Kyle Longley's LBJ's 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America's Year of Upheaval analyses that tumultuous year through the eyes of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The work is accordingly a microbiography of the man, and of Johnson's personal political abilities in a year that saw his crisis-management skills tested to their limits. Longley offers comprehensive coverage of the major foreign and domestic policy crises of 1968, namely the Tet offensive, Johnson's decision not to seek reelection, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the violent upheavals at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Most valuable are Longley's detailed analyses of less often considered events, such as the circumstances surrounding the President's 1968 State of the Union address, the Pueblo incident, Johnson's disastrous efforts to elevate Abe Fortas to chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Richard M. Nixon's efforts to undermine peace talks in Vietnam.

Throughout, Longley offers a perceptive insight into Johnson's psyche and makes excellent use of the memoirs of White House staffers and journalists, including those that are still infrequently mined by scholars, such as James U. Cross's reminiscences in the aptly titled Around the World with LBJ: My Wild Ride as Air Force One Pilot, White House Aide, and Personal Confidant (2008). Such published materials are well grounded in detailed archival research conducted at the LBJ Presidential Library, of which the author was named director in July 2018. The work is illustrated with eleven photographs. Certain of these images, such as the one chosen for the dust jacket, are highly familiar to Johnson scholars. Indeed, that singular shot of a seated President, bent over, with shoulders hunched, rubbing his fist against his eyes, in a stupor, has become almost synonymous with the quagmire that was Vietnam and the fix that Johnson found himself in. But even formal photographs of the Johnsons as they prepare for an event, just after the 1968 presidential result, would repay further analysis and contextualization (257). What does an image of the President, leaning in towards Lady Bird, as if need of support, tell us about the aftermath of that election, or about the late moments of the Johnson presidency, or about the role of the First Lady in this administration?

For Longley, Johnson is a tragic figure, and 1968 is a “nightmare year” (281). However, the choice of a chronological framework centred around specific public crises (and Johnson's efforts to solve them) means that the President's everyday boorishness, and generally unbecoming behaviour, are often given short shrift. This is a pity, given Longley's closing suggestion that the reverberations of that year persist today, and have “shaped our current political discourse, often for the worse” (281). One example will suffice here. Longley refers to such “horrific outbursts” as an occasion when, in a private meeting, the President unzipped his fly and withdrew his penis to indicate to reporters his feelings on the Vietnam War, but the remainder of the work is not punctuated with such examples of the President at his personal, private, worst (3). If the gaps between women's and gender history, and political and policy history, are to be filled, the next generation of biographies must build on Longley's work and embrace recent efforts to expand our understanding of the relationship between moments of high policy drama and crisis, and normalized, everyday gendered praxis. To put it another way, what might the case of Johnson tell us about the coarsening of American political culture?

At a time when executive behaviour seemingly matters immensely, and when both scholars and grassroots movements are insisting upon urgent analyses of the state of the nation, the significance of the presidency as a site for critical thought and reflection is of utmost importance. Longley's history of Johnson in 1968 is an illuminating one, particularly in terms of its analysis of often overlooked public crises: the book will certainly appeal to presidential scholars and diplomatic historians. LBJ's 1968 will also be useful for assigning to undergraduate courses, and it will attract the general, interested reader who is looking for an engaging and accessible introduction to Johnson's management efforts in this most turbulent of years.