Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 - Softcover

Flawed Giant has a number of surprising revelations about Johnson's behavior after declining to run for re-election in 1968.―Daily News

An historical biographical tour de force. Once again, the author displays extraordinary diligence in thorough research and balanced presentation.... Flawed Giant is far from ordinary biography.―Richmond Times-Dispatch

Lyndon B. Johnson could have been a contender for Mount Rushmore until his Presidency ran aground in Vietnam―a tragedy that is deftly explored in this readable portrait by a noted historian.―People

A substantial work, rewarding for those still grappling to understand the 1960's.―The Commercial Appeal

To read Robert Dallack's new book on LBJ is to be transported back to the era that he helped make so angry and turbulent.... Flawed Giant captures in unforgiving detail a president whose flaws were tragically larger than life.―Chicago Tribune

Dallek has written history that has the unresolvability of great drama.―Salon Magazine

It's difficult to imagine a more definitive biography of America's embattled president than the 754-page story of the most important 12 years in the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Flawed Giant draws on interviews with hundreds of people closest to Johnson.... this book is exhaustively researched and gracefully written.―Naples Daily News

Dallek writes with clarity and pace. He weaves an enormous amount of detailed information into tightly focused chapters, concluding each with a few crisp, terse paragraphs of summary judgment. It is thus an easy book to read, and frequently compelling.―Philadelphia Inquirer Online

Poised, scholarly, and readable.―The New Yorker

Dallek utilizes the mammoth documentation available at the LBJ Library and recently released telephone tapes to provide a comprehensive study of the Johnson presidency that far outdistances earlier works. It is both sympathetic and critical.―The News & Observer

Lone Star Rising, the first volume in Robert Dallek's biography of LBJ, was hailed as "a triumphant portrait of Lyndon Johnson as rich and oversized and complex as the nation that shaped him." Now, in the final volume, Dallek takes us through Johnson's tumultuous years in the White House, his unprecedented accomplishments there, and the tragic war that would be his downfall.
In these pages Johnson emerges as a character of almost Shakespearean dimensions, a man riddled with contradictions, a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Drawing on hundreds of newly released tapes and extensive interviews with those closest to LBJ―including fresh insights from Ladybird and his press secretary Bill Moyers―Dallek takes us behind the scenes to give us a portrait of Johnson that is at once even-handed and completely engrossing. We see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare, environmental protection, and the establishment of the National Endowment of the Arts and Humanities to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see for the first time the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam, a war he did not want to expand and which destroyed his hopes for The Great Society and a second term.
Exhaustively researched and gracefully written, Flawed Giant reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of the most extravagant characters ever to step onto the presidential stage.