Taking Charge

Taking Charge, the first volume of The Johnson White House Tapes, is filled with revelations about the full-blooded Texan behind the public image. We hear LBJ telling who he thinks really killed JFK, creating the Warren Commission, staking his presidency on a revolutionary civil rights bill, scuttling Robert Kennedy's drive to be his Vice President, using the Tonkin Gulf attack to expand the American beachhead in Southeast Asia, and unveiling his private, tortured early doubts that we could ever win a war in Vietnam. By allowing us to hear LBJ as he applies the "Johnson treatment" to foes and friends, Taking Charge offers spellbinding insight into how the thirty-sixth President used power. Johnson flatters, provokes, and twists the arms of some of the dominant personalities of our times, including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, Robert McNamara, Katharine Graham and other leading media figures, members of Congress, and many others. We come to understand Johnson's complex, changing relationships with Lady Bird and the rest of his family, Jacqueline Kennedy, ex-Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and members of his Cabinet and White House staff.