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PBS' "American Experience" begins a four-hour biography of Lyndon B. Johnson with two hours of "LBJ" tonight at 9 o'clock on channels 22 and 67. The second half is tomorrow at 9 p.m.This documentary dabbles little in amateur psychoanalysis or complex theories, but its straightforward accounting is full of resonance and depth.At times Johnson seems like "Citizen Kane," with complexities that belied his quest for the simple love of a distant mother. He seems alternately like the basest of politicians and the noblest of philosophers.

Jules Witcover's commentary ("Don't count Biden out in 2016," Jan. 29) contrasts the vice president's potency with former vice presidents who had little influence or significance in American history. Indeed, when Lyndon Johnson was broached by John Kennedy in 1960 to be Kennedy's running mate, LBJ allegedly asked his mentor and fellow Texan, John Nance Garner, about the vice presidency. Garner, who was Roosevelt's veep between 1933 and 1941, allegedly replied, "Lyndon, the vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of spit!"

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, I sat in the gallery of the House of Representatives and watched President Johnson give what turned out to be his last State of the Union Address. He had been elected in a landslide in 1964, and the standard political logic of the day had it that LBJ was such an astute politician, such a master of Congress, such an expert in the manipulation of the levers of power that he could not be beaten in 1968 even though his job rating had been slowly deteriorating.I quickly lost interest in the substance of the speech -- it was the typical combination of self-congratulation, puffery and outright lies that the people had come to expect from President Johnson.

After President Barack Obama's speech on health care earlier this month, pundits have compared his performance to that of President Harry "give 'em hell" Truman. After his election, they compared him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But for the upcoming health care battle, Mr. Obama needs to step into the shoes of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. For LBJ's brawling, Southern style of trench politics is best suited for Mr. Obama's challenge, especially when it comes to lining up votes from recalcitrant members of his own party.

AUSTIN, Texas -- While Americans welcomed a new president this week, some people are remembering the passing of a former president: Lyndon B. Johnson, who died 20 years ago -- on Jan. 22, 1973.To mark the event, the LBJ Library and Museum in Austin is showing a video of how the nation paid its last respects to Johnson.That's not the only museum display with special relevance this week. As Bill Clinton was sworn in as the nation's 42nd president Wednesday in Washington, two holy books on display at the LBJ Library reminded visitors of when Johnson took his oaths of office:After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Johnson took his first presidential oath in November 1963 aboard Air Force One. He was sworn in on the Kennedy family's Catholic missal, a book of prayers and rites.

WASHINGTON -- When Chief Justice Earl Warren refused to head a presidential commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson applied his legendary arm-twisting tactics.Mr. Johnson made various appeals to Mr. Warren's patriotism, finally expressing fears that post-assassination panic could trigger a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. As LBJ told it, the chief justice "started crying" and caved in.The browbeating, folksiness and gruff charm of LBJ spring to life in newly released transcripts of his taped telephone conversations in the first 35 days of his presidency nearly 30 years ago.In the documents made public yesterday, Mr. Johnson grapples with Republican opposition to a civil rights bill, rides herd on legislation for higher education, counts votes in Congress and seeks advice on Vietnam, Cuba and other foreign hot spots.

Take a biographer already trailing clouds of controversy. Have him write the third volume of a monumental work about an American president seemingly destined to be loved and hated for reasons as conflicted as the author and his subject. And what you get is a donnybrook in the book-reviewing fraternity that often reveals as much about the reviewer as the book. Such has been the case about the nonfiction event of the year, Robert L. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate.

JOHNSON CITY, Texas -- The county is Blanco, and it's about the only thing hereabout that's not named for Lyndon Baines Johnson or his family.The local public school, naturally, is LBJ Elementary. It's where the 36th president went to grade school, though he learned to read at age 4 in a one-room school 14 miles and a million flowering bluebonnets west of here.It was in that school, now restored, that Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The "original education president," the National Park Service guide tells a group of us on tour, signed 50 major pieces of school legislation and believed "the only valid passport from poverty is an education."

SAN ANTONIO - Almost completely recovered from a wound left by a piece of shrapnel that had missed his heart by half an inch, the Army staff sergeant was just a few days away from getting shipped back to Vietnam. So, the night of June 14, 1968, William Swoveland pulled himself out of his bunk and sat down to write a letter. "I have seen my men hurt and killed and sometimes it seems there's no reason for it," Swoveland wrote. "All of the civilians who have died in Saigon and yet we can't bomb [the enemy's]

The first two books in Robert Caro's monumental study of Lyndon Baines Johnson were greeted with outrage from many long-time friends and associates of the 36th President. Much too negative, they groused. The angry partisans accused Caro of making Johnson out to be an unprincipled monster whose Texas political career had been launched on a wave of questionable and corrupt actions. Now, in the third volume in the series, Caro has moved on to Johnson's arrival in the Senate in 1948 and his rapid rise to national fame as Democratic leader from 1953 to 1961.

Lady Bird Johnson, the widow of Lyndon B. Johnson, whose tumultuous presidency often overshadowed her considerable achievements as an activist first lady and environmentalist, died yesterday at her home in Austin, Texas. She was 94. Mrs. Johnson, who suffered a major stroke in 2002 and had been in failing health for several years, died surrounded by family and friends, including daughters Lynda Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson, said family spokeswoman Elizabeth Christian. As the wife of the 36th president, Mrs. Johnson was often portrayed by contemporaries and some historians as a meek woman who silently endured her husband's volcanic outbursts and infidelities.

SAN ANTONIO - Almost completely recovered from a wound left by a piece of shrapnel that had missed his heart by half an inch, the Army staff sergeant was just a few days away from getting shipped back to Vietnam. So, the night of June 14, 1968, William Swoveland pulled himself out of his bunk and sat down to write a letter. "I have seen my men hurt and killed and sometimes it seems there's no reason for it," Swoveland wrote. "All of the civilians who have died in Saigon and yet we can't bomb [the enemy's]

In the mid-1970s, beginning work on the first volume of his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro moved for three years with his wife and indefatigable researcher, Ina, from New York to the Texas Hill Country where Johnson had grown up. "I realized that was a world I didn't understand, and I was never going to get to understand it unless I lived there," says Caro, a New Yorker. "It was a land of great isolation, loneliness and poverty when Johnson was growing up there."

WASHINGTON - Ah, summer vacation. The beach? Camping? Perhaps a week off in the city, catching a show or museum? Or how about lugging a chain saw around for hours in 100-degree heat, chopping up cedar trees? Ah, summer vacation for President Bush. The president chooses to unwind during August in a furnace called central Texas, and his most cherished pastime there is "clearing brush" on his 1,600-acre ranch. This summertime hobby, he has said, along with fishing and jogging, helps him relieve his job stress.

CHICAGO -- Our military is bogged down in a guerrilla war overseas, the federal government is spending way beyond its means and a president from Texas has opened up a credibility gap. Is this 2003 or 1967? When we elected George W. Bush, we thought he was the son of George H. W. Bush. But he behaves like the proud progeny of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ is not any Republican's idea of a great president. But no one in the GOP seems to mind seeing one of their own tread in his footsteps. Unfortunately, that means overextending the U.S. government at home and abroad, an approach that didn't turn out too well for President Johnson or the country.

An Austin, Texas-based firm has purchased a subsidiary of the Rouse Co. that leases furnished business offices for as short a period as an hour, the companies said yesterday. The Rouse subsidiary, ExecuCentre LLC, has four offices in Baltimore, Columbia and Owings Mills. The buyer is BusinesSuites, a national provider of furnished offices with flexible leases. Before yesterday's acquisition, the company had 10 centers in Austin, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston and Las Vegas. BusinesSuites said it has 170,000 square feet of office space in top-tier buildings.

Susan Threadgill writes in the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly magazine:"H.R. 'Bob' Haldeman's recent diaries are chock full of seamy details about the presidency of Richard M. Nixon."One of the seamiest is the hitherto unknown story of how Nixon tried to blackmail Lyndon Johnson into using his influence with congressional Democrats to help halt the Watergate investigation."Nixon had threatened to reveal that Johnson had bugged him during the 1968 campaign. But Johnson let Nixon know that if Nixon did that, LBJ would release what the diaries then refer to as 'deleted material -- national security.

It's wonderful to look at. The subject matter is epic. And the writing has moments of lyricism that will stir you to your bones.For all of that, "LBJ," a four-hour biography of Lyndon Johnson beginning tonight at 9 on MPT (Channels 22 and 67), isn't a cause for celebration. "LBJ" is television doing history, and making some big mistakes. When the subject matter is as important to our shared past and sense of who we are as it is in this case, such mistakes are inexcusable.The major mistake starts with decisions made by writer/producer David Grubin based on whom he did and did not get to participate in the project.

Take a biographer already trailing clouds of controversy. Have him write the third volume of a monumental work about an American president seemingly destined to be loved and hated for reasons as conflicted as the author and his subject. And what you get is a donnybrook in the book-reviewing fraternity that often reveals as much about the reviewer as the book. Such has been the case about the nonfiction event of the year, Robert L. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate.

AUSTIN, Texas - Thirty-eight years ago today, network television was interrupted at 11:36 p.m. so President Lyndon B. Johnson could tell the nation that U.S. warships in a place called the Gulf of Tonkin had been attacked by North Vietnamese boats. In response to what he described as "open aggression on the open seas," Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam. The airstrikes opened the door to a war that would kill 1 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans and divide the nation. Over the years, debate has swirled around whether American ships were actually attacked that night, or whether, as some skeptics have suggested, the Johnson administration staged or provoked an event to get congressional authority to act against North Vietnam.