The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson

September 30, 1991
Califano, Lyndon Johnson's chief domestic adviser during the last three and a half years of his presidency, was perhaps closer to him on a daily basis than anyone else throughout that embattled period: ``I watched him laugh, swear, get angry, cry, get hurt, hurt others, dream, and achieve things most everyone thought impossible.'' The man who stalks boisterously and often boorishly through these pages was ever the consummate politician, even as the Vietnam war shackled his dreams of the Great Society and sapped his political will. Appalled and shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, Johnson, the author shows, nonetheless found a way to exploit both tragedies for his own good as well as for the country's. ``Brave and brutal, compassionate and cruel, incredibly intelligent and infuriatingly insensitive,'' he was a chief executive who, as the author amply demonstrates, changed the country more than most realize. Califano, who went on to become secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, has written an intimate, balanced and basically sympathetic portrait of the 36th president.