Who Was Lyndon Baines Johnson?

“Do you have a lot of energy?" the thirtysixth President of the United States asked a young winner of the White House Fellowship. “It’s important for me to know.”LBJ was looking for a confidante with the endurance to hear and interpret some of his deepest secrets, fiercest convictions, and haunting dreams as he came to the lonesome end of a career that changed history. That confidante was Doris Kearns, twenty-four when she went to work at the White House in 1968. and now a professor of government at Harvard. “Who Was Lyndon Baines Johnson?" will appear in this and next month’s Atlantics. It is drawn from Ms. Kearns’s forthcoming book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.