The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 86, July 1982 - April, 1983 Page: 365

Book Reviews

These problems aside, Rosenbaum's research into the New Mexico
territorial situation of the late nineteenth century is impressive. His
chapters on the Maxwell Land Grant and San Miguel County leave
one with an appreciation for the complexity of the Chicano past.
Houston Metropolitan Research Center THOMAS H. KRENECK
The Compassionate Samaritan: The Life of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
By Philip Reed Rulon. (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1981. pp. xv+348.
Foreword, preface, photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
$21.95, cloth; $10.95, paper.)
Rulon's study of Lyndon B. Johnson claims at once to be a fully
rounded biography and an analysis that concentrates on Johnson's
educational goals, legislation, and programs. The result is a reasonably
credible marriage of these genres, but at a level of generalization that
attempts both too much and too little. The Compassionate Samaritan
attempts too much because, as a biography, it is competing with at
least twenty published biographies, memoirs, or journalistic book-
length studies of Johnson that vary widely in credibility and utility,
but that total some 6,00o pages and leave very little that is new for
Rulon's 312 pages to reveal to us.
Yet too little is attempted for the study of educational policy be-
cause Rulons' limited use of the archival evidence and his apparent
ignorance of important secondary literature do not produce a firm
grasp of the complex process of legislative agenda formulation. Instead
we get a narrative of presidential speeches and statements, and a series
of education-related acts of Congress. Rulon's bibliography lists the
papers of Johnson and of S. Douglass Cater, Richard N. Goodwin, and
Mike Manatos (an odd choice, as Manatos was Lawrence O'Brien's
vote-counter for the Senate, and had almost no substantive policy role
in education or anything else), but not those of Bill D. Moyers, Joseph
A. Califano, or James Gaither; his oral histories list Gaither and
Francis Keppel, but not Harold Howe, Wilbur J. Cohen, Samuel W.
Halperin, and so on. As for the secondary literature, the author out-
lines the most visible activities of the task forces on education, but
seems unaware of the theoretical and empirical literature on task forc-
ing, especially the work of Norman C. Thomas. Nor is there any ref-
erence to the major books on national education policy by Stephen K.
Bailey, Edith K. Mosher, Eugene Eidenberg, and Roy D. Morey.
Hence there is little systemic connection of educational policy and

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