APRIL 2018 - AudioFile
Dan Woren provides a clear, authoritative tone in his performance of Zeitz’s meticulous audiobook on the political maneuverings of the Johnson presidency. Listeners expecting a sweeping overview of LBJ’s life and career should note that this work focuses on Johnson’s efforts to build coalitions to enact the programs that comprised the sweeping policy changes of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, and the War on Poverty. Zeitz’s work is both concise and exhaustive. This is not hagiography; Johnson's confrontational, provocative personality is on display throughout. Often the narrative includes the work of staff close to the president, including Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers. Woren’s performance handles all the challenging moments with the right level of respect. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
The Barnes & Noble Review
Lyndon Baines Johnson is the only Shakespearean president of our time. In the last hundred years, who else is there? There have been periodic attempts to claim this mantle for Nixon. But despite the magnitude of his crimes -- Laos and Cambodia, Watergate, the outright treason of trying to derail the Paris Peace Talks, there is no tragic dimension in Nixon's downfall because there is no horror in watching a crooked operator act like a crooked operator. By contrast, Obama's command of oratory and his stewardship of the country through a period of multiple crises also raises associations with the Bard -- but Obama, while certainly a complex man, was, crucially, an executive of great steadiness. The drama of which he was at the center, the drama of watching America's nervous breakdown at the prospect of a leader who wasn't white, wasn't visibly reflected in any expression of personal torment.
But LBJ? In his character one can spot the tragic outline: an awe-inspiring combination of daring and worship of conventional wisdom; an awareness of the immensity the social problems confronting America and cussed determination not to be cowed by them. He was a visionary who believed in the transformative power of politics and possessed a ruthless mastery of the way politics actually operates. He was, in the words of his best biographer Robert Dallek, a flawed giant. There is no denying LBJ's failures, and I do not mean to gloss over the young men who died in Vietnam because of those failures, which played out on a larger scale than most president's successes.
The conventional line on LBJ, particularly from the white Left, has been that whatever good intentions drove his gargantuan ambition to finish the business of FDR's New Deal through his own Great Society, they were undone by Johnson's choice to mire America deeper and deeper in Vietnam.
It's not entirely a wrong view, and it is, at root, the view of Joshua Zeitz's Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House. Zeitz, an editor at Politico, has conceived of his book as a kind of political version of an NFL instant replay. Anyone reading it will learn who was involved in what decisions, the nature of each player's relationship with LBJ, how they did or didn't work together, and what it was about each player's contribution, their foresight or shortsightedness, spelled success or failure. You will find out the money each legislative initiative required, and how well that money was spent. No one can read Zeitz's book and not come away from it with knowledge of the day-to-day workings of the Johnson White House.
All of this to say that Building the Great Society is a wonk's book. And at a time when the White House treats reality as a construct that they would like to banish, it might seem to be abetting that same delusion to insist that the magnitude of a president cannot solely be measured by the success of failure of individual legislature. But, as Norman Mailer insisted in his great political writing of the '60s, there is a spiritual side to politics that cannot be discounted if we are to take the measure of any president. What Zeitz cannot do here is bring to life the way in which LBJ's political ruthlessness, which was not enough to save his presidency, was also tied to a transformative moral vision. Yes, he understands and documents that LBJ had been a reliable part of the segregationist Southern Democrat voting bloc during his time in the Senate. And yes, he understands that LBJ had a more intimate relationship with poverty than his predecessor. It's not too much to say that Zeitz understands the noblesse oblige attitude at the heart of the Kennedy administration's often inadequate poverty and civil rights initiatives. (Which is why that famous footage of a clearly tormented Bobby Kennedy wordlessly trying to bring comfort to the desperately poor he encountered in Appalachia offers the sense of a man thunderstruck to his soul.)
But this is a book about the most colorful and profane and impassioned of presidents that has nothing in the way of humor or drama -- or, for that matter, good common dirt. It's not that Zeitz dislikes LBJ, or that he is indifferent to the peculiar character of the man. Among the most vivid elements of the book are the accounts of how LBJ overworked person after person on the White House staff, could be impatient and even cruel, and also suddenly solicitous and embracing. Zeitz understands what it meant to the White House staff to be invited into the First Family's living quarters for a cocktail reception. It had never happened during JFK's time, and it calls up Johnson's common touch, not an insignificant thing for a president whose focus was poverty and civil rights.
The victories are here: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the creation of Head Start and Medicare, the Fair Housing Act. Zeitz, commendably, understands that some of these acts were not as far reaching as some more liberal parties to them wished them to be. But he does not dismiss the belief in politics as the art of the possible with the cynicism masked as purity that is now all too common on the Left.
Zeitz's interests are not those of a storyteller, a prober of the nation's soul, or even a psychobiographer of the president at the heart of these changes. Even with only a little more than 300 pages of text, Building the Great Society has the feel of someone filling out an evaluation. Robert Dallek's two- volume LBJ bio managed a command of the detail of the workings of the White House without neglecting an overarching vision of his subject. For all the detail in Zeitz's book, you can help feeling there is more of LBJ in the ten pages of Ralph Ellison's essay "The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner," which concludes, "When all of the returns are in, perhaps President Johnson will have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American President for the poor and for Negroes, but this, as I see it, is a very great honor indeed."
During a recent city election I saw a poster for a young progressive candidate that proudly proclaimed "not a politician," as if this were a good thing. The disparaging of experience and expertise is not something we value in any other profession. (Do you know anyone who would prefer a less-experienced surgeon?) Experience, the ability to understand both how politics works and how to work it to the desired purpose, is somehow regarded as proof of corruption. Johnson was, above all, a politician. And if we now fear for the longevity of Medicare or the Voting Rights Act, it's worth remembering those things would not exist in the first place without his genius as a politician. This was a man obsessed with how he wanted to be remembered. It seems particularly cruel that the immortality given him is unique to him: that of a great president who is not beloved.
Charles Taylor has written for numerous publications, including Salon, The Boston Phoenix, and The New York Times Book Review.
Reviewer: Charles Taylor
Publishers Weekly
01/15/2018
In this probing study of domestic policy in the Johnson Administration, historian and journalist Zeitz (Lincoln’s Boys). argues that battles over civil rights and anti-poverty measures were as fierce as those over the Vietnam War. Zeitz examines the crafting and implementation of L.B.J.’s Great Society agenda: the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, which together profoundly changed American life and the role of government; food stamps, Head Start, and federal school-aid measures; and the controversial “community action” programs that funded citizens’ groups as they organized, protested, and sued local governments, which felt to beleaguered Democratic mayors like a war on them rather than a War on Poverty. Zeitz’s lively narrative foregrounds the personalities and power plays of Johnson’s White House staff—genteel press secretary Bill Moyers emerges as both a liberal idealist and a “ruthless” bureaucratic operator—under the tyrannical L.B.J., infamous for his castration taunts and compulsory nude pool parties. Zeitz also explores the sociology motivating the policy-makers; they were convinced that the poor could be better helped by social and cultural opportunity and integration than by redistributing money, a conviction that eventually foundered on economic slowdown and white backlash. Zeitz’s lucid account yields engrossing insights into one of America’s most hopeful, productive, and tragic political eras. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Building the Great Society
"Building the Great Society is endlessly absorbing, and astoundingly well-researched — all good historians do their homework, but Zeitz goes above and beyond. It's a more than worthwhile addition to the canon of books about Johnson.”
—NPR, Michael Schaub
“[A] well-researched and readable history of a vast governmental effort to make America anew.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Zeitz draws creatively on memoirs and White House documents. His tales… zip along with style.”
—The New Republic
“Zeitz’s lively narrative foregrounds the personalities and power plays of Johnson’s White House staff…[his] lucid account yields engrossing insights into one of America’s most hopeful, productive, and tragic political eras.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Zeitz presents accessible, nuanced portraits of the men behind Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic programs...[and] effectively demonstrates how Johnson assembled one of history’s most productive White House staffs: an amalgam of committed John F. Kennedy holdovers along with new talents from academia, the newspaper world, and think tanks."
—Library Journal
“Joshua Zeitz’s beautifully written book is not only a riveting portrait of LBJ and the talented men around him, but also a compelling reminder of what extraordinary political skill it took to enact the body of laws that made America a more humane and admirable society. Every officeholder in Washington would profit from reading this book.”
—Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 and Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life
“Zeitz argues convincingly that Johnson's team . . . quickly became a smoothly running and effective machine, accomplishing a great amount in a relatively short time . . . A timely reconsideration of the Johnson years.”
—Booklist
Praise for Joshua Zeitz and Lincoln's Boys
“A century before Harry Hopkins, Clark Clifford, or Ted Sorensen, John Hay and John Nicolay performed the duties of presidential aide, adviser, political operative, and confidant. Even the great Abraham Lincoln needed support, and Joshua Zeitz captures perfectly the intimate, interior world of the White House.”
—David Plouffe, former White House Senior Adviser
‟What a wonderful, welcome book. Zeitz has pulled off a difficult task—revealing how the myth of Lincoln came to be without distorting the true greatness of our extraordinary sixteenth president.ˮ
—Ken Burns (filmmaker)
“Joshua Zeitz’s delightful study of John Hay and John Nicolay interweaves intimate biography, political drama, and the shaping of historical memory to produce an arresting and original narrative. Above all, it reminds us that, thanks to Lincoln’s secretaries, the moral dimensions of the emancipationist Civil War could not be bleached from the historical record by an increasingly fashionable understanding of the struggle as a romantic ‘brothers’ conflict.’”
—Richard Carwardine, author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power
“Abraham Lincoln was blessed with truly first-rate biographers in John Nicolay and John Hay, so it is ‘altogether fitting and proper’ that Nicolay and Hay have now attracted a terrific chronicler of their own life and times in Joshua Zeitz. This fine book traces the extraordinary evolution of Lincoln’s two private secretaries from clerks into tireless historians and rabid keepers of the flame. Historians have long remembered their roles as canny observers of the White House during the Civil War, but this study adds much fascinating new material about their peerless role in crafting and preserving the Lincoln image.”
—Harold Holzer, author of The Civil War in 50 Objects
“Beautifully researched and written, it restores to full stature two figures who might have been young, but left a deep mark upon history. Highly recommended.”
—Ted Widmer, former presidential speechwriter and author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City
APRIL 2018 - AudioFile
Dan Woren provides a clear, authoritative tone in his performance of Zeitz’s meticulous audiobook on the political maneuverings of the Johnson presidency. Listeners expecting a sweeping overview of LBJ’s life and career should note that this work focuses on Johnson’s efforts to build coalitions to enact the programs that comprised the sweeping policy changes of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, and the War on Poverty. Zeitz’s work is both concise and exhaustive. This is not hagiography; Johnson's confrontational, provocative personality is on display throughout. Often the narrative includes the work of staff close to the president, including Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers. Woren’s performance handles all the challenging moments with the right level of respect. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-10-31
A behind-the-scenes study of Lyndon Baines Johnson's presidency."He was a crass political operator and liberal idealist," Politico contributing editor Zeitz (Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image, 2014, etc.) says about his complex subject, "an unbridled opportunist and steadfast champion of the poor, a southern temporizer and civil rights trailblazer, a progressive hero and bête noire of the antiwar Left." Beginning with John F. Kennedy's final days and ending with Richard Nixon's rise to power, the author embarks on a fine-grained exploration of LBJ's Great Society. More specifically, Zeitz zeroes in on the many players in LBJ's administration, including, among many others, Jack Valenti, Horace Busby, Bill Moyers, Walter Heller, Richard Goodwin, and Abe Fortas. The author walks readers through the difficulties Johnson encountered passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1966, his notorious "War on Poverty," the implementation of life-changing initiatives such as Medicare, and the relentless situation in Vietnam. Though it's easy to remember Johnson as the president who led the war in Vietnam, Zeitz reminds us of many other elements of his presidency, especially his efforts to integrate and end race disputes. In what is an extremely detailed account of a highly controversial presidency—one that attempted to address and resolve issues that are, unfortunately, still around today—the author offers his readers a red flag: we must wake up to the fact that many of today's significant issues are not new, and we must look to the lessons of the past to continue in the footsteps of all those who have tried so hard to build a better society. "Even as this book goes to print," writes the author, "the enduring value of the Great Society is no longer an academic question or political talking point but instead a real-world concern." Refreshingly, the only real change today is that women have come to occupy increasingly influential roles in the administrations that followed.An enlightening look at the political foundations of 20th-century hope.
