LBJ: A Life (review)

Irwin Unger and Debi Unger, LBJ: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. 586 pp. $30.00.

Irwin Unger, the author of an important study of the Great Society, and his wife, Debi, have written a useful but derivative biography of Lyndon Johnson. Their book is a lively synthesis that relies primarily on previous biographies of Johnson as well as memoirs written by his associates. Conspicuously missing, except for the oral histories, are any references to the rich archival holdings of the Johnson presidential library.

The authors are at their best in tracing Johnson's political career and showing the impact of his dynamic but unstable personality. They succeed in drawing a sharp contrast between Johnson's mastery of Congress and the legislative process and his deep insecurity in dealing with international affairs.

The Ungers show that Johnson's foreign policy views reflected the prevailing mindset of his generation. He staunchly opposed isolationism in the l930s, fought against the appeasement of dictators, and supported Franklin Roosevelt's interventionist policies before Pearl Harbor. With the onset of the Cold War Johnson backed Harry Truman's policy of containment in Europe and Asia, sharing the common view that appeasement, as demonstrated by the Munich agreement of 1938, was the greatest sin of all. When Johnson endorsed the Marshall Plan in 1948, he proclaimed that the goal was to "keep Stalin from overrunning the world" (p. 131).

This Cold War orthodoxy fatally shaped Johnson's stand on the Vietnam War. He saw the struggle there as a clear case of aggression by North Vietnam against a sovereign South Vietnam, rather than a civil war being fought to determine the future of the whole nation. In 1967 Johnson declared that the United States had to "honor its responsibility and its commitment to help Vietnam turn back aggression from the North" (p. 396). The Ungers also attribute Johnson's fiasco in Vietnam to his own inner doubts and his excessive reliance on foreign policy advisers who reinforced his determination not to appease aggressors. It is ironic, the authors note, that these same "wise men"--Dean Acheson, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge--were the ones who finally convinced Johnson to reverse course in 1968. The tragedy of Johnson's flawed Vietnam policy stemmed in large measure from his reluctance to follow his own instincts, which placed a higher priority on his Great Society program at home. As he confided to Doris Kearns in 1970, he realized at the outset that "if I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--in order to get involved in that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home" (p. 320).

The Ungers pay far more attention to domestic policy than to foreign affairs in the Johnson presidency. They barely mention such topics as the intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, the Six Day Mideast War in 1967, and Johnson's efforts to promote nuclear arms control, which led ultimately to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Interim Offensive Accord of 1972. Thus, they give the misleading impression that Johnson's concern with world affairs began and ended with Vietnam.

Despite this imbalance the Ungers provide a well-written and reliable one- volume account of Johnson's life and political career. Their book lacks the elaborate documentation of Robert Dallek's two-volume biography, which draws heavily on declassified primary sources. But they do offer a fair and balanced view of a very controversial president, unlike the one-sided volumes written by Robert Caro. Although the Ungers minimize Johnson's role in foreign policy in general, they succeed in presenting a coherent and illuminating account of how and why he went wrong in Vietnam.

 

Reviewed by Robert A. Divine,
University of Texas at Austin

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