Books in Brief: My Brother Lyndon

My Brother Lyndon, by Sam Houston Johnson (Cowles, $6.95). If indeed, as we have been told, LBJ did try to suppress this book, one can’t imagine why. For it is, from cover to cover, a sycophantic puff piece oozing with nothing but adulation for the former President and caustic comment about those who differed with him. “Lyndon’s ‘shadow brother’ pulls no punches in his outspoken, witty, eye-opening account of LBJ,” a full-page ad in the New York Times promises us. “Sam Houston Johnson not only knows the behind-the-scenes stories of the history-making dramas, but he tells them all with ‘country boy’ candor.” And technically the ad is true. Brother Sam pulls no punches because he throws none. Examples of his “country boy candor” include no mention at all of the Bobby Baker case and LBJ’s involvement in it and the characterization as “sheer nonesense” by “a few soreheads” of the idea that there may have been some hanky-panky in Lyndon’s 87 vote margin of victory in his election to the Senate in 1948. But, take heart. We are told that LBJ occasionally cheats at dominoes, is not a graceful loser, was once told by grandmother that he would end up in a penitentiary, almost married a Ku Klux Klansman’s daughter, liked to “mash the gas pedal to the floor board” when there was no fuzz around, wore baggy, ready-made suits from Sears Roebuck when he first went to Congress, and once, sounding distinctly like an ex-Governor from Alabama, denounced Senator Fulbright, saying: “Hell, he can’t even park a bicycle.” Sibling Sam tells us that anyone who worked for his brother at least a month deserved a Purple Heart. Anyone making it through this book certainly deserves no less.