Robert Dallek is among the country's most prolific and authoritative presidential biographers. Lyndon Johnson is arguably the president to whom he has devoted his most intensive archival research. This short biography, an adaptation of his two-volume magisterial biography, traces this presidential life from the Texas Hill Country to the House and Senate to the White House. It narrates his passage of a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved, as well as his continuation of the war in Vietnam. This brief work conveys Johnson as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants."

This volume is being timed to coordinate with the 50th anniversary of Johnson's death.