, Lyndon Baines Johnson probably did
more to reform and repair American society than anyone else in
history. Yet, instead of being memorialized as a hero, LBJ is more
often remembered as a slimy manipulator whose good intentions were
sunk in the quagmire of a needless war. But as LBJ: Architect of
American Ambition, an outstanding new biography by Randall B.
Woods, reminds us, the career and legacy of this extraordinarily
complex Texan can hardly be summarized in a sentence… LBJ leaves us
with a fuller picture of this ‘accidental president’ and a greater
appreciation of him as a noble failure or—perhaps more accurately—a
great man with some king-size flaws.
*Christian Science Monitor*
Randall Woods has produced a magnificent portrait of Johnson that,
while candid in showing the president’s flaws, is [also]
sympathetic.
*Cleveland Plain Dealer*
Why…do we need another biography of Lyndon B. Johnson? The answer
is that Johnson was so complex that every new biographer willing to
do the tough spadework of original research discovers fresh layers
of Johnsonian reality to explain, new psychological and political
corridors to explore. Such is the case with this excellent new work
by University of Arkansas historian Woods. Woods finds Johnson’s
key motivation to be largely altruistic, emerging from righteous
outrage over the poverty and racism he’d witnessed while growing up
in Texas. Woods serves up a Johnson who is less cynical, less
self-serving and more heroic and tragic than the man portrayed
elsewhere. Woods’s Johnson is a man who saw his greatest personal
ambitions realized with the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, and
the Great Society programs. Not inappropriately, Woods concludes
his eloquent and riveting account by quoting Ralph Ellison, who
noted that Johnson, spurned at the end of his life by both liberals
and conservatives, 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.’
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
Woods’s single volume evenhandedly condenses the complexities and
controversies associated with the thirty-sixth president of the
U.S. …Raised in the populist tradition, LBJ cut his political teeth
as an all-out New Dealer. But he shrewdly knew that the ambitions
he harbored for himself and American society would never be
realized without placating conservatives of various kinds—economic,
segregationist, or anticommunist. In this fact of Johnson’s
political life, which induced some to perceive him as a malodorous
wheeler-dealer, Woods detects a remarkable consistency, an inwardly
liberal LBJ whose outwardly moderate politics were an expression of
his mastery of political calculus… Thorough, astute, and
readable.
*Booklist*
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