‘LYNDON’--AN L.B.J. FOR ALL SEASONS

“Mah fellow Americans.”

How easy it is--and was--to caricature Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose presidency was sandwiched by the tragedies of Dallas and Vietnam.

Show him rough and crude and elephant-eared and Texas and manipulative and intimidating and predatory, peering through his eyeglasses at a squirming, about-to-be-scrunched political victim.

American Presidents are made for exaggeration because their lives and burdens--and consequently faults--are already larger than life. The stereotypes hang around. Some five decades later, we still have the wheelchair-bound Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a long cigarette holder impaling his frozen grin.

TV accelerates the facile process. We have the romantic and tragic John F. Kennedy speaking in clipped Bostonese. We have the scowling, no-neck Richard Nixon, arms thrust skyward in mock triumph. And we have the bumbling Ronald Reagan. Will dramatists ever get beyond the bumbling Reagan?

Not for years, probably. It takes time and distance to separate, buffer and sharpen. Some Presidents are easier to dislike from afar, others--like Lyndon B. Johnson, perhaps--easier to appreciate and understand.

No caricatures tonight. If, after watching the splendid “Lyndon Johnson” on PBS (8 p.m. on Channel 50, 9 p.m. on Channels 28, 15 and 24), you do have a better fix on this President, spread the credit: Laurence Luckinbill as L.B.J. in James Prideaux’s TV adaptation of his stage play based on Merle Miller’s oral biography “Lyndon”; enterprising direction by Charles Jarrott; creative sets by Ben Edwards and oh what makeup by Kevin Haney. Don’t forget, also, that “Lyndon” is a production from the late David Susskind, his last great gift to American TV.

Remarkably, Luckinbill provides the TV season’s second supreme L.B.J., following Randy Quaid in NBC’s “LBJ.” Luckinbill doesn’t really sound much like L.B.J., and he’s not L.B.J.-sized. But his 90-minute, one-man show is an electrifying State of the Lyndon message, a rich and raw definition of man and his era, in some ways as powerful a statement about the Indochina conflict as “Platoon.”

The heavy makeup turns Luckinbill into a facial replica of L.B.J.; there are occasional profiles when the head seems mask-like and too large for the body. Mostly, though, it adds character and dimension.

What a gorgeous performance. Luckinbill revs up and rises in an enormous swirl and brings you along. Of course, his L.B.J. is big, lusty, boastful and at times so full of himself that he soars straight to hawg heaven! He is also calculating, shrewd, crude, lewd. He rants, paces, shouts, explodes. Yes, all of that. But Luckinbill and Prideaux peel off still more layers.

Edwards’ sets carry L.B.J. smoothly from the Oval Office back to a Texas classroom as a teacher, then out on the stump campaigning for early office, as he winks at the camera, making us an accomplice to one of his scams.

We meet L.B.J. the populist and pragmatist, voting wrong when it’s right for him. Me meet him high and we meet him low, hearing his poignant memory of Jackie Kennedy after her husband’s assassination, sitting “so alone.”

L.B.J. was no friend of the Kennedys, even as John Kennedy’s vice president. Yet his voice softens and shoulders sag as he recalls Jackie at the airport in Dallas, still wearing that pink suit stained with her husband’s blood. “It was as if she felt that as long as she had that dress on that things might be like they were that morning when she stepped off that plane so lovely and . . . so happy.”

Johnson was a reformer. Yet a funny thing happened to L.B.J. on the way to the Great Society--Vietnam, the war that now seems to almost eclipse his domestic achievements. It grows here casually, routinely, almost humorously, as L.B.J. recalls setting in motion a major escalation. It was the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in reaction to an alleged--and some charge phantom--1964 provocation by the enemy’s torpedo boats in the Tonkin Bay.

“We had a lunch here at the White House, (Robert) McNamara and (Dean) Rusk and McGeorge Bundy, and we had some experts over for coffee and had some ice cream for dessert and decided to bomb the North Vietnamese naval bases.” The phone rings. “Oh, hi , Luci, honey!”

This L.B.J. is culpable as leader of the United States, but also a President whose own staff and military leaders misled him about Vietnam just as they misled the nation. It’s a a verdict that historians will continue to argue about.

The drum rolls and frustrations rise, meanwhile, along with the chanting of demonstrators outside the White House. “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” His anger soars, too, and later so do his political problems and guilt, as he ultimately announces he won’t seek reelection. You see Vietnam all over his face.

“The creek was rising,” he says. This is towering TV, profound, sad and nightmarish.

DANDY DADDY: Small films sometimes make big impacts on TV, small films with enormously important messages.

What a fine effort was “Daddy,” ABC’s Sunday-night movie about a high school couple burdened by parenthood as a consequence of having sex. Dermot Mulroney and Patricia Arquette turned in superb performances as the teen-age parents.

Told from the boy’s perspective, “Daddy” was a sharp departure from TV’s usual casual approach to sex. It was TV at its stirring, troubling, valuable best, a grim case study of young people held in a terrible vice that cost them their youth and prospects. No happy endings or even moralizing, just depressing reality, a long, dark tunnel with more darkness at the end.

VANNA SPEAKS. I’ve seen the Playboy spread on “Wheel of Fortune” letter turner/superstar Vanna White (the magazine mailed copies to TV writers), but a Vanna article in the current PSA airline magazine is more revealing, if less erotic.

In it, Vanna comes through as very sincere, guileless and sort of, well, judge for yourself from the following excerpt:

PSA: What’s next for your career?

White: Movies. That’s what I really want to do. My ultimate goal is to win an Academy Award for a very dramatic role, the sort of work Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange and Kathleen Turner do.

PSA: What advice would you give to young women entering your line of work?

White: You should know the entire alphabet, be yourself, be poised and be in shape. I walk miles and miles every day on the set. You have to do a lot of walking in high heels. I know a lot of women wear high heels, but walking back and forth in them is not as easy as it sounds.

The entire alphabet?