cover image LBJ: A Life

LBJ: A Life

Irwin Unger. John Wiley & Sons, $30 (592pp) ISBN 978-0-471-17602-2

Readers familiar with the original, exciting research of LBJ biographers Robert Caro (working on volume three for Knopf), Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ronnie Dugger and Robert Dallek will find this volume derivative, if accessible. Historian Irwin Unger (The Greenback Era, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1965) and Debi Unger (coauthor of America in the 20th Century) seem to be neither pro-Johnson nor anti-Johnson. Their main concern is to give an accurate chronology of LBJ's career, which they do. The authors capture LBJ's hell-raising Texas childhood and adolescence, his surprising ascent from backwater schoolteacher to ruthless politician, his domination of the U.S. Senate, his elevation to the White House after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his passionate advocacy of a Great Society, the Vietnam War, his downfall, his restless postpresidential life until his death in 1973, his complicated marriage to Lady Bird, his womanizing and much more. While the authors emphasize that, throughout his life, LBJ struggled to balance the often tawdry practicalities of politics with his more elevated commitment to social justice, they shy away from making a definitive judgment on LBJ's performance. Their own performance is adequate and well-written, but only a strongly articulated assessment of LBJ would have distinguished this book from other biographies. (Oct.)