“HE FELT, ALL AT ONCE, THE WHOLE WEIGHT OF THE COUNTY”: THE PROFESSIONAL, PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION COPY INSCRIBED BY PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON IN THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION TO LABOR LEADER JOHN L. LEWIS

(JOHNSON, Lyndon) WHITE, William S. The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson. Boston and Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside Press, 1964. Octavo, original red cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition, first printing, presentation/association copy, of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William White’s history of Johnson, inscribed by LBJ, “To my friend and Counselor John L. Lewis, With appreciation, Lyndon B. Johnson, August 18, 1964.”

Presidential historian and journalist William S. White, who was awarded the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of William Howard Taft, was contacted by President Lyndon Johnson shortly after he assumed office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. No journalist stood “much higher in Lyndon Johnson’s affection than the tall, 56-year-old columnist” (Time). In an interview White later spoke of his decision to write The Professional: “I thought that there was the greatest need to give the country, and particularly the world, legitimate reassurance about Lyndon Johnson; that he was in fact an able man, that he wasn’t just a Texas cowboy… The reason I titled it The Professional [was that] I was doing a profile of a politician as a politician… I intended to show what this man’s capacity was in these circumstances” (Johnson Library Oral History Collection). Bookplate of inscribee. Lewis was the president of the United Mine Workers of America and founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO—now part of the AFL-CIO). According to Johnson’s “Daily Diary (Worksheet),” in the Archives of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Johnson met with Lewis in the Oval Office on August 18, 1964, the date of the inscription, to discuss the Coal Mine Safety Bill, and then lunched with Lewis. In September 1964, Johnson awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom, noting that Lewis “ has given voice to the aspirations of the industrial workers of the country and led the cause of free trade unions within a healthy system of free enterprise.”

Book fine. Light wear to extremities of price-clipped dust jacket. A near-fine inscribed copy, with important provenance.