David Frum reviews for the latest Newsweek the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s growing biography of Lyndon Johnson.

What does Caro think about LBJ?

It’s not an attractive picture. Caro’s Johnson is a bully and braggart, a wheedler and manipulator, a man of bad personal morals and worse business ethics.

And it is this, frankly, monstrous character who realized more of Caro’s liberal ideals than any politician in modern times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt very much included—and vastly more than the charming, winning, but domestically ineffectual JFK.

In a story already rich with drama, this tension between author and subject—between Caro’s loathing of Johnson and his reverence for Johnson’s accomplishments—is the tensest drama of all.

How did Johnson do it?

Here is Caro’s disconcerting message: Johnson didn’t do it by inspiring or exhorting. He did it by mobilizing political power, on a scale and with a ruthlessness that arguably surpassed all other presidents, before or since.

And what does Frum think about this monstrous manipulator devoted to the ruthless mobilization of political power? He’s all for the LBJ method of operation, urging President Obama to emulate the 36th president. (The print version of the article carries the headline “What Obama Can Learn From LBJ.”)

Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift. But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president. The constant searching for opportunities; the shameless love-bombing of opponents; the endless wooing of supporters; the deft deployment of inducements and threats—these are the low arts that led to Johnson’s high success. You can see why a high-minded leader like Barack Obama would recoil from the Johnson style and embrace Kennedyesque rhetorical grandeur instead. Such presidents contribute great phrases to quotation books, but they tend not to add lasting laws to the statute books—or enduring change to the history books.