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. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Califano, President Johnson's special assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969, remembers Johnson as a driven, obsessive, yet compassionate leader, similarly described in Robert Dallek's authoritative Lone Star Rising ( LJ 6/15/91). A dedicated and loyal Great Society foot soldier, Califano emphasizes the legislative actions and policy implications of Johnson's programs. Lacking Robert Caro's graceful style and his excessive emphasis on Johnson's ambition ( Means of Ascent , LJ 4/15/91), Califano's memoirs successfully recount the workings of an expansive, caring, yet quixotic government and the actions of a president who tried and cared. Especially noteworthy are Califano's descriptions of Johnson's fateful decision to pursue simultaneously the Vietnam War and the Great Society; Johnson's anguish over the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, his long-time political nemesis; and the emergence of the credibility gap. An important book for most libraries.-- Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp . Lib., King of Prussia, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From LBJ's domestic adviser, a memoir that shows the President ``with the bark off''cagey, crude, demanding, and, finally, Shakespearean in his pitiful descent from power. Here, unlike in Governing America (1981), his take-no- prisoners account of his unhappy tenure as HEW Secretary under Jimmy Carter, Califano (America's Health Care Revolution, 1986) has had more time to reflect and fewer axes to grind, and the result is all to the good. He depicts LBJ not as Robert Caro's monster of ambition or speechwriter Richard Goodwin's clinical paranoid, but as a masterful President who, despite an often recalcitrant Congress and his own deep personal flaws, delivered the astonishing Great Society legislation. Future LBJ biographers will be combing this account for some of the more priceless anecdotes of this hard- driving pol at work: installing a telephone in Califano's office bathroom so that the young aide could always be at his beck and call; calling in the press before a flummoxed new appointee could change his mind about accepting the post; or winning a key vote on civil-rights legislation by identifying a Congressman's secrethis black mistress. The second half of the narrative takes an increasingly more somber tone, with Johnson unsuccessfully using all his energy and intelligence to keep the economy afloat, conclude the Vietnam War, and extend his landmark social-welfare programs. New light is shed on the deterioration of the President's relationship with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, his folly in nominating crony Abe Fortas as Supreme Court Justice, his contempt for Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy, and his turning to religion in crises. One of the better White House ``palace guard'' memoirs of latea compassionate, blessedly self-effacing tribute to a President who ``put the thumb of government on the scale for the vulnerable among us.'' (Black & white photographsnot seen.)

No question about it, LBJ was a control freak as president, and Califano's look back to his three and one-half years as a White House aide might as well be his own emancipation from the grip of the larger-than-life Texan. The anecdotal preponderance in this memoir tilts toward numerous episodes of the famous Johnson "treatment": vulgar cajolery characterized by threats and pleas and pees. Califano's introduction to it in 1965 was an invitation to inspect a bare presidential buttock for boils, and thereafter he served as hatchet man or shock ab~sorber for the recipients of LBJ's energetic ire or praise. Substantively, Califano carried the congressional water on Great Society legislation, which years later he administered as Carter's welfare secretary. Thus very little about the premier ruination of Johnson's reputation--the Vietnam War--is accounted for here, with the significant exception of the jawboning efforts to conceal its true fiscal dimensions. Ergo the "credibility gap" and like ethical lapses, which Califano, to his credit, admits: "Johnson and Fortas [a corrupt crony] . . . believed they were exempt from many of the traditional rules." So working for the prince of the Perdanales was--What? Exhilarating, infuriating, exasperating, exhausting, inspiring? Califano's experience runs the emotional gamut, and after the passage of 20 years, he is probably glad it's over. ~--Gilbert Taylor