Schulman's brief biography of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, Schulman offers a digest of Johnson's early life through his persistent means of working towards American liberalism. In his book, Schulman states that Johnson "personified a liberal, activist government", by means of a modern liberalism in which the government oversaw the needs of the people. In his thesis he indicates that Johnson was far from an average pursuer of modern liberalism. Schulman states "More than any other politician of the past five decades, Johnson embodied the contradictions of political liberalism in post-World War II America, orchestrated its triumphs, and endured its agonies.".
In Johnson's early quest for liberalism he found two different viewpoints. Classical liberalism which let people do what they wanted without any or little interference from the government, which Johnson was highly against. The second form was "modern" liberalism which allowed the people to have freedoms but required regulation from the government. However, there was one more form of liberalism that Johnson would later modernize. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal Liberalism" which consisted of Roosevelt's four basic freedoms. The first two freedoms included freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The last two were freedom from want and freedom from fear. Schulman states that "These last two freedoms represented guaranteed security against economic depression and foreign aggression, freedoms that only an energetic, vigilant big government could assure." .
There were three ways that liberalism changed during the years that Lyndon B. Johnson served as a Senator. The first was by Keynesian economics named after its creator John Maynard Keynes. Schulman states that the government was in search of a way to improve the lives of ordinary Americans without offending business, and ways to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless without asking the rich to sacrifice.
