The most liberal president of the 20th century

None of this excuses the very real harm LBJ did. His passion for civil rights stands side by side with his allowing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to direct a massive smear campaign against King. Hoover went so far as to violate FBI policy by deciding not to inform King of threats against his life, and even mailing to his home an audiotape, made from wiretaps, of King's extramarital affairs with a note suggesting that King kill himself to keep the tape from becoming public. Kotz details how LBJ aide Bill Moyers gave FBI agent Cartha "Deke" DeLoach the go-ahead to disseminate the bureau's surveillance on King. (Kotz tells of an FBI agent trying to persuade Atlanta Constitution editor Eugene Patterson to publish a story of King's affairs. Patterson refused, telling the agent, "What you're doing is the story ... the federal police force of the United States doing this to an individual citizen." Does anyone believe an editor today would show that discretion?)

Kotz writes of how much LBJ feared Hoover's power. He does not excuse Johnson for giving that thug so much leeway, but he doesn't make the mistake so many have made with Johnson and take that as the whole of the man.

Kotz tells the story of the relationship between Johnson and King as a tale of the tenuous marriage of idealism and pragmatism. It's to Kotz's credit that he does not depict it as an either/or choice. Which is what makes his section on the 1964 Democratic Convention and the MFDP so irresolvable. You feel how disgusted the MFDP and its supporters were at the prospect of seating a delegation controlled by the Mississippi Democratic Party, a power structure that intimidated blacks and protected the murderers of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney, and the killers of many others. At the same time, there is no doubt what a catastrophe a walkout on the part of the Mississippi delegation would have been: It would have triggered a walkout by other Southern delegates and seriously weakening LBJ's chance of reelection. So the unquestionable morality of seating the MFDP butts heads with this chilling potentiality: President Goldwater.

I came to "Judgment Days" wondering what there was left to say about this subject and these two men after Dallek's "Lone Star Rising," after the two volumes already published of Taylor Branch's trilogy "America in the King Years," after the documentary "Eyes on the Prize." I should have realized that, like World War II, the civil rights era is a seemingly inexhaustible storehouse of narrative, and like World War II, an era in which America had to decide whether it was willing to live up to its stated principles.

Specifically, by keeping his focus on the relationship between Johnson and King in the years from 1963 to 1968, Kotz has allowed us to see the struggle of each to balance idealism and pragmatism. He may focus more on Johnson than King (as I have), but Johnson is a figure whose achievements are less acknowledged than they should be. And Kotz has found an ineluctable sadness in both men. Kotz writes on the insecurities of Johnson and King with what you might call empathetic bafflement. King, perpetually weary from an exhausting schedule and with a mournful fatalism toward the martyrdom he expected at any moment, and LBJ, as ruthless and effective a politician as America has ever produced, but also one who wanted the public's love and knew he would not have it, who was not even satisfied with his crushing defeat of Goldwater (he wanted to know how anyone could have voted for his opponent) -- each of them were contradictions. But both were visionaries convinced of the morality of their cause and racked by constant, nagging self-doubt. Committed to civil rights, they were shadowed by Vietnam, a stalking ghost through the story of "Judgment Days," ready to swallow it whole. It is a measure of their mutual achievement and of their personal sadness that you put down "Judgment Days" believing them, on some essential, irreducible level, brothers under the skin.

-- Editor's note: This story has been corrected since its original publication. --

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