Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973.

By Robert Dallek Oxford University Press, $35

Two scenes in the White House, 1968: An evening in April. Lyndon Johnson has invited Nelson Rockefeller and his wife to the executive mansion. Three weeks earlier, Johnson had announced he would not run for re-election. Now, over dinner in the family quarters, the president -- dissatisfied with all the Democratic candidates hoping to succeed him -- urges Rockefeller to go after the Republican nomination. Johnson tells the New York governor that he would never campaign against him because "you've been a longtime friend."

Fast-forward to Sept. 15 of the same year. The white House visitor now is evangelist Billy Graham, bearing a gift in the form of a memorandum from Richard Nixon. Nixon, having easily crushed Rockefeller's late-blooming candidacy, wants to further chill Johnson's already lukewarm support for Hubert Humphrey. The memo, hand-written by Graham from Nixon's dictation, oozes flattery:

"1) ... [I] would never embarrass him after the election. I respect him as a man and as the president. He is the hardest working and most dedicated president in 140 years.

"2) I want a working relationship with him ... and will seek his advice continually.

"3) Want you [President Johnson] to go on special assignments after the election, perhaps to foreign countries.

"4) I must point out some of the weaknesses and failures of the administration. But will never reflect on Mr. Johnson personally.

"5) When Vietnam is settled he [Nixon] will give you [President Johnson] a major share of credit -- because you ... deserve it.

"6) Will do everything to make you ... a place in history because you deserve it."

Graham goes over the Nixon memo with Johnson. He later recalls that "the president asked me to read these points twice. Then he took the paper from my hand and studied it for a moment but I could see he was having difficulty reading my writing. He then said, `Let me give you answers point by point.' The substance of his answers were warm appreciation. He said, `I intend to loyally support Mr. Humphrey, but if Mr. Nixon becomes president-elect, I will do all in my power to cooperate with him.'"

Robert Dallek's Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 provides much fascinating detail -- including an assertion by some Humphrey aides that Johnson had Humphrey's telephones tapped during the 1968 campaign. But though the book is rich in anecdote, it is much more: It is in fact the best balanced and most thorough account produced, or likely to be produced, about the ill-starred Johnson administration. (Flawed Giant is the second part of a two-volume biography. The first, Lone Star Rising, dealt with Johnson's early life and congressional career.)

The central theme running through the book, as it ran through the Johnson presidency, is the parallel development of the two major issues that preoccupied Johnson in his five years as president -- The Great Society and Vietnam. The first was Johnson's great dream; the other, his worst nightmare. One proved his great strength and expertise as a domestic political legislative leader; the other exposed his gravest shortcomings as a diplomatic and military strategist. The Great Society program slowed and ultimately came to a dead stop as the Vietnam war grew and grew until it finally shattered the entire administration.

All this Dallek reports authoritatively and in great detail so that the reader cannot fail to see how these two issues became intertwined in mortal embrace. The result is a masterful account of both issues. At the end, Dallek offers his own judgment. On the Great Society: "Like FDR's New Deal, Johnson's poverty war and reach for a Great Society may seem somewhat outdated or inadequate to current challenges, but the humanizing force behind them abides and gives both men historical standing as visionaries who helped advance the national well-being and fulfill the promise of American life ..." And on Vietnam: "The principal products of administration discussions about the fighting were false hopes, self-generated illusions, and paranoid fears of domestic opponents, who were not the communist dupes Johnson believed them to be but men and women as devoted to the national security and well-being as anyone in the government and military."

One consistent theme running throughout the book is Johnson's obsessive contempt for the press. "Reporters are puppets," he told historian Doris Kearns. "They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings. ... Every story is always slanted to win the favor of someone who sits somewhere higher up. There is no such thing as an objective story." Johnson and his aides lived by that rule, feeding inside dope to reporters they thought were friendly -- and trying to freeze out or intimidate those who were considered hostile. Reporters regularly assigned to cover Johnson (myself included) were of course aware of his extreme sensitivity to anything written or broadcast about him. But we had no idea of the depth of his rage and the strength of his obsession on the subject. Particularly on Vietnam, he played hardball, referring to reporters who wrote stories he did not like as "communists" who were unpatriotic and endangering "national security." He proposed to have a New York Times reporter expelled from Vietnam after he wrote an article saying the war was a "stalemate" in mid-1967. Johnson also suggested imposing censorship on news dispatches from Vietnam. Fortunately for his reputation -- and his country -- other officials talked him out of both moves.

Dallek spent seven years researching and writing this book, but he does not claim to fully understand his subject. He cites Russell Baker's, comment that Johnson was "a human puzzle so complicated that nobody could ever understand it." Dallek seems to agree. "It may be that future biographers will have superior methods for deciphering a man of such uncommon ambition, capacity, and energy," he writes. "But whether they do or not, it is difficult to believe that they will ever fully agree on how to assess this larger-than-life figure. ... Johnson was one of those great success stories posing the question: Did he reach such great heights and ultimately fall so far because of or despite his inner demons?"

CHARLES W. BAILEY, a former Washington correspondent for The Minneapolis Tribune, is a member of the editorial advisory board of The Washington Monthly.