April 2006

ARTICLE TOOLS

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In his introduction, Dale Buss mentions his first interview with James Dobson for a 1987 Wall Street Journal profile. It almost didn't see print, Buss says, because Dobson insisted that the newspaper refer to him as "Dr.," a title The Journal uses only for physicians. "Dobson rightly pointed out that he was known far and wide as 'Dr. Dobson.'"

Dobson was hardly unusual in fussing about titles, but he was unique in insisting that he did it out of concern for others' welfare. That blending of the personal and the public is a key to his personality, and it partly explains his phenomenal impact. He can hardly say, "That's just my opinion." If it's his opinion, he believes it is right, and if it is right, he will not compromise, though the world go up in flames.

The best thing about Buss's admiring but overly long biography is that he doesn't smooth out the complications. Buss, who has interviewed practically everybody, tries to give the whole picture.

He describes an itinerant Nazarene evangelist's only child, born in 1936, who grew up with an overpowering perfectionism. "Jim's parents and grandparents really conveyed to him a sense of destiny, that he would be used of God to touch the world in a special way," a close friend from college remembers.

The most natural place to work out that destiny was in the Nazarene church as a pastor. Dobson chose psychology instead, building a career at USC's School of Medicine, where he ran a major research project on PKU (Phenylketonuria) and wrote a textbook on mental retardation. Like his father, though, Dobson was drawn to reach the masses, writing the best-selling Dare to Discipline in 1970 and offering weekend seminars.

Dobson built a massive ministry around his daily radio program, Focus ...