title: Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: White House Years
author: Joseph Califano
description: Califano, Lyndon Johnson's chief domestic adviser during the last three and a half years of his presidency, was perhaps closer to him on a daily basis than anyone else throughout that embattled period: "I watched him laugh, swear, get angry, cry, get hurt, hurt others, dream, and achieve things most everyone thought impossible." The man who stalks boisterously and often boorishly through these pages was ever the consummate politician, even as the Vietnam war shackled his dreams of the Great Society and sapped his political will. Appalled and shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, Johnson, the author shows, nonetheless found a way to exploit both tragedies for his own good as well as for the country's. "Brave and brutal, compassionate and cruel, incredibly intelligent and infuriatingly insensitive," he was a chief executive who, as the author amply demonstrates, changed the country more than most realize. Califano, who went on to become secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, has written an intimate, balanced and basically sympathetic portrait of the 36th president. <br />Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  BROTHERHOOD OF WAR 7 
   
  New Breed 
   
     
   
     
   
   (One) 
   
     
   
   The White HouseWashington,D.C. 12 December 1963 
   
     
   
   Lyndon Baines Johnson, the President Of the United, States, was sitting on a 
  small couch in the Oval Office. Following the assassination of John Fitzgerald 
  Kennedy twenty days before, Johnson had acceded to the presidency. This was 
  enough time for Johnson to grow to like what he was doing. The President was 
  holding a squat glass dark withKentucky sour mash bourbon whiskey. He had 
  removed his jacket, revealing that he held up his trousers with suspenders. And he 
  had draped his arm on the back of the couch and his right leg on the cushion. 
   
   Walter Cronkite, reporting the "Evening news," spoke of events that caused the 
  President of theUnited States to shake his head and mutter an obscenity. And then 
  the CBS Broadcasting System paused for the delivery of a commercial message. 
   
   As the President raised his bourbon to his mouth, the door to the Oval O