Dallek On Caro I Don T Have A Vendetta

A native Brooklynite who originally set out to be a dentist, Dallek became a history professor at UCLA, where he still teaches three days a week. He’s published four previous books and won the Bancroft Prize for “Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945.” This volume of his LBJ biography took him 7 1/2 years to research and write; he hopes to finish the next (and final) volume in five years.

Seated before a big JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT poster, the slightly rumpled professor reads aloud a reviewer’s assessment of Caro’s work: “It is, in the end, a cartoon.”

“I agree,” he says. “I think that is an accurate portrait of Caro’s work.”

But isn’t this unabashed attack on a fellow author unseemly? The gregarious Dallek says no. “I don’t have a vendetta against Caro,” he explains. “But I have written a different kind of book. And I’m hopeful and expectant that my work will be compared favorably to what he’s done.”