{"id":1382,"date":"2018-12-31T16:57:43","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:57:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2018-12-31T16:57:43","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:57:43","slug":"lone-star-book-reviews-53","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1382","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

HISTORY \/ POLITICS<\/p>\n

Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson\u2019s White House<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Joshua Zeitz<\/span><\/p>\n

Viking<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-0-525-42878-7, 400 pages, $30.00\u00a0 (also available in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats)<\/p>\n

January 2018<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Si Dunn<\/p>\n

Trump and the Republican Party keep saying they want to \u201cunwind\u201d Barack Obama\u2019s political legacy.<\/span> Yet what\u2019s also under threat are major achievements of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, according to historian Joshua Zeitz<\/span> in this important, informative new book, Building the Great Society.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zeitz writes: \u201cIt 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 \u2014 to leverage the full weight of the federal government to desegregate public and private institutions peacefully throughout one-third of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

The author also notes that \u201c[p]ersuading Congress to enact a steady profusion of liberal initiatives was a crowning achievement\u2026. [F]ew presidents have left in place so sweeping a list of positive domestic achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n

A central focus in Zeitz\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

LBJ \u201chad no interests outside politics,\u201d Zeitz writes. \u201cHe did not read books. He played no sport. What he did was work \u2014 eighteen hours each day, unceasingly \u2014 and he expected his aides to be as wholly consumed by the art of politics as was he.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zeitz notes that \u201cCharles Schultz, who succeeded Kermit Gordon as budget director, recalled that LBJ \u2018relaxed in ways that would tire me.\u2019 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. \u2018It isn’t that Johnson abuses people,\u2019 a holdover from the Kennedy administration told Teddy [Theodore H.] White. \u2018He simply dehydrates them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cJohnson assembled an ad hoc staff that defied the expectations of even the most cynical Washington hands,\u201d Zeitz writes.<\/p>\n

While the current White House has seemed to possess a revolving personnel door, LBJ showed excellent team-building skills. \u201cHaving 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\u2026.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\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Beltway. Still, Building the Great Society<\/span> 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\u2019s Boys.<\/span><\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com HISTORY \/ POLITICS Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson\u2019s White House Joshua Zeitz Viking Hardcover, 978-0-525-42878-7, 400 pages, $30.00\u00a0 (also available in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats) January 2018 Reviewed by Si Dunn Trump and the Republican Party keep saying they want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}