Lyndon Baines Johnson

The definitive short biography of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, based on Robert Dallek's award-winning biographies.

Robert Dallek is among the country's most prolific and authoritative presidential biographers. Lyndon Johnson is arguably the president to whom he has devoted his most intensive archival research. This short biography, an adaptation of his two-volume magisterial biography, traces this presidential life from the Texas Hill Country to the House and Senate to the White House. It narrates his passage of a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved, as well as his continuation of the war in Vietnam. This brief work conveys Johnson as 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."

This volume is being timed to coordinate with the 50th anniversary of Johnson's death.

Robert Dallek is the author of many works of presidential history, including his two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant (OUP); Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power; An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963; Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life; and How
Did We Get Here?: From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He lives in Washington, DC.