Ronnie Dugger is a scholar, journalist, author, and deeply rooted Texan who witnessed firsthand the career of Lyndon Johnson, who is here portrayed as an enormously energetic man of equally enormous contradictions. His inherited populism was at odds with and, in the end, was destroyed by his lust for power. He was a liberal who nonetheless played toady to oil, power, and construction interests; a politician who worked to make a better life for the poor and yet shamelessly used politics to become wealthy; a true macho frontiersman who stayed home when war came and glorified his one combat experience for political gain. Here, also, is the other Johnson: the president who, the author believes, did more for civil rights than any president including Lincoln. This book is not only a biography of Lyndon Johnson but an attempt to understand fifty years of American history, the period the author calls the Johnson Era.