This is the third of Kearns Goodwin's presidential biographies that I've wanted to get read before seeing her at the State Bar convention in Dallas next week. It is also the first LBJ biography I've read, and it just blew me away. Kearns of course had a front row seat with LBJ in his final years, working with him on his memoirs, but the maturity in this 1976 work is amazing. She never overreaches to impose her judgments unfairly on what Johnson did (she was a antiwar voice before being hired as a White House Fellow late in LBJ's administration) but does point out where his undisputed gifts as a public figure led him into trouble as President.
The thing I was reading closely for was her conclusion as to "of course" what he should have done regarding the war, but it never comes. She freely admits that pretty much any president would have escalated in Vietnam given the facts and historical assumptions, and although she believes that he alone would have engaged in the deception as to the war's cost given his commitment to his Great Society programs, she never opines on what he could or should have done that would have extricated the U.S. from Vietnam any earlier without running risks that were then considered unacceptable in terms of containing Communism. The best I could tell is that he refused to give up on Vietnam or his domestic goals significantly longer than any other conceivable president would have - something that invites discussion as to whether his decision to stay the course longer on both hoping for a better turn of events was a better one. The reader (at least this one) finishes the book concluding that LBJ was in a no-win scenario (to coin a phrase). He believed that he was preventing global nuclear war at worst or a global takeover by Communism at best by sacrificing fifty thousand American lives, and I nowhere saw anything that indicated that he could or should have thought anything different - a remarkably disciplined job by a historian seeking to explain only what he did and why - not necessarily what he should have done. (Other books surely do - just not this one.)
Anyway, a great book - I really enjoyed it.