Lexington: Hey! Hey! NEAR the end of "All The Way" - a play about Lyndon Johnson that has sold out its current run in Cambridge, Massachusetts - the actor playing LBJ asks if the audience is feeling squeamish. It is a reasonable question given the preceding three hours, charting Johnson's first year in the Oval Office. The "accidental president" created by John Kennedy's assassination is shown snarling, bullying and flattering his way to a near-miracle, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act despite fierce opposition in Congress. At the same time, the audience sees him marching towards tragedy, building a case for war in Vietnam with ginned-up intelligence and the suppression of awkward facts. Johnson is seen buying votes with regal grandiosity: here an aqueduct to green the desert for an Arizona Democrat, there an ambassadorship for an Illinois Republican's chum. When bribes fail, threats follow. Tall, rangy and swing-armed like a dangerous ape, the fictional LBJ - played by Bryan Cranston, a television star from such series as "Breaking Bad" - prowls the stage or growls into telephones, menacing enemies and friends alike. He threatens to ruin a bigoted senator by ending cotton subsidies for his state, and to foment a coup against a doddery committee chairman. The horrors of the age loom large. Federal agents exhume a murdered civil-rights worker from Mississippi's red clay, cloths to their noses against the stench. Pro-segregation southern Democrats, in cahoots with conservative Republicans, snarl about a "mongrel race" imperilling America. The Johnson of the play (as in real life) is horrible to women and vile about the Kennedy administration in which he served as vice-president. He orders illegal FBI spying. Yet on a recent evening at the American Repertory Theatre, a professional offshoot of Harvard University, the audience chortles at his schemes. For all the nastiness on display, the mood in the stalls is a bit wistful. There is talk in the trade press of a Broadway transfer. LBJ fascinates a country that once spurned him. Much credit should go to Robert Caro, author of an elegant, even-handed and bestselling series of Johnson biographies (a fourth volume, "The Passage of Power," came out in 2012). Mr Caro describes a presidency bookended by protest chants, beginning with civil-rights cries of "We Shall Overcome" and ending after years of lies, secrets and blunders in Vietnam with jeers of "Hey! How many kids did you kill today? History has not resolved those contradictions. If politically minded Americans are drawn to Johnson, it is for a simpler reason: he knew how to get stuff done. Johnson inherited political deadlock. When JFK died, conservatives in Congress were blocking almost the entire Kennedy agenda, from civil rights to a big package of tax cuts - even a programme to build new schools. Johnson used his office to marshal public support while picking opponents off, one by one. Mr Caro quotes a senator's grudging tribute: "That man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it." An unprincipled man of principle In part, today's LBJ-nostalgia is a reaction to Barack Obama's presidency. The author of "All The Way," Robert Schenkkan, calls himself an Obama fan, and notes that the president never sold himself as "the second coming of LBJ." But he yearns to see Mr Obama show more Johnsonian "oomph" when confronting Republicans, for instance over their policies towards the poor. There are parallels with advice that the then Vice-President Johnson offered President Kennedy (like Mr Obama an aloof and cerebral global celebrity who rushed through a stint in the Senate, then promised more change than he could deliver into law). LBJ wanted his boss to confront bigotry and to explain "dramatically and convincingly" his sympathy for black America. Among theatre-goers polled during the interval, not everyone chides Mr Obama for his cautious style. Stephen Holland, a doctor who voted for him twice, is pleased that his president seeks compromise over confrontation: "I knew what I was getting: a community organiser." In contrast Maya Jasanoff, a history professor, detects widespread impatience with Mr Obama. She thinks it no accident that the public is hungry for stories about "politics that works," even when that involves grubby machinations. She cites "All The Way," such political TV hits as "House of Cards" and "Scandal," and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," a film about the congressional fight to abolish slavery. True, Johnson had some advantages denied modern presidents. For one thing Johnson operated at a time of unabashed pork-barrel spending. With money tight and fiscal conservatives on the prowl, buying votes is harder today. For another party boundaries have become more rigid. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed with the help of 27 Republican senators and 46 Democrats, but that paints a misleading picture of bipartisan comity. In fact each party had conservative, liberal and moderate wings, often organised along geographical lines. Johnson's genius lay in spotting coalitions that crossed such fuzzy party lines. But Johnson's victories were never accidental. Don't think, know, he would berate underlings who "thought" a bill was safe. A Texas country boy and self-taught master of Congress, Johnson scorned Kennedy's brainy inner circle - "All those Bostons and Harvards," as Mr Caro quotes him scoffing - who knew no more about vote-counting or when to send a bill to Capitol Hill "than an old maid does about fucking." Today, Team Obama seems similarly unable to count, and so has racked up self-inflicted humiliations, on issues from gun control to Syria. LBJ could be brutal, but never prim or self-righteous. Mr Obama frequently expresses dismay over the irrationality or hypocrisy of opponents. To Johnson, the weaknesses of his foes were a gift. "I'm just like a fox," he once boasted. I can see the jugular in any man. Mr Obama still has time to learn from him: unless he is too squeamish.