Editor’s note: This is an article from the Fall 1996 issue of UCLA Magazine.
It’s Election ’96, and Bob Dole is scrambling to define himself as pro-family by proposing a huge tax cut. Ross Perot is wasting more precious prime-time TV with a rambling tirade on the deficit. As for Bill Clinton, he’s mollifying conservatives with welfare reform, appeasing liberals opposed to the reforms and trying to keep ahead of the scandal of the day.
Has a presidential race ever produced such an opportunistic trio of candidates and so much unwarranted wackiness? “Sure,” says UCLA American history professor Robert Dallek cheerfully. “It reminds me a lot of the late 19th century when we had an awful lot of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. There was an affinity for third-party movements then because the feeling was that neither of the major parties were addressing the important questions. I think there’s a lot of that feeling now.”
Dallek, the esteemed biographer of FDR and LBJ, is on the phone from Washington, D.C., where he’s settled in Woodley Park, an upscale neighborhood of lovely old brick homes and tree-lined streets. He moved here last January for a time when his wife, Geri, a respected health-care policy analyst, took a job with the nonprofit agency Families USA.
But the prolific scholar hasn’t exactly passed the time lying around reading The Washington Post. In September, Dallek’s sixth book, Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents, will be published by Hyperion, and he’s hard at work on the next. He’s been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, among other places. And he spent the 1994-’95 academic year at Oxford University, as Harmsworth Professor of American History.
Oxford was not his cup of tea, so to speak. “It was a little bit stuffy for a transplanted Californian,” he explains in his New York-accented voice. They’re very preoccupied with tradition. You go to ‘high table’ for dinner. You have to wear your academic gown. You can bring your mistress but you can’t bring your wife — unless a colleague invites her.” Dallek chuckles at his charmingly delivered jest.
“Bob has a joke a minute,” confirms UCLA history professor Richard Weiss, who has known Dallek since their graduate school days at Columbia University. “He’s full of wonderful anecdotes and great stories. But in his work he’s very judicious. He’s clearly a major 20th-century American biographer.”
It took him years of slogging away in archives, of poring over oral histories and National Security files, but today, at the age of 62, Dallek is in the front ranks of presidential scholars that include Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough. His 700-page tome, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945, garnered the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 1980. “It’s a tour de force, a standard work on the subject,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning JFK biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “and one not likely to be superseded for a very long time.”
Still, Dallek is undoubtedly best known for Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960, the first of a two-volume biography of the 36th president. Researched and written over seven years, the book was widely praised for its careful scholarship and even-handed portrayal of the controversial, larger-than-life politician.
Dallek’s expertise on the American presidency and foreign policy, not to mention his snappy prose style, has earned him a regular spot in the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section. (“Ross Perot’s decision to run again for president is about as surprising as yesterday’s weather report,” he cracked in a recent column.) And his new book, a pointed study in how the 41 men who occupied the White House either succeeded or failed, is clearly well-timed to contribute to the debate on leadership bound to accompany the election.
In Hail to the Chief, Dallek identifies five traits — vision, pragmatism, consensus-building ability, charisma and trust — and argues they are central to the making of an effective president. He describes how model leaders like Jefferson and Lincoln brought to bear these qualities in response to the domestic and foreign crises of their day and how washouts like Harding and Hoover failed to meet the test.
The book grew out of Dallek’s years of studying and writing about various presidents and his desire to understand what made the strongest chief executives successful. The book also reflects Dallek’s 30 years of teaching: In the introduction, he warmly credits the UCLA students in his honors collegium course on the American presidency with having helped solidify his thinking on the subject.
“It’s very good reading for an election year,” says Schlesinger, “a thoughtful and intelligent meditation on the history of the presidency.” Dallek, however, insists that he’s not attempting to capitalize on the election. “It’s not a campaign book,” he demurs.
Which is not to say he doesn’t have an agenda. Dallek wrote this book expressly for a popular audience; he sees education as a critical part of the historian’s job. “There is so much ignorance of the country’s history,” he observes fretfully. “When you see polling data, high school graduates can’t place the Civil War or World War I in the decades they occurred. I’ve seen data where they ask students the last two states added to the Union, and they answer Canada and Mexico.”
He’s also disturbed by the gossipy tell-all trend in political journalism, and offers his book as an antidote. “I’m hoping some of the reviewers will say, ‘Isn’t it nice to have a serious book about presidential leadership at a time when we’re getting all this scandalmongering?’ It seems to me we need some serious discussion of how our institutions work and why.”
And while Dallek can be quite blunt when it comes to criticizing individual presidents, he is no cynic. He has a reverence for the institution that is surprising and even touching.
Early this year, Rica Rodman, one of Dallek’s former honors students who now produces President Clinton’s weekly radio address, arranged for Dallek to be introduced to the President. The event took place on a Friday, after Clinton had recorded his speech in the Roosevelt Room, where Teddy Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize is displayed. (The setting was especially poignant for Dallek, who regards Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt as among the greatest presidents.) The scholar was then escorted into the Oval Office, where he had his photo taken with the President.
“Professor Dallek and President Clinton were standing in front of the famous desk that JFK used, that John used to crawl under,” recalls Rodman, “and Bob handed the President a couple of his books. Then I said, ‘Mr. President, I’d like to introduce a former professor of mine.’ But the President knew immediately who Robert Dallek was. Clinton looked so excited. He said, ‘He was your professor?’”
Dallek devotes three full pages in his new book to slamming Clinton over his botched efforts to reform health care. But he found nothing awkward about meeting the President in person after lambasting him in print. “Maybe I’m a humanist,” the historian says thoughtfully. “Whether the president or an ordinary guy in the street — we all suffer our limitations. Clinton meets people all the time who are critical of him. What good is it to be a cipher to a person in authority? Maybe my book can be of some help to someone who’s aiming to be president.”
When it comes to relating his own history, the biographer who unearthed amazing stuff about LBJ is decidedly less open. “We’ll see how resistant I am,” he laughs when asked for various details of his personal life. “Knowing what a good researcher can come up with puts you on your guard.”
Dallek grew up in Brooklyn in the midst of the Depression and the throes of the New Deal. His father was a traveling salesman who sold business machines, his mother a genteel woman who was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States from England. Dallek and his father were not especially close; a few years ago, describing his feelings about Lyndon Johnson, the biographer told an interviewer, “He reminds me of my father — quite an overbearing and narcissistic character.”
Still, it was not an unhappy childhood. The neighborhood was largely Jewish and, despite rising anti-Semitism, Dallek never felt in the minority. “There was a wonderful Americanization that took place there,” he recalls.
On Sunday, Dallek and his friends would pack a lunch and take the subway to Ebbets Field and sit in the bleachers for 50 cents. “I lived and died with the Brooklyn Dodgers,” he says. He still recalls the thrill of seeing Jackie Robinson play his first game.
At the same time, Dallek was also developing an interest in history and literature. He loved reading about historical figures, and there was constant talk of politics in his Brooklyn neighborhood. “It was always there and I soaked it in,” Dallek recalls. “Everybody was a staunch FDR supporter. He was seen as a liberal and very supportive to minorities — Jews and Catholics and Italians. There was a keen sense that Roosevelt was bringing ethnic groups into the mainstream.” The strong connection Dallek felt as a youngster to “the great president of the century” inevitably influenced his decision to write a biography of Roosevelt years later.
The story of how Dallek came to study history is almost comical. On the advice of his family’s dentist, who had attended the University of Illinois, Dallek enrolled there. He assumed he’d go into dentistry himself; it seemed a fine profession for a lower-middle-class Jewish boy from Brooklyn. But a course taught by the famous historian Frank Freidel set him straight. Dallek switched to German history with an emphasis in diplomacy. In 1955, he moved on to Columbia University to continue his graduate work; he earned his Ph.D. in 1964.
Columbia proved a pivotal choice. There, in addition to such stellar faculty members as Henry Steele Commager and David Donald, Dallek met the prominent American historian Richard Hofstadter, who would become his mentor. Under Hofstadter, Dallek wrote his dissertation on William Dodd, the American ambassador to Nazi Germany. In 1968, it was published as his first book.
Dallek cites Hofstadter as having inspired his massive biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt and speaks of the deep sense of personal loss he experienced when the noted historian died in 1974. “I was enchanted with his writing,” he explains. “He taught me that style and the accessibility of your language are very important, that history is a story you need to tell well if you are going to engage an audience.”
In 1964, Dallek was recruited by UCLA. When he arrived in Los Angeles for his interview, he had never seen California. Dallek had five job offers, but it didn’t take him long to make up his mind in favor of UCLA. “It seemed to me a dynamic and growing institution,” he recalls. “What was fun was how new and fresh it all was. They were just opening the research library. Having spent years at Columbia, where the infrastructure is so dilapidated, there was the sense you had of a commitment to build a real state university. That was very appealing.”
Dallek quickly became known as one of the campus’s most popular teachers. He was friendly and lively and had a gift for turning dry, dull facts into compelling stories. “He didn’t just stand up in front of a lectern and read from notes,” recalls Rica Rodman, who credits Dallek with spurring her interest in history and politics. “He was a captivating speaker. He really brought the presidents to life.”
Among other secrets, Dallek learned that during the bitter 1968 Nixon-Humphrey presidential campaign, Johnson had bugs planted in the planes of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, as well as in the American embassy in Saigon. In the course of his spying, Johnson discovered that a key member of Nixon’s campaign committee had secretly approached the Saigon government, urging them not to reach an agreement with the North Vietnamese because, if elected, Nixon would cut them a better deal. LBJ and his aides “were furious that the Nixon people were screwing up the peace negotiations,” says Dallek. “They fully believed that if Nixon won the election, he would come to office under a cloud of treason.”
Preparation of this second LBJ volume has brought with it some unexpected ethical dilemmas. Following the publication of Lone Star Rising, Dallek received a letter from Lady Bird Johnson, whom he’d interviewed while researching the book. “It was a very brief note thanking me for trying to be fair,” he says. The historian has since developed an acquaintance with the former First Lady and with several prominent Johnson associates, including former Press Secretary George Christian and former National Security Adviser Walt R. Rostow.
Dallek dismisses the idea that this might present a conflict of interest and compromise the objectivity of his book. “Look,” he explains, “it’s my job to reconstruct this story as accurately and fairly as I can. I can’t bend reality to accommodate friend or foe.
“You have to be a pretty compulsive character,” Dallek says of being a biographer. “I think all scholars have an obsessive quality to them. You come to understand why, in the Middle Ages, this work was done by monks.”
