O.K., it's staggering, amazing, awesome, horrifying-but is it the book by Robert Caro, or is it Lyndon Baines Johnson himself? Maybe we don't have to decide; maybe it's both. As monumental as this biography (now in its third volume) is, as mountainous as Mr. Caro's research has been, I suspect, as I have long said of Texas politics, that it's all in the material. All you have to do is get it on the page.

L.B.J. was some sumbitch. Piece of work. Many and varied are the delights of this book, and perhaps the best of them is the long, brilliant lead-in to the great set piece of the book: how Lyndon Johnson passed one bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

For anyone who has ever covered a legislative body, this book is like having an old itch finally scratched. This is how the story should be told-all of it: the drama, the absurdity, the tension, the screaming, the trade-offs, the sweat, the blackmail, the sellouts and the sheer insane complexity of it. Most big legislative battles are in fact like that-just not as much at stake. Look at the legislative history of the McCain-Feingold bill and you'll see exactly the same Perils of Pauline quality, an old-timey melodrama in which the villain ties the helpless heroine to the railroad tracks yet again and, as the hero struggles frantically to free her, the train gets closer and closer and …. Then, when it's all over, somebody points out that you really haven't accomplished very much, and it's time to start all over again.

These are great stories, the stuff of the legends of democracy-rich in character, plot, suspense, nuttiness, human frailty, maddening stupidity. These should be the American sagas; these should be our epics. Bob Caro has given us a beauty, and I think we owe him great thanks.

And in order to pass a piece of legislation that big, that significant, that surrounded by enemies, it takes a Lyndon Johnson, a Bob Bullock, a Jess Unruh-a legislative master, a craftsman, an almost insanely driven, power-hungry, ruthless, lying, shameless, relentless S.O.B. In other words, a good politician. Having watched some of the masters at work (though I missed Lyndon except at the last, my teachers in Texas politics were obsessed by him), I think it one of the tragedies of our democracy that "politician" has become a dirty word. Of course we're entitled to cheerfully despise them, but only if we know what it takes. The prophet Amos said, "Let justice roll down like mighty waters"-but then some politician has to get into the sewer system and figure out how to make it work.

Mr. Caro has inoculated himself against the charge of "heroizing" Lyndon Johnson by writing two unforgiving previous volumes. Several critics noticed that in the second volume, Means of Ascent , Mr. Caro's reiteration of the old charge that L.B.J. "stole" the 1948 Senate race is pretty simplistic: Lyndon didn't steal it, he just out-stole the other guy. I thought I remembered an even more churlish Caro passage from the first volume, The Path to Power , describing Johnson's year teaching at "the Mexican school" in Cotulla in South Texas, and then his year at Sam Houston High in Houston, when he carried his newly created debate team to the finals of the state championship, an amazing feat. My recollection of Mr. Caro's account of Lyndon's career as a teacher was that the biographer pretty much dismissed an astonishing performance by saying, "And then he dropped them like a hot rock because someone offered him a job with more money." (Not that anything wouldn't have paid more money than teaching public school in Texas in the early 1930's.)

What I found in re-reading those passages is that Mr. Caro gives full credit to Johnson for those years of astonishing commitment, hard work (did anyone ever work harder?) and achievement, but he uses that as an opportunity to set up his Johnson dichotomy: ambition vs. compassion.

My reaction is: What's new? Good politicians have always been in that bind. In order to get anything done, first you have to get the power; if you don't get the power, you can't help people. But getting power is usually ugly. The way one judges politicians, in my opinion, is by what they do when they have power: help people or screw people?

I have some minor quibbles with the book. Yep, as Mr. Caro says, not since Lincoln has there been such a white champion of people of color-and given his background, it is mind-blowing. But I think it's a mistake to claim, as Mr. Caro does, that Johnson or any leader "wins" the fight for people's rights-they win it for themselves. It was not Lyndon Johnson or even Martin Luther King Jr. who won the struggle over civil rights; it was the people who marched and prayed and were hot and scared all the time.

I can't get over being surprised that Mr. Caro is surprised by two facets of Johnson-racism and Texas crude. Of course he was racist; I never met a Texan of his generation who wasn't. The miracle is that he mostly overcame it, not through some late-breaking recognition of injustice, but out of his deep sense of identification with poor people. Mr. Caro notes in horror that many of the rich, powerful Texans who nurtured Johnson's career were racist. Yep. Ed Clark, the man Mr. Caro identifies as "the longtime 'Secret Boss of Texas,'" used to say, "Integration is like putting shit on ice cream: ruins the ice cream and dudn't improve the shit." Anyone raised in the South before the civil-rights movement remembers that blindingly ugly language. Likewise, Mr. Caro cannot quite stifle his repugnance over the fact that Johnson was a crude bastard, deeply vulgar. I have no idea how to explain this, but there is a deep streak of Texas culture that finds crudity-especially barnyard humor-amusing. I suppose South Park is a variant of it.

Finally, I'm not sure Bob Caro has any significantly new readings of Johnson. We always knew he was a master of the Rube Goldberg device that is government, that he knew which handle to crank, which button to press, which lever to push, and where to kick the damn thing to get it to start up and do something that would help people. As for the "warts and all" aspects of the book, we also always knew that as a human being, Johnson was mostly wart. The tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is "hadn't've been for Vietnam …. " Hadn't've been for Vietnam, he would have gone down as one of our greatest Presidents, despite having been a miserable human. That's the next book.

Molly Ivins' next book, Shrub II , will follow up on her best-seller Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Vintage).

I'm afraid you really are going to have to read this book just to see what you think of it. "This is a terrible book," David Brock begins. "It is about lies told and reputations ruined. It is about what the conservative movement did, and what I did, as we plotted together in the shadows, disregarded the law, and abused power to win even greater power."

He continues: "My story is about those familiar corrupting influences of ambition, greed and ego …. It is also about the dangers of extremism in a political cause, and about how one can be blinded to the ethics of one's own actions."

I believe Blinded by the Right lives up to Mr. Brock's billing, but I recommend you make your own judgment. Passionate partisans of both right and left particularly need to read the book.

In some ways, it's a moral version of The Perils of Pauline : Our hungry young protagonist set out from Berkeley, Calif., slipped, fell, went from bad to worse to unspeakable, and then found some dimensions beyond that. All in the blithe assumption he was serving the Greater Good. Well after he started questioning his own motives, Mr. Brock nastily tried to blackmail a woman who was someone else's source into backing down on a story (the blackmail evidence was provided, according to Mr. Brock, by Justice Clarence Thomas). At this point, even if you're sympathetic toward David Brock, you can't help but be amazed by what a shit he was. And I'm not sure he hasn't done it yet again in this book.

He keeps gamely trying to explain it all, with heavy emphasis on the inherent falsity of being a closeted gay. Even granted the moral quandaries of that dilemma, there's too much closeted-gay angst in Blinded by the Right . Another recurring theme is how Mr. Brock and his fellow "Third Generation" conservatives were just reacting to the dread excesses of political correctness he says dominated campuses in the 1970's. He could have saved himself a lot of trouble by going to Texas A&M.

At Berkeley he watched as then–U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was shouted down by a group of leftist protesters-to the point where she could not speak at all. Mr. Brock, then a reporter for the college paper, quite rightly reacted against this offensive stupidity. He reports that the only support for free speech on the campus came from conservatives. As a longtime American Civil Liberties Union liberal who has been through innumerable battles on behalf of every damn body's right to speak, my reaction is, What are we, chopped liver? You have to admit, the ACLU will go to bat for anybody-Nazis, Kluckers, Ollie North.

Our man went off to Washington where he fell into the big, fat middle not of a right-wing conspiracy, but a vast agglomeration of like-minded people possessed by both seething anger and stupefying self-righteousness. I find Mr. Brock's hindsight comments on the nature of conspiracy quite sensible. What a web it is, with several peculiar foundations at the center of it, and the perfectly astonishing Richard Mellon Scaife at the heart of it.

Mr. Brock started at what has to be one of the most peculiar newspapers in America, The Washington Times , funded by the Rev. Sung Myung Moon. Here begins a third strain of self-exculpation: No one ever taught our man how to be a journalist. I think this theme deserves serious consideration. Poor Mr. Brock actually thought himself a reporter, as though he and Danny Pearl were of the same species. I don't like the idea of credentializing journalism, which is more a craft than a profession. But someone has to teach you a craft, too. It seems to me there's a real problem with letting loose to attack a President someone who has never had to report accurately a five-car pileup or a county commissioners' meeting.

As though The Washington Times weren't bad enough, Mr. Brock then moved on to The American Spectator , a publication whose practices left me blinking like an owl. I worked for a small political magazine myself for six years: The Spectator is from another planet. Here Mr. Brock had free rein to attack Anita Hill ("a little nutty and a little slutty"), not to mention the infamous Troopergate story, using sources that wouldn't pass muster if you were writing "Elvis Lives!" for a tabloid. How this crap got into the mainstream media is one of the most fascinating parts of the book.

A lot of it, however, is not new. In the late 90's, Mr. Brock wrote a series of articles for Esquire in which he explained much of what he'd done, and he turns out to have been a major source for Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in their excellent book The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton . The reason this material is still interesting is that mainstream journalism has yet to back off and look at the Clinton scandals with any perspective. As an occasional visitor to Washington during the final standoff, I never saw anything politically odder. Two great power centers, the White House and the Starr investigation, stood blazing hatred at one another across the city; I couldn't find anyone who hadn't taken sides. Mr. Brock tells a big piece of the story of how we got there.

Blinded by the Right has several weaknesses. David Brock still hasn't learned how to attribute everything he needs to, and the writing is sometimes clunky-he has a tendency to start sentences with information about how someone looks and dresses before inserting a comma and moving on to the news. And fairly often Mr. Brock uses the wrong word, off by a shade or two. Perhaps I should be even more wary of his book: Remember that his Anita Hill hatchet job got respectful views from The New York Times , among others, for its supposedly damning accretion of fact.

I do have one major qualm: During his years in Washington, Mr. Brock's "surrogate parents," the couple that fed him dinners, cheered for him in victory, rooted for him in defeat and advised him (badly) in peril, were Judge Lawrence Silberman of the D.C. Court of Appeals and his wife, Ricky. If what I read in this book is true, Judge Silberman should be impeached as quickly as possible. Having known jurists of the ethical caliber of William Wayne Justice, who will not even voice his political opinions much less conspire for them, I almost vomited on reading of the Silbermans' tawdry role in this cabal. (Journalists may need to examine their consciences over Clinton scandals, but by God there are a lot of lawyers and judges who deserve some dark nights of the soul.) So here's David Brock, once again, this time stabbing in the back not someone whom he never met or even bothered to do an honest job of reporting on, but two people who were apparently endlessly kind to him. God help him.

I had forgotten about it until I saw it mentioned in his new book, but many years ago I wrote a column about Mr. Brock's The Real Anita Hill headlined "Save Yourself $24.95." This time around-not, I hope, for partisan reasons, but because I think everyone needs to gnaw through this one to reach his own conclusions-I'd say spend the $25.95.

Molly Ivins' next book, Shrub II , will follow up on her best-seller, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Vintage).

into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush , by Frank Bruni.

HarperCollins, 278 pages, $23.95.

This is a curious book, in

that it's both quite a good personality study of George W. Bush and also a

prize example of what's wrong with political journalism.

The genre is campaign memoir,

and Frank Bruni takes us-at greater length than necessary-into the surreal

swirl of endless days, sleep deprivation, computer foul-ups, dirty clothes and

food-on-the-run that is a national political campaign: that bizarre,

hermetically sealed world of the bubble, where little things take on an insane

importance and wind up on the front page, perhaps affecting history. I quite

enjoyed the descriptions of the gang on the campaign plane, but then I'm a

political reporter who had to sit out 2000, and I missed the madness. I

especially enjoyed Mr. Bruni's riff on the shifting vogue in electronic gadgets

carried by the correspondents, but one has to wonder how much the foibles and

travails of the press actually interest most readers.

The best account of a campaign from the press point of view is

still Tim Crouse's 1972 classic The Boys

on the Bus , a much funnier book than Ambling

into History . But I'll defend Mr. Bruni on this point: Those who have never

covered a campaign will think he is nutty on the subject of food, which the

Bush campaign provided in such lavish quantities

that the press collectively became a pack of porkers. The extent to

which press coverage of a campaign can be influenced by good eats cannot be

overestimated. I promise you: One reason Richard Nixon won in 1968 was because

Hubert Humphrey had a backer in Minnesota who manufactured wieners, and all we

had to eat for several months was teeny wienies. I suspect that next time out,

when Mr. Bruni is no longer new to national campaigns, much of this will strike

him as old hat and not worth reporting, which is a bit of a shame.

Mr. Bruni's major thesis about Mr. Bush is summed up by a

slightly misquoted passage from Shakespeare, as cited by a close friend of the

President: "Some people are born great, some people grow to greatness, and some

people have greatness thrust upon them." Mr. Bruni believes Mr. Bush got there

all three ways. If you are not a Bush fan, don't urp yet. This is not that much

of a suck-up book. Mr. Bruni probably doesn't believe that "greatness" is the

right word: I suspect he'd go for something between "great" and "adequate."

That George W. Bush was born with a leg up, that he learned and got better as

he campaigned, and that Sept. 11 was one hell of a final exam is, I think, all

true. I do not subscribe to the theory that Mr. Bush became Winston Churchill

on Sept. 12, and I think most of his policies are disastrous.

I've known President Bush slightly since high school, watched him closely as governor of Texas, and

I think Mr. Bruni gets him well. By the end of the book, when Mr. Bruni says

some bit of behavior is "utterly Bush," you know exactly what he means. Mr.

Bruni states at the beginning, "This book … is dedicated primarily to what Bush

looked and acted like on the edges of what was usually considered news." The

downside to this method is far too many accounts of "mischievous grins,"

"special winks," "conspiratorial glances" and "the springy frame that ambled

merrily along," not to mention various tics Mr. Bruni found "endearing" and

"seductive." All politicians aim to seduce. Mr. Bruni also describes Mr. Bush as occasionally or frequently

"inane," "vapid," "fatuous," lazy and usually unprepared. Mr. Bruni maintains,

again accurately, that Mr. Bush will buckle down for a big game.

But I think he misses how disengaged , as we used to say politely

of the deteriorating Ronald Reagan, Mr. Bush appears to those who do not know

him. That first visit to Mexico, where the people are so cortes y formal , was a disaster: The President thought he was being

charmingly informal, and the Mexicans thought he was dissing them. The two

European trips were the same, but we get no hint of it here. Sorry to be mean,

but Mr. Bruni spends so much time bitching about sleep-deprivation, he

apparently had no time to read the local press.

Most reporters fall at least a

little in love over time with the politician they're covering. It's an

occupational hazard in our trade--and a good reason to rotate reporters. Mr.

Bruni describes this phenomenon as a "cult," in which everyone on the plane

becomes obsessed with the leader. One notices Mr. Bruni's empathizing with the

Bush team-and again, that's almost inevitable for a one-candidate reporter-in

his inadvertently comic accounts of the other campaigns. He spends a few days

with John McCain and finds there is Too Much Access, and it's an unfair

advantage that Mr. McCain makes reporters like him so well. A visit to the Gore

camp is even worse since there is No Access At All, not even for The New York Times . Al Gore did

not make nice with reporters: "He made no

effort. His energies were channeled into his campaign trail remarks, so dense

with knowledge, so showy with digressions. He sweated the big stuff and muffed

the small stuff." How awful! It's as though Mr. Bruni has visited rival frat

houses and felt they just wouldn't do.

Mr. Bruni is occasionally

self-important, but then he works for The

Times and it goes with the territory. One of the more sympathetic passages

is Mr. Bruni's anxiety over a big interview with George and Barbara Bush. He

arrives absurdly early, times his route, lays out his suit and is as nervous as

a whore in church. A one-shot interview is always risky, but Mr. Bruni gets

some fabulous quotes. Bush père

observes that his son's shot at the Presidency is "a six-inch putt" given his

advantages, and Mr. Bruni finds rich material for insights. In far more elegant

language, he describes a trait that we summarize in our crude Texas fashion as Dubya thinks his own shit don't stink .

Mr. Bruni identifies the quality as "a strain of moral arrogance," as if "Bush-ness

itself was proof of civic righteousness, of the impossibility of wrongdoing."

Mr. Bruni finds this "extremely presumptuous." One sees it frequently: Mr. Bush

is perfectly capable of taking the low road, as he did in South Carolina, and

then complaining about his opponent's tactics, as though he were on high moral

ground. There's an element of pure snobbishness to it.

I'm less persuaded than Mr.

Bruni of the famous Bush family loyalty: They dump old friends who get dropped

in the mud in what Texans call a New York minute. (Ask Ken Lay.) I'm also less

persuaded that one of Mr. Bush's most notable traits-his emphatic preference

for the familiar in people, pets, pillows, peanut butter and cabinet members-is

just a yen for the snug and the cozy. One might just as fairly deduce a lack of

curiosity and an unwillingness to stretch himself.

If someone has written a book about Botswana, you can't criticize

it by saying, "But he doesn't even mention

Italy." If this book is limited, as almost all political journalism is these

days, to the politics of elections rather than what governance does to people's

lives, Mr. Bruni has missed half the story. Contemporary politics is the

marriage of personality and money ;

Mr. Bruni barely mentions money. Mr. Bush flew around the country promising to

"restore honor and integrity to the White House," in part courtesy of Enron

planes. He has been a servant of corporations all his political career.

There is an even graver flaw in the book: the complete disconnect

between the political race and the issues. Mr. Bruni observes the reason

political reporters don't write about issues during a campaign is because they

already have-usually the previous summer, when no one was paying attention-so

it's not news , whereas gaffes are.

Nine-tenths of the way through the book, Mr. Bruni notes in passing that Mr.

Bush's entire campaign was based on the tax cut and education. He says the

candidate's "tax families," trotted out at campaign stops to prove his tax cut

would help average Americans, were considered a complete joke by reporters. As

for education, the federal budget supplies only 7 percent of school funding: No

President is going to make much of a dent in those problems. So we watched a

campaign based on a tax cut painfully canted toward the rich and a bunch of

malarkey. Shouldn't that have been the "story line," rather than "Can the

goofball from Texas beat the stiff from Tennessee?"

Molly

Ivins is a syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Shrub: The Short

but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Vintage).