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Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. By Robert Dallek. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. xiv + 721 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-505435-0.)
As evidenced by the breadth of Robert Dallek's research for this volume, surely he shares a measure of the unbounded energy that impelled Lyndon B. Johnson to drive himself and his staff through long days and nights and weekends of work.
Dallek is the first academic historian to undertake a comprehensive biography of the thirty-sixth president. He plans to complete it in two volumes, but he does note Russell Baker's description of Johnson himself as "a flesh and blood, three-volume biography." An author who reduced it to writing, Baker suggested, might need a fourth volume "to set things right."
Baker, along with friends, contemporaries, and biographers alike,...