Dwight Garner: Review of Michael L. Gillette's "Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History"

Dwight Garner writes for the New York Times.

In 1934, on their first date, Lyndon Baines Johnson asked Claudia Alta Taylor, the woman who would become known as Lady Bird Johnson, to marry him. He was 26. She was 21.

They’d been driving around all day. He’d felt he’d been struck by lightning. She was less sanguine. “I just sat there with my mouth open, kind of,” she reports in a crisp and absurdly endearing new book, “Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History.” She adds, “I was far from sure I wanted to know him any better.”

President Johnson’s impetuousness came to mind when a copy of this volume made its way to my kitchen table a few weeks ago. I hadn’t planned to write about it. Other books out this month seemed more pressing. The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s titanic biography of Johnson, published just last year, looms in the rearview mirror. Hey, hey. Enough L.B.J....