"This Time, This Place" is many things -- and at times, nothing much -- but it is foremost a historical salvage operation on behalf of that "awesome engine of a man . . . terrifying, kind, hyperenergetic, ruthless, loving." The adjectives keep rolling in until Valenti throws up his hands. "Almost anything you could say about Lyndon Johnson, good or bad, had at least a hint of truth to it."

...

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

Such over-the-top language may be expected from the man who once declared, "I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President," and who recalls his first encounter with JFK in this fashion: "He reminded me of a Plantagenet royal, a wise, brave, splendid king who would save a lady in distress." (Wait for it.) "Or a nation."

This hyperbole appears to be the bastard offspring of Lord Macaulay and advertising copy, and yet beneath it lurks a kind of deliberative drabness. Valenti was a lobbyist through and through, and any lobbyist worth his salt knows better than to bite the hand that may one day feed him.