SOME `FLAWED' SURPRISES; DALLEK'S FOLLOW-UP ON LBJ REVEALS A LOT MORE TO LIKE - AND DISLIKE.

Byline: Tom Nolan Special to the Daily News

It seemed a simple enough project for historian Robert Dallek: an ``on the record'' biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson based on archives opened to scholars three decades after the chief executive left office. ``But I found the material so prodigious,'' said Dallek, for years a UCLA professor and now teaching at Boston University, ``and the guy's so interesting, that I felt I should do two volumes. My publisher agreed - but he cautioned me: `Not three.' ''

The first installment of Dallek's LBJ work, ``Lone Star Rising,'' was printed in 1991 to fine reviews. Now its companion volume, ``Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and his Times 1961-1973'' (Oxford University Press, 754 pages; $35), brings Dallek's Johnson work to a close - 14 years after he began.

I'm so glad to be done with it,'' says Dallek, in Los Angeles for signing Wednesday at Vroman's in Pasadena and Thursday at Dutton's Brentwood. ``It also leaves a gaping hole in my life.''

In addition to paying many visits to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, and other archives, Dallek interviewed hundreds of Johnson intimates and associates, including Bill Moyers (who'd never discussed his former employer for the record) and the president's widow, Lady Bird Johnson, who told of the agonizing uncertainty her husband suffered over Vietnam. ``She said he knew what was right when it came to civil rights, voting rights, federal aid to education and his Great Society program,'' Dallek says. ``But when it came to Vietnam he didn't know what was right: `He said it was like a thorn in his throat - he couldn't get it out, and he couldn't get it down.'''

``Flawed Giant'' has a number of surprising revelations about Johnson's behavior after declining to run for re-election in 1968: that LBJ considered re-entering the race after Robert Kennedy's assassination, that he wiretapped vice president Hubert Humphrey lest Humphrey break with his Vietnam policy, and that Johnson secretly backed Nixon over Humphrey until late in the campaign. There are other surprises: Johnson's depression and paranoia, and the womanizing he angrily bragged of. ``When they talked about Kennedy's womanizing,'' Dallek says, ``he'd bang the table and say, `I had more than he ever had on purpose.' ''

Such passages have generated a good deal of news coverage. The publicity has caused some old Johnson loyalists to speak up. Former aide Jack Valenti attacked Dallek's writing, prompting Dallek to answer: ``I said he should understand that blind partisanship is no substitute for historical truth.''

Dallek, winner of the Bancroft Prize for his ``Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,'' is a frequent commentator on LBJ for ``Nightline,'' CNBC and PBS documentaries. Does he feel he's gotten to know Johnson well? ``Oh, absolutely,'' he says.

But he admits that ``in many ways, Johnson remains impenetrable. Stanley Marcus of the Neiman-Marcus department store in Texas once said Lyndon Johnson was an octagonal figure. Press Secretary George Reedy said Lyndon Johnson walked out of Luigi Pirandello's play `Six Characters in Search of an Author.' You never knew who the real man was, or what to believe; you had to accept that he was an actor. Arthur Schlesinger once said to me, `Lyndon Johnson's a man who could have been invented by Mark Twain, or William Faulkner.' ''

Dallek has no illusion that ``Flawed Giant'' will be the last word on LBJ. ``Any historian or biographer who thinks he or she is going to produce a definitive work on Lyndon Johnson is a damn fool,'' he says, ``because there is no such thing. The great Dutch historian Peter Gayle once said, `History is argument without end,' and that's especially true when it comes to such a controversial figure as Johnson. Perspective always changes. When Harry Truman left office, he had only a 32 percent approval rating; now he's considered maybe one of the great presidents.''

It's hard to rate Johnson, Dallek says. ``Time magazine had a poll of historians asking us to rank 17 presidents of this century; what do you say about someone like Johnson? He was a great success, and he was a great failure; where does that put him? In the 20th century, I think Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt come out 1-2-3; a lot of people rate Harry Truman fourth now. But after that, there's a pretty big scramble.''

His personal views about Johnson were reinforced by his research, Dallek says: ``I found my opinions grew stronger. The parts of him I liked, I liked even more; the parts I disliked were deeper. I found him an appealing and a repelling character.'' Some of the thousands of hours of audio tapes Johnson secretly made of his presidential telephone conversations recently have been released commercially (``Taking Charge,'' Simon & Schuster Audioworks; $25, edited and with commentary by Michael R. Beschloss); does Dallek think they help Johnson be seen as a more human figure than the stiff, would-be statesman he seemed in public? ``I don't know,'' he says, ``because, although his more engaging qualities are on the tapes, I think a lot of people accurately saw him as a manipulator. It is part of the reality of the man, which somehow diminishes his achievement as president.''

Dallek never met Lyndon Johnson, but an LBJ associate gave him a hint of what he might have experienced if he had. ``When I saw Bill Moyers, he said if Johnson was still alive, he'd call me up tomorrow morning and say, `Hey Bill, I hear you had dinner with this guy Dallek last night; what kind of fella is he? Does he wanna be Archivist of the United States? Think he'd like to be Librarian in Congress?' I thought that was pretty illustrative of how Johnson operated.''

With his LBJ work at last complete, Dallek looks forward to an expanded teaching schedule. He does have another book planned. ``I'm going to do a biography of John F. Kennedy,'' he says, ``two-thirds of it on his presidency.'' Dallek quickly adds: ``Definitely one volume.''

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Photo: (1) Robert Dallek

(2) no caption (Book cover - FLAWED GIANT: LYNDON JOHNSON AND HIS TIMES 1961-1973)