The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson; The Drive for Power, From the Frontier to Master of the Senate

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. 514 pages Illustrations (46 pages of plates). Notes and Sources. Bibliography, Index. DJ somewhat worn and soiled, pencil erasure on front endpaper. Ronnie Dugger (born 1931) is an American progressive journalist. Dugger attended the University of Texas and was editor of The Daily Texan 1950-1951. He was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961. Later he served as the Observer's publisher, spending more than 40 years with the political newsmagazine. Dugger has published hundreds of articles in Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive and other periodicals. In 2011 Dugger won the George Polk Award in recognition of his lifelong achievements in journalism. The following year he was dubbed the "godfather of progressive journalism in Texas" in an in-depth feature published in the Austin American-Statesman by Brad Buchholz. In 1996, Ronnie Dugger also co-founded The Alliance for Democracy, a national grassroots populist organization. Dugger and his friends decided to build The Texas Observer into an independent liberal weekly paper. From the first "I sought to practice journalism according to three basic standards, accuracy, fairness instead of 'objectivity,' and moral seriousness.." He went on to mentor and influence progressive Texas journalists Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower. Ronnie Dugger is a scholar, journalist, author, and deeply rooted Texan who witnessed firsthand the career of Lyndon Johnson, who is here portrayed as an enormously energetic man of equally enormous contradictions. His inherited populism was at odds with and, in the end, was destroyed by his lust for power. He was a liberal who nonetheless played cozily with oil, power, and construction interests; a politician who worked to make a better life for the poor and yet used politics to become wealthy; a true macho frontiersman who stayed home when war came and glorified his one combat experience for political gain. Here, also, is the other Johnson: the president who, the author believes, did more for civil rights than any president including Lincoln. This book is not only a biography of Lyndon Johnson but an attempt to understand fifty years of American history, the period the author calls the Johnson Era.