The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency.

JOHNSON, Lyndon Baines.

$3,500.00

Item Number: 120772

New York : Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

Signed limited first edition of President Johnson’s autobiography, one of 300 copies, this is number 61. Octavo, original red cloth, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with 72 pages of photographs. Signed by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Additionally inscribed by Johnson in the year of publication on the dedication page, “To Abe Feinberg who was always there all the way for his Country & his President from his friend Lyndon B. Johnson LBJ Ranch ‘Xmas ’71.” The recipient Abraham Feinberg was a successful businessman with investments and businesses in New York and Israel.  A supporter of Jewish causes, Feinberg is regarded as having been instrumental in the establishment of the state of Israel. As the president of Haganah, the Zionist military movement, he helped mobilize support for Israel. He offered his home to Zionist leaders who were trying to gain support of the U.S. government and assisted European Jews seeking refuge. He even accompanied Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, to his first meeting with President Harry Truman. Active in American politics, Feinberg worked informally with the U.S. and Israeli governments during Middle East crises, led many Democratic fundraisers and served as a confidant to Presidents Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. There was hardly a Jewish cause to which he did not contribute. In near fine condition. An exceptional association.

In The Vantage Point, one of the most complex and fascinating men to occupy the Presidency of the United States describes his years in the White House. In the books preface, Johnson states: "I make no pretense of having written a complete and definitive history of my Presidency. I have tried, rather, to review that period from a President's personal and political philosophy, a President's experience and knowledge...and a President's response to the demands that were made of him." The book was published in the same year that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum opened on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin.