More of the Way With L.B.J. : LONE STAR RISING: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908-1960, <i> By Robert Dallek (Oxford University Press: $30; 721 pp.)</i>

Much of the pre-publication publicity for “Lone Star Rising” has cast this excellent volume as the rival to another biography with very different ambitions, Robert Caro’s “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”

This does it insufficient justice. Robert Dallek’s book stands in the tradition of Stephen Ambrose’s “Eisenhower”--lives of American Presidents viewed preeminently in the context of larger historical structures and themes. Dallek’s previous major work, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy” (Oxford University Press, 1979), was distinguished by its ability to make sense of a huge mass of conflicting evidence on a large, controversial topic without oversimplification or overgeneralization. These talents are on even more luminous display in “Lone Star Rising.”

A professor of history at UCLA, Dallek is less interested in Johnson as Shakespearean character than as product and champion of political and social movements. His L. B. J. is “much more concerned about larger issues in American life than people have generally given him credit for,” promoting the reannexation of the South and West to the American polity, state capitalism, the cause of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised, the Cold War national security state, the imperial presidency. The author argues that even before his 1953 election as Senate Democratic leader, L. B. J. had “left an indelible mark on American life.”

The closest Dallek comes to putting Johnson on the couch is his account of the President’s youth. The author feels that the boy was frustrated at his mother’s “conditional or undispensable love--an affection that depended on his conformity to her wishes,” which “plagued him for years to come.” He notes nevertheless that Johnson remained closer to his mother Rebekah than to his violent father, Sam Ealy Johnson, whose defects as a husband L. B. J. enumerated to friends late in life.

Dallek finds in Johnson’s leadership of the New Deal’s National Youth Administration program in Texas the early glimmerings of the impulses to help the black and poor that found their full expression in the Great Society. Yet even during his New Deal period in Congress, Johnson had to keep one eye on conservative fellow Texans, fearing to challenge “the prevailing attitude in Texas on black rights,” privately noting to a friend that there was “nothing more useless than a dead liberal.” Dallek argues that nevertheless when Johnson “could operate behind the scenes for liberal causes that generated little sympathy in Texas, he went out of his way to get results.” One example: He alienated many isolationists and pacifists with his early call for the rescue of Jews from Hitler’s Germany.

In his references to Johnson’s personal qualities and personal life, the author leans away from hyperbole. Dallek describes his subject in the late 1930s as “a man of extremes. There were the best of times and the worst of times, but usually little in between.” He writes that Johnson was “not so accommodating when it came to Lady Bird’s feelings about extramarital affairs. Johnson developed a reputation as a womanizer.”

Dallek’s admirable determination to be fair to Johnson occasionally produces the language of the textbook: At Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson was “overbearing, self-centered and all too ready to ease his own self-doubts with overblown descriptions of his virtues,” but also “extraordinarily . . . understanding of other people’s interests.” His abrasive first campaign for Congress was “far from a model of civic virtue” but “not much different from those of his opponents.” In acquiring his Austin radio station and turning it into a profitable business, Johnson “was walking a thin ethical line. No doubt he took comfort from the thought that others in Congress were doing the same thing.” Far more often, however, the author’s approach succeeds in rendering Johnson’s complicated mixture of selfishness and higher loyalties.

Dallek does a particularly impressive job in demonstrating that Johnson’s years as Senate leader were not devoted merely, as the lore would have it, to cracking the whip over colleagues, grabbing for Capitol office space and perquisites and burnishing his national image in order to run for President. Dallek grants him high credit for unifying Senate Democrats, helping Dwight Eisenhower (albeit fitfully) enact a bipartisan foreign policy and wresting power from Joseph McCarthy. He shows how Johnson in the late 1950s moved toward seeking the White House by courting Democratic liberals and growing more outspoken against the Eisenhower Administration, not least on the space program and civil rights.

More than any previous historian, Dallek illumines Johnson’s puzzling 1960 presidential campaign, showing why this man whose understanding of congressional and state politics was so profound could delude himself into thinking that he could win the Democratic nomination in the back room: “He thought he could accommodate the various special interests in the nation as no politician had since F. D. R. . . . He believed that the party and country would turn to him as a consensus builder, a moderate nationalist who could more effectively hold the nation together and address its domestic and international problems than any politician, Democrat or Republican, on the national scene.”

Describing how L. B. J. became John Kennedy’s running mate, Dallek persuasively argues that thanks to liberal opposition and Eisenhower’s new assertiveness, it was “clear to Johnson that he could no longer control the Senate as he had in 1955-58.” He notes one Johnson man’s view that he had “lost emotional control of the Senate” and L. B. J.’s own hope in 1960 that, as with the majority leadership, he could make the vice presidency something more than it had always been.

Had Johnson been defeated in his concurrent campaigns for Vice President and Senator and retired to Texas that year, it is unlikely that many readers would care about him today. Few Americans in 1991 know the names of other Senate lions such as George Norris, Richard Russell or even Robert Taft. The ultimate test of this book must be how well Dallek explains the origins of the great historical movements of the 1960s on which Johnson exerted such impact, and which had such an impact on him.

At this Dallek succeeds brilliantly. He has achieved the goal, suggested in his introduction, of producing what should stand for a long time as the best scholarly life of Lyndon Johnson.