Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960.

AMERICAN liberals these days are having some of the same difficulties as Russian Communists. Not only is the faith dying; the saints are being exposed as scoundrels, even monsters. New research has been unkind to Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Lyndon Johnson.

Thanks largely to Robert Caro, who is only halfway through his projected four-volume biography of Johnson, LBJ's reputation has suffered worst. Caro has put him squarely in the monster category, showing him as a man who would stop at nothing in his quest for power and wealth.

Robert Dallek's Lone Star Rising is a liberal's attempt to restore Johnson to the pantheon of "great" Presidents. Caro so far has brought Johnson's career up to 1948, the year he stole the Texas senatorial nomination from Coke Stevenson; Dallek's book, the first of two parts, covers LBJ's life up to 1960, the year he was elected Vice President. Comparisons between the two biographies are irresistible.

Caro's two volumes have been attacked as lurid in their portrayal of Johnson as a villain of mammoth dimensions; his account of the 1948 race, a gripping epic of skulduggery, has been accused of glorifying Stevenson for the purpose of blackening Johnson. Dallek doesn't try to compete with Caro's novelistic detail and narrative propulsion, but he does argue that the case was more ambiguous. Stuffing ballot boxes was common in Texas then; nobody can be sure, Dallek says, which man would have won in an honest race.

This argument doesn't say much for Johnson; at most, it proves he was no worse than his environment. But Dallek's version simply doesn't cope with the enormous mass of evidence, testimony, and overall coherence Caro provides. When you read Caro, you feel you have been with LBJ on the campaign trail; you can almost smell his sweat as he drives himself, enduring the agony of a gallstone he couldn't stop to have treated, to get every possible vote by hook or by crook.

Moreover, Dallek confirms Caro in spite of himself. He gives strong grounds for suspecting that Johnson's people prevented a recount through furtive contact with Justice Hugo Black, who helped save LBJ's bacon with a crucial ruling. And to his credit, Dallek has unearthed other evidence of Johnson's illegal secret maneuverings throughout his career, as in his acquisition of radio and TV stations in his wife's name.

Dallek has done heroic research, and he fashions it into a consistently readable story. Yet, having read Caro's version, one can't help feeling that Dallek is missing the point of that story. A professional historian (at UCLA), he shrinks from certain large inferences toward which his data point. This might do honor to his scrupulousness; at times Caro seems to rush to judgment. All the same, the facts bear Caro out. There is too much in the record that establishes Johnson's venality, ruthlessness, and downright cruelty. His life seems a gloss on Burke's remark, "Criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred." LBJ's means included bullying, bribery, and blackmail; his inveterate habit of collecting dirt on colleagues played a large part in making him, as they say, "the most effective Majority Leader in the history of the Senate." His wiretapping of King was all in a day's work.

To be sure, there was more to Johnson than criminal tactics; the power of his personality is legendary. Few could resist him importunate approaches; he had a genius for sensing and pulling every individual's psychic levers. In one-on-one encounters, he was overpowering. To read Dallek's account of his years in the Senate is to marvel at the tactical brilliance of a man whose pursuit of power was utterly single-minded, unimpeded by any principle whatever.

This, unfortunately, is what Dallek seems not to comprehend. He keeps repeating that Johnson had a "genuine concern" for common folk and minorities, as shown by his support for every imaginable federal program; but this is like saying that a peddler of patent medicines has a genuine concern for the sick. Johnson's treatment of his underlings, driving and sometimes humiliating them, does not suggest pity as his ruling passion; he favored state interventions on all occasions because that was his line. He was a man of the State, who would have risen to power with equal skill and amorality in any political system. The more constituents he could find for his cure-all, the more his own power was enhanced. Nobody has found a single case where Johnson's concern for human suffering led him to oppose state intervention.

Dallek seems to me not to be following the facts where they lead him, but to be softening his interpretation of LBJ's actual conduct in order to preserve his prior assumption that Johnson's Great Society established him as a great President. Of course a conservative, a libertarian, or a strict constructionist will simply reply that Johnson used bad means to achieve bad ends. And this is enough to make sense of the whole story. Johnson's lust for power and his greed for money were the only constants in his life, whether he was working within the law or against it; and they also shaped the way he made law. His generosity to the downtrodden consisted entirely in spending other people's money on them and reducing other people;s freedoms for their sake.

Lyndon Johnson was not a man on whom subtlety should be wasted. Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, a liberal, said it all: "He was a typical Texan wheeler-dealer with no ethical sense whatever, but a great pragmatic ability to get things done." Dallek, on the whole, likes the things he got done, so that his judgment is more clouded--and cloudy--than Carol's (though Caro too seems to approve of the Great Society). The result is that Johnson and such henchmen as Abe Fortas and bobby Baker come to roguish life in Caro's version, whereas in Dallek's they are relatively nebulous entities constructed from documents. Dallke's effort, estimable in many ways, is ill served by the controlling theory that LBJ was a humanitarian at heart. Can it be accidental that all the putative good he did also happened to serve his own turn every time? Was his manifest ability to switch principles at the drop of a Stetson just part of his odyssey toward liberal principles? did the big furtive campaign donations he received from businessmen issue from public-spiritedness?

If you take the view that the more laws passed, the better, then Lyndon Johnson was a great President. But such bland approval of his record forces you to ignore the significance of half of what he did--and especially the way he did it. What emerges from every account of Johnson's career is that he used both cajolery and fear to control those around him. Dallek captures the cajolery, with obvious admiration; he even confronts a good deal of Johnson's deviousness; but he misses the element of fear, the tacit (and sometimes overt) threat of reprisal LBJ often used to get his way. Caro shows that even in college politics, Johnson was both the most powerful and the most hated man on campus, leaving behind him a bitterness that is still vivid in most of those who remember him from those days. Most Americans try to succeed by being liked; Johnson succeeded by being dangerous. He knew how to hurt people, and how to let them know he could. He knew how to help them, too, but only at the taxpayer's expense, and only when there was something in it for himself. To portray him as anything but a collossal scoundrel is almost to denigrate his specific gifts.

Mr. Sobran, NR's Critic-at-Large, writes a twice-a-week column for Universal Press Syndicate.