Word: dugger
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...POLITICIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LYNDON JOHNSON by Ronnie Dugger Norton; 514 pages...
...history record that in 1967, at the height of the Viet Nam War, President Lyndon Johnson was visited several times in the White House by God. As Ronnie Dugger reports in this scrupulous, generally disapproving account of the 36th President's rise to power, the Creator would appear around 2 or 3 a.m. when Johnson received his daily reports from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Dugger does not disclose what the Commander in Chief was told by his Commander in Chief, but he does recount that on one occasion Johnson "prayed on his knees for an hour...
That is about the only L.B.J. boast left unquestioned by Dugger, a respected publisher of the muckraking semimonthly Texas Observer. Every other Johnsonian swagger, pronunciamento and claim is held up to the light for flaws and cracks. According to The Politician, Johnson had a million of them. Dugger interviewed the President at length in 1967 and 1968 but broke off their sessions when L.B.J. began pressing for a puff piece. No one can accuse the author of delivering one. His book is very light on endearing anecdotes, and it is unlikely to match in sweep and detail the first volume...
...Dugger takes the Johnson saga from the great-great-grandfather who did not fight at the Alamo as Johnson once boasted, through Grandfather Sam E. Johnson, who did not found Johnson City, Texas, as L.B.J. once claimed, to Father Sam Jr., a progressive state legislator who never realized his ambition of becoming a Congressman. Young Lyndon learned the art of the possible by tagging along as his dad cut deals and pulled strings, and when the older man turned to drink, Lyndon's iron-minded mother lashed the boy onward. She had him, at age four, reciting the Preamble...
...beginning of his career, says Dugger, Johnson was a fawning sycophant on the lookout for a useful mentor. He used his role as editor of the campus paper at Southwest Texas State Teachers College to flatter the school's president, who had made Johnson his assistant. Winning a Senate seat in 1948 by 87 votes out of nearly 1 million cast, "Landslide Lyndon" set about cultivating Georgia's powerful Richard Russell. He would invite Russell to dinner and coach his daughters to call the man Uncle Dick. That campaign paid off. When Russell was in line to become...