Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Devastating Diatribe, May 31, 2003
It would be an understatement to say that author Haley does not like Lyndon Baines Johnson. And despite the fact that his book is an unrelenting tirade against all things Lyndon, it provides a useful service in reminding the reader of how Johnson trampled and double-crossed friend and foe alike in his single-minded lust for power.
I am fairly conservative politically, but I am open-minded enough to recognize and oppose corruption whether practiced by liberals or conservatives. In my lifetime, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton have been shining examples of the worst impulses in American presidential politics in which greed and lust for either power or money ended up overshadowing any of their real achievements.
Haley shows that Johnson was a man of few real principles, neither liberal nor conservative, but rather a man who usually always wanted to know which way the wind was blowing before taking a stand on any important issue. Johnson was a man who used all his powers of persuasion and veiled threats to get what he wanted and woe unto anyone who stood in his way. He was a man who knew and used the old adage "It's not what you know, but who you know" to Machiavellian extremes. But he was also a man of sometimes great political courage who would rarely give an inch once he took a stand. He hated those who opposed him, nursed resentments, and wreaked revenge on those who crossed him in the least as most of his enemies and many of his friends learned to their sorrow. From the earliest days, he was involved with corrupt Texas politicians from the local to the state level and swam in the seas of corporate corruption with the likes of the infamous swindler Billy Sol Estes and others of his stripe.
Admittedly, the conservatism of the author is the conservatism of a bygone age and the reader will recognize that the book is meant to be a partisan attack on Johnson. Some of the attacks on Johnson are made solely for political reasons as Johnson was clever enough to outmaneuver Haley's ideological brothers and sisters. But Johnson surrounded himself with enough scummy characters and got involved in so many underhanded political AND business deals that he deserves the rough treatment given him in Haley's devastating diatribe.
No matter your political leanings, your eyes will be opened when you read A Texan Looks At Lyndon. The book is well-written and often riveting in its allegations and revelations, but it loses one star for occasional hysteria. If US or Texas politics interests you, then I highly recommend this.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You have been warned, July 31, 2000
Haley wrote this book (and published it himself) in 1964 basically as a campaign tract for Barry Goldwater. In the intervening years it has become a classic of its kind,a philippic, to use M.E. Bradford's term, tracing the illegitimate rise to power of Lyndon Baines Johnson. If you're politically naive, this book will grown hair on your chest. It's an unblinking, fearless portrait of Johnson's wheeling dealing and underhanded methods to achieve the power, prestige, and money he craved all his life. Haley names all the names and lays out facts and figures for the reader to make up his mind. And the reader winds up shaking his head in utter astonishment. The best part of the book is that detailing Johnson's eventual election to the U.S. Senate in a contest with former Gov. Coke Stevenson. The election was clearly Stevenson's, but through the machinations of George Parr, the notorious Duke of Duval County, the results were turned around in LBJ's favor. Investigators later found that among those voting in the primary were people who didn't live in the county anymore and people who weren't alive at all. But the results stood.(An interesting and amusing aside: when Haley ran for Texas governor in 1956, he approached Parr and said, "I'm Evetts Haley. I'm running for governor, and if I win, it will be my privilege to put you in jail." Parr's reply: "I believe you will." Parr, the Artful Dodger of Texas politics for years, eventually killed himself.)
At times the book grows tiresome, especially in the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes scandals, where Haley turns a virtual torrent of names and numbers on the reader as to be sometimes confusing. But slog through those sections to get to the excellent chapter where LBJ wields an iron hand as Senate Majority Leader and maneuvers himself into the Vice Presidency. It is chilling.
Haley suffered considerable damage to his reputation as a result of this book, but he never backed down, and now time seems to be bearing out the truth of his claims, which have also been verified in such later works as the Robert Caro books. This is an indispensable lesson in this Presidential election year. Read it and weep.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable Precursor To The Caro Series, January 30, 2004
This not-too-well organized or written condemnation of Lyndon Johnson represented the first documented gathering of serious charges about LBJ's ethics and practices. Dismissed as angry ranting by a fawning Texas public when first published, this little book outlines broadly the subject areas later explored in detail by Robert Caro in his superlative "The Years of Lyndon Johnson" series. This brief paperback does not read smoothly -- and it helps a great deal to have read Caro's books before reading it -- but you will see that at least one person was fully onto Lyndon Johnson's supernatural self-interest and pragmatic willingness to do whatever was necessary for advancing Lyndon Johnson. My grandparents worshipped Lyndon -- and showing this book to them, when it first came out, was like tossing holy water on a demon. They did not want to have ANYTHING to do with it. Lyndon had completely won their hearts and minds.
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