I am a man of ambition. Lesser ambition than some, my ambition extend towards actually reading Caro's magnum opus on LBJ. But until volume five arrives, there's Goodwin's biography. Goodwin has the advantage of personal knowledge. She was a White House fellow working on the Great Society, even as she was an anti-war figure on the New Left. After his presidency, she collaborated on his failed memoirs. When she speaks of the LBJ charm, the way that he could make you the center of the universe or freeze you out entire, it is from personal experience. This very closeness is both the strength and weakness of the book. As much as she is an expert, Goodwin uses a rather hoary psychodynamic theoretical paradigm, explaining Johnson's actions in relation to his mother and his childhood. The book becomes as much about Johnson's perceptions of events as the events themselves.

Johnson's early childhood was centered around his mother, an intellectual and aesthetic woman stifled by the strictures of Texas society, and his slightly disreputable and perennially hustling father, an entrepreneur and local politician in the prairie populist vein. Through his early career, Johnson made an art of two principles of power. The first was apprenticeship to powerful men, from the head of his college to leaders in the House and Senate. The second was master of hidden structures of meeting scheduling, office space, and using agenda setting to toss out a complacent old guard in favor of Johnson. For LBJ power was defined by patronage and negotiation. He could get you what you wanted, as long as you gave him what he wanted, which seemed like an eminently reasonable trade at the time. But what Johnson really wanted was 'just a little appreciation for what he did'. The goal of Johnson's political maneuvers was always to cast the other party into a potentially limitless sense of obligation, a tactic which worked against equals who had their own bases of support.

Johnson's ascension to the presidency meant that he had no equals. Final able to wield power, fettered only by the Constitution, Johnson embarked on his Great Society, a mass of new social programs. He also escalated America's involvement in Vietnam, seeing it as a necessary test of America's commitment to its allies and principles. Both endeavors ended in fiasco. Vietnam became a quagmire, the strategy of 'controlled escalation bombing' a fiasco. Distracted by the war, Johnson did not devote his talents to the Great Society, and its programs were consumed in a similar quagmire. A master of small groups, Johnson froze when speaking before a large audience, when he was unable to understand and mirror their psychological needs. The public image he had crafted of the all-powerful technocrat crumbled under the realities of the late 60s. Johnson had carefully avoided testing his public support, trusting in a 'solid center' that turned out not to exist after the early primaries.

This is often a fascinating book, and best when it quotes Johnson extensively. But it's also oddly underspecified for a serious history, without much of a sense of the details of the time. At something like 10% of the pagecount of Caro's books, less detail is a natural authorial choice, but this book may go too far in the other direction.