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

Abstract

Everything about Lyndon B. Johnson was larger than life: his stature, his personality, and his prodigious political talents, passions, and flaws. So large did he loom that for fifty years after his presidency his presence tended to deflect scholarly attention from those who served him. At long last, Joshua Zeitz's crisp narrative moves Johnson's long-overshadowed supporting cast to center stage. Johnson's men (and Zeitz's principal subjects were all men—Johnson's senior secretary and confidante, Juanita Roberts, is mentioned only once in passing) have not entirely escaped scrutiny heretofore. Books on the origins of the Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, and the civil rights struggle have dealt extensively with Johnson administration figures great and small, from Sargent Shriver to Walt Rostow. But unlike past treatments in which such figures served as characters moving a story much larger than themselves, Zeitz aims to make their work the story itself. Zeitz focuses on ten men who were most devoted to Johnson: the presidential assistants Joseph A. Califano, S. Douglass Cater, Jack Valenti, and Horace Busby; the president's personal lawyer and later associate justice of the Supreme Court, Abraham Fortas; the presidential counsel Harry C. McPherson; the speechwriter Richard Goodwin; the press secretaries Bill Moyers and George Reedy; and Johnson's loyal factotum Walter Jenkins.