HISTORY / POLITICS

Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House

Joshua Zeitz

Viking

Hardcover, 978-0-525-42878-7, 400 pages, $30.00  (also available in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats)

January 2018

Reviewed by Si Dunn

Trump and the Republican Party keep saying they want to “unwind” Barack Obama’s political legacy. Yet what’s also under threat are major achievements of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, according to historian Joshua Zeitz in this important, informative new book, Building the Great Society.

Zeitz writes: “It was no small accomplishment to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was another matter entirely to have it mean something — to leverage the full weight of the federal government to desegregate public and private institutions peacefully throughout one-third of the United States.”

The author also notes that “[p]ersuading Congress to enact a steady profusion of liberal initiatives was a crowning achievement…. [F]ew presidents have left in place so sweeping a list of positive domestic achievements.”

A central focus in Zeitz’s new work is that it was not easy to work for the bigger-than-life Texas politician. Yet a well-meshed team of presidential aides made legislative victories happen.

LBJ “had no interests outside politics,” Zeitz writes. “He did not read books. He played no sport. What he did was work — eighteen hours each day, unceasingly — and he expected his aides to be as wholly consumed by the art of politics as was he.”

Zeitz notes that “Charles Schultz, who succeeded Kermit Gordon as budget director, recalled that LBJ ‘relaxed in ways that would tire me.’ On the ranch, he drove his guests at frenetic speeds and talked politics. On the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, he cornered captive friends, staff members, and congressmen and talked politics. ‘It isn’t that Johnson abuses people,’ a holdover from the Kennedy administration told Teddy [Theodore H.] White. ‘He simply dehydrates them.’”

Thrown into the White House after the JFK assassination, LBJ drew from a mixed bag of East Coast Kennedy aides and aides from Austin and other parts of the Lone Star State. Despite dire predictions, “Johnson assembled an ad hoc staff that defied the expectations of even the most cynical Washington hands,” Zeitz writes.

While the current White House has seemed to possess a revolving personnel door, LBJ showed excellent team-building skills. “Having cut his political teeth as a congressional aide and, later, as Texas state director of the National Youth Administration, Lyndon Johnson had long appreciated the value of staff….During his two terms in the Senate, and especially during his six years as majority leader, he assembled what was arguably the most talented bench of speechwriters, policy experts, and legislative draftsmen in the institution’s history.”

Adding photographs of top aides within the LBJ Administration (such as Walter Jenkins, Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, Horace Busby and others), would have helped this book be more informative for readers outside Washington’s Beltway. Still, Building the Great Society again demonstrates that Zeitz is a talented writer with excellent credentials for delving into American political history. His previous books include a 2014 best seller, Lincoln’s Boys.

* * * * *