Bio Politics : Books: Two biographies, two vastly different pictures of L.B.J. The Johnson Wars pit publishers, authors and historical writers against one another.

When they write about the wars over Lyndon Johnson’s legacy, future historians may note that the opening salvos weren’t fired in the Texas hill country or in the halls of Congress. Instead, they erupted at Lutece, the chic Manhattan restaurant.

There, on a cool March night this year, Oxford University Press held a reception for UCLA history professor Robert Dallek on the publication of “Lone Star Rising,” his biography of the 36th President. It was a low-key affair attended by several book critics, hardly the kind of event that would cause a ruckus.

But it angered the folks at Knopf books. They had scheduled a reception in the same restaurant the very next night for best-selling author Robert Caro, whose second volume in his biography of Johnson, “Means of Ascent,” had just won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. Who was this guy Dallek, anyway?

“They (Knopf) felt we were upstaging them, but we had this event scheduled for months,” says an Oxford Press publicist. “There’s no conflict here.”

With dinner invitations, perhaps not. But the incident underscores what has become an intellectual rivalry--between two publishing houses, two authors and two schools of historical writing--over the unquiet grave of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Reaching from the L.B.J. Library in Austin, Tex., to the New York cocktail circuit, the debate says as much about the state of biography and historical research in America as it does about the late President himself. It also signifies a resurgent interest in the politician who, according to a 1988 public opinion poll, was the only postwar President to rank lower than Richard Nixon. Although provocative works on Johnson have been produced by such writers as Ronnie Dugger, Doris Kearns, Merle Miller and Robert Sherrill, there have been fewer studies of Johnson than of most other modern Presidents. It’s a king-sized vacuum waiting to be filled.

The series of dramatic revelations in Dallek’s 721-page book will probably heighten interest in L.B.J. On the positive side, Dallek digs up evidence that Johnson helped ransom Jews from Nazi Germany, an act that, he says, reflects the Texan’s compassion for victims of bigotry and persecution.

The book also includes allegations that he and his aides offered bribes, collected FBI information on opponents and may have lobbied U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to uphold Johnson’s “theft” of the 1948 Senate election--which he narrowly won by stuffing ballot boxes in South Texas.

“It’s time we learn the real story about this man and his times,” says Dallek, 57, an award-winning scholar who has taught at UCLA since 1964. “When Charles de Gaulle came to John F. Kennedy’s funeral, he remarked that John Kennedy was the mask that this country wore but that Johnson was the true face underneath the mask.”

Besides the multivolume works in progress by Dallek and Caro, additional books and memoirs about Johnson will be published this year, and PBS will air a four-part series on L.B.J. in September. To some, the time is ripe for a reassessment of his presidency, especially in view of the continuing attacks on the legacy of Great Society programs.

During a May 4 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, for example, President Bush tore into Johnson’s domestic record, particularly the idea of “equating dollars with commitment.” Speaking at the site where L.B.J. unveiled his vision of the Great Society, Bush said that Johnson’s motives were good but that his programs weren’t up to the task.

Among the social programs launched or expanded by Johnson were Medicare, Head Start, Model Cities, federal aid to education and an array of community-based anti-poverty efforts. To some observers, that alone should guarantee him an important place in history.

“I think Johnson will be judged less harshly by future generations,” says Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who has written epic works on John and Robert Kennedy. “But that will only happen when passions subside. Meanwhile, there are questions we have yet to answer.”

The questions haven’t changed much in the 28 years since Johnson assumed the presidency:

Who was this man with the droopy, jug ears? Some historians call him a liar without peer, a charlatan who campaigned for peace but sent American soldiers to their graves in Vietnam. Yet others remember him as the presidency’s greatest advocate for civil rights since Lincoln.

Caro and Dallek reach vastly divergent conclusions. One finds Johnson a scoundrel; the other offers a more balanced portrait. The final verdicts are not yet in, because Caro’s latest book traces Johnson’s life through 1948, and he plans to write two more volumes. Dallek’s book runs through 1960, and he will produce a second volume to complete his saga.

Both historians have unearthed treasure troves of heretofore unknown material on Johnson. But critics may spend as much time debating their research techniques as their findings.

What, after all, is historical truth? Does it come from a seasoned academic, like Dallek, who carries on painstaking research in more than 450 manuscript collections? Or does it come from Caro, a premier investigative reporter-turned-biographer who has spent 15 years sifting through 40 million documents in the L.B.J. archives and conducts thousands of interviews?

The answers are important because the two biographies could not be more different. Dallek’s “Lone Star Rising” creates a complex portrait, allowing the reader to hear a variety of voices. The L.B.J. who emerges is a vain, deceitful man, but one who brought the South into America’s economic and political mainstream.

Caro, on the other hand, is a more powerful writer who takes readers into nooks and crannies of Johnson’s life that many historians would overlook. He is an indefatigable researcher for whom history is akin to drama played out on a stage. Although his language is vivid and intense, it is also moralistic. “Means of Ascent” presents L.B.J. as a man without principles or restraint when it came to his own ambition.

It’s difficult to judge which writer comes closer to the truth, says Patricia Limerick, a professor of Western history at the University of Colorado. Whenever she lectures on Johnson’s presidency, Limerick says, “I’m tormented by the conflict between the good and the bad, between the Great Society and the Vietnam War.

“I’m like my students when I say, ‘What’s the truth? Would someone just give me the simple facts so I can make up my mind?’ But I know that it’s more complicated than that, and so is Johnson. There are no easy answers, and I guess that’s what history is all about.”

This much is clear:

Johnson was born on a Texas ranch in 1908 and was initially elected to Congress in 1937. He entered the U.S. Senate in 1948 and eventually became majority leader. He was elected to the vice presidency in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected President, and became President in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. L.B.J. won a four-year term in 1964 but declined to run for reelection amid protests over the Vietnam War. He died of a heart attack on Jan. 22, 1973.

There is little agreement beyond that.

Technically, the Johnson Wars broke out last year, when Caro’s latest installment was published. The book, which covers Johnson’s life from 1941 to 1948, won impressive praise from some quarters and was likened to “The Power Broker,” the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, New York’s master builder.

“I’m enormously impressed at the energy that Caro has put into evoking the life of Lyndon Johnson, and what makes (Caro’s) work unique is that he’s highly critical of this man,” says Henry Graff, a Columbia University history professor. “It gives his work its starch and high drama.”

But several critics attacked Caro’s book as a biased and historically flawed diatribe against the late President. A key complaint centered on Caro’s portrayal of Coke Stevenson, the former Texas governor and L.B.J.’s opponent in the 1948 Democratic Senate primary. Some reviewers suggested that the 54-year-old Caro had turned Stevenson into a cliched symbol of frontier integrity--a John Wayne figure in a white hat beloved by millions of voters.

“Caro’s picture of Coke Stevenson is a tall tale,” says Washington political essayist Sidney Blumenthal, who ripped Caro’s conclusions--and integrity as a historian--in a controversial New Republic review. “Most Texans didn’t take (Stevenson) seriously, and (Caro) commits vast sins of omission.”

Clearly irked by such criticism, which became a hot topic at New York literary parties, Caro says every assertion in his book is true. He swung back in an essay titled “My Search for Coke Stevenson” that is included with the paperback version of “Means of Ascent.”

It would be unfair to judge his portrait of Johnson, he adds, because his work is only half complete. More important, Caro stresses that his purpose is not to write a conventional biography but to use Johnson’s life as the vehicle for a study of American political power.

A slim, dark-haired man with glasses who has been likened to Clark Kent, Caro speaks softly, but with growing intensity, when explaining his work. In his Spartan midtown office, lined with books and drafts of upcoming chapters, he says controversy over his work is inevitable.

“Lyndon Johnson was the consummate politician, he was the essence and embodiment of a politician. And maybe there’s a sense of shock among some people when they learn that this is how he became President. ‘So this is how he achieved power!’ ”

The drive to understand Johnson has taken Caro down rarely traveled paths. When he decided to write about the hardscrabble hill country where Johnson grew up, natives viewed him as just one more Yankee writer breezing through town. To win their trust, he and his wife, Ina, who is also a historian, rented a house in rural Texas for almost three years.

Curious about how Johnson became a wheeler-dealer after less than three years in Congress, Caro interviewed hundreds of sources and dug out memos in the L.B.J. archives that told the story: The young pol had tapped into campaign contributions from Texas oil barons and had become a one-man finance committee, funding the elections of Democratic colleagues across the country.

In future books, Caro says, he will show other sides of Johnson, detailing his contributions to civil rights and anti-poverty legislation. As before, he will rely as heavily on the tools of an investigative reporter as on archival research.

To explain the impact of voting-rights legislation, for example, the author plans to live in a small Southern town and chart the differences that voting reforms made in the lives of blacks. To more fully comprehend the horrors of the Vietnam War, Caro says, he will live for several months in a Vietnamese village that came under heavy attack from U.S. bombers.

“I try to give the whole picture of an era,” he says. “And I want to examine everything in detail that I think is important . . . not only the man and what he did politically but the effect of power on the human condition. I’m not saying that’s the right way to do biography, but that’s the way I wanted to do biography.”

Robert Gottlieb, Caro’s longtime editor and editor of the New Yorker, speculates that the author ran into trouble because Johnson loyalists in Washington and Texas were trying to stifle a critical voice. He predicts that the furor over “Means of Ascent” will die down. Caro, meanwhile, is immersed in his third volume and declines to comment on his rival.

But the real battle may be just beginning, because now it is Dallek’s turn to be heard. And the scholar who has studied L.B.J. for seven years doesn’t mince words. “I think I treat Lyndon Johnson far more evenhandedly than Caro does,” he says. “He’s unrelenting in his animus toward him, and that gives you a distorted picture. I show Johnson for who he is. I show him warts and all. But I also say, ‘Let’s tell the full story.’ ”

Where Caro praises Coke Stevenson to the skies, Dallek views him as a reactionary governor who was unfazed when white vigilantes lynched a black man in Texarkana in 1942. Both historians agree that Johnson exaggerated his World War II combat record, but Dallek--unlike Caro--points out that L.B.J. also worked feverishly to mobilize the war effort at home.

Perspective is everything to the UCLA professor. Johnson may have stolen the 1948 election, he says, but it was done in part because the 1941 Senate race had been stolen from him, and he wasn’t going to let the same thing happen twice. Caro says he was truly shocked to learn of Johnson’s skulduggery, but Dallek is less cynical, putting events into a larger context.

He found L.B.J. to be a familiar figure, Dallek says, because the late President’s overbearing, tyrannical qualities reminded him of his own father. Dallek spent several years as a research associate at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and believes that experience helped him recognize Johnson as a narcissistic personality--a man for whom he eventually developed some compassion.

Summing up his case, Dallek insists that Johnson’s place in history should not hinge solely on his character. If historians applied that rigid standard of virtue to all U.S. Presidents, he says, men like Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter would be our most honored leaders.

“Of the two books, Dallek’s is by far the more balanced portrayal,” says historian Max Holland. “Writers have to strike a balance between journalistic technique and historical research, and I think Caro’s big failure is in distorting history to make it say what he says is the point. It’s vividly written, but it’s wrong.”

It’s also a big commercial success. “The Path to Power,” Caro’s first volume, sold 450,000 copies, and more than 150,000 hardback copies of “Means of Ascent” have been sold. Although Oxford Press has launched a marketing campaign that stresses the differences between the books, few observers expect “Lone Star Rising” to approach Caro’s sales figures.

Ultimately, that may have more to do with market realities than with the books’ merits. In a culture where Kitty Kelley’s expose of Nancy Reagan shoots to the top of the bestseller list, there may not be much room for temperate biography.

“The line between biography and gossip has narrowed in our time,” says Ronald Steel, the award-winning biographer of the great political journalist Walter Lippman. “There’s a wide market for biography these days, but when it deals with controversial figures, there’s a temptation on the part of some to be more editorial, to take more of a point of view and be controversial.”

In part, Steel continues, it’s because fiction writers have not been delivering the grand, rousing tales that people like to read. “If you want great drama and heaving busts these days, you either have to read romance novels or biography.”

Dallek deplores the trend toward scandal-mongering books, saying historians should educate, not titillate. But he concedes that the attention drawn by Caro’s approach to L.B.J. could make the market more fertile for his own work.

“I’ve often felt that, if my book makes it onto the bestseller list, I’m going to have to drop (Caro) a note,” Dallek says. “I’ll have to say, ‘Bob, I couldn’t have done it without you.’ ”