When I was in second grade, I read my first biography as part of a class assignment. It was one of those “Childhood of Famous Americans” biographies about famed magician Harry Houdini. I dressed in a faux tuxedo, slicked down my hair and wore a pair of plastic handcuffs to give a class presentation, overachiever that I was, even at 8. I enjoyed the experience of learning about a real person who lived in the “olden times” so much that the next book I checked out of the school library was a similar “Young Americans” biography of Teddy Roosevelt. From that point on, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, my life path was set. Not only did I become obsessed with the life and figure of Teddy Roosevelt at that young and impressionable age (going so far as to dress as the 26th President the following Halloween), I became obsessed with learning about ALL THE PRESIDENTS (and of course, eventually, all history in general).
What has been the high water mark of this obsession? One might argue it was pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in History. Or even the fact that I am, as of writing, employed by an organization dedicated to the promotion of historical literacy. And yet, I now think the purest embodiment of this spirit has been the fact that since August, I’ve been embroiled in Robert Caro’s expansive The Years of Lyndon Johnson. “Embroiled,” as in “embroiled in Vietnam,” is a very apt word to use in this case. Much like the war with which Lyndon Johnson would become synonymous, the experience of reading Caro’s books feels like being drawn deeper and deeper into a seemingly never-ending conflict with little hope of resolution.
You might say the same of the FOUR DECADES that Robert Caro has spent working on these books. Don’t believe me? I’ve read four volumes, clocking in at about 3,000 pages and only the last 300 pages or so covered some of Johnson’s presidency. There’s still another 4 years of the Johnson Presidency to get through in a future installment (notably, the 4 years where Vietnam really was a *thing* and the entire United States went into meltdown). That’s a lofty goal for a fifth volume - or even a sixth volume - assuming a fifth volume is ever published. Robert Caro, in the depths of his 80s, says publication is still years off and *oh* by the way, he has to live in Vietnam for a time period in order to “understand how American boys fought in Asia”. And so Caro’s personal quagmire continues…
But this review isn’t about Robert Caro’s glacial writing process - it’s about the experience that I, the poor little boy who took up reading biographies as a childhood hobby, had reading what many consider to be the biography to end all biographies.
So where do I begin?
Let’s start with this: I’ve never really cared much for Lyndon Johnson, which made answering the question “Why are you reading so much about Lyndon Johnson” awkward. Some of my dislike towards LBJ is explainable by childhood dalliances with the GOP. I used to be on team “Teddy,” “Eisenhower” and “Reagan” (*shudder*). Even as I grew older and found liberal presidential heroes, they were FDR, JFK and Bill (*shudder*). As much as I knew and acknowledged LBJ’s towering role in passing Civil Rights Legislation and pursuing Great Society programs, there were always things about Johnson’s presidency that unnerved me. Vietnam, of course. And the impact that 1968 had on destroying the dominant role of the Democratic Party in American politics. But maybe it just boiled down to some Bobby Kennedy-esque instinctive hatred for the man that usurped the throne of Camelot with his crass demeanor and Texas drawl.
And for the first two volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, I would say that Robert Caro had done absolutely nothing to change my opinion of Lyndon Johnson and only reinforced my worst beliefs about him. Glad I read those 1100 pages, right? The Johnson that Caro describes in the first two volumes is not just the crass, vulgar, larger-than-life Texas caricature we all know with his obsessions both scatological and sexual (LBJ called his penis “Jumbo,” color me shocked!). Caro’s Johnson is also the ur-politician —- perhaps even more so than other consummate political operators like FDR and Clinton. Johnson is the ultimate machiavellian, schemer and wheeler-dealer. The man who learned above all one lesson from his father’s humiliating failure: the practical realities of acquiring and maintaining power always had to take precedence over ideals and idealism. One leaves the first two volumes of Caro’s work feeling that Johnson truly had no real principals apart from getting elected. In the pursuit of electoral victory, he was a man who spoke like a conservative to conservatives and like a radical New Dealer to other New Dealers. And if that failed, he would just steal elections.
The first two volumes of the series, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, are objectively good, if not great, books, but they can be slow, tedious reads at times. Not least of all because Caro really digs into the details about the reasons why the Texas Hill Country is unsuitable for farming; because the biggest achievements of Johnson’s early career had to do with the financing of a hydroelectric dam to bring power to the “hill people;” and most of all, because, as Caro repeatedly points out, Johnson didn’t do a whole bunch of legislating during his House years.
Also, Lady Bird bought a radio station! Ok, I shouldn’t include that one here, because it came as a genuine surprise to learn that Lyndon Johnson was one of our wealthiest presidents by a huge margin. That he achieved this wealth by leveraging government connections with the FCC to build a radio and television empire and live off the largesse of advertising spots for decades made it all that much more scandalous (in a Robert Caro kind of way). Thus the portrait of Johnson that Caro paints is not just of a power hungry man, but of someone with an unquenchable thirst for the acquisition of wealth.
Where these first two books truly shine is describing Johnson’s not always above the board electioneering, political maneuvering and manipulation of institutions like the Little Congress and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as his cultivation of father figures like Roosevelt and Sam Rayburn. If you can make it through the long drawn out sections on rural electrification or the National Youth Administration (or National Yawn Administration amirite?), you’re treated to the Caro specialty: mini-biographies of the heroes and villains caught up in the maelstrom of Johnson’s life. And if The Power Broker was a Robert Moses biography stuffed with mini-biographies of Al Smith and Fiorello LaGuardia, thefirst two volumes of theYears of Lyndon Johnson is a LBJ biography suffused with mini-biographies of Lady Bird Johnson, the Brown Brothers, Roosevelt, Tommy Corcoran, John Nance Garner, Rayburn, Pappy Lee O’Daniel, and Coke Stevenson (the last two volumes add mini biographies of Leland Olds, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, Emmett Till, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, to say nothing of the omnipresence of LBJ hangers-on like John Connally, Bobby Baker and George Reedy).
But make no mistake, the first two volumes largely felt like a necessary hurdle to get through in order to reach the main event, Master of the Senate - the third volume, widely considered to be the best in the series. Master of the Senate deserves every accolade it has ever received, not only for recounting a richly detailed history of Johnson’s 12 years in the upper chamber but because, as far as I can tell, this is the most accessible single-volume history of the United States Senate ever published. Caro reveals his ultimate mini-biography by spending the first 150 pages or so of Master of the Senate by exploring why the U.S. Senate works the way it does with its arcane rules and traditions, including those of the filibuster and cloture. Caro thus ties together not only his thesis on Johnson’s Senate years, that he was the first man to truly break through the conservative “dam” function the Founders intended for the Senate, to the wider history of the legislative body - he also illuminates lessons about how the Senate still works in 2019 - the conservative traditions linger and men like Richard Russell have just been replaced by men like Mitch McConnell. Throughout it all, Caro walks the fine line of writing a love letter to this much maligned body of American democracy, while also pointing out how the very qualities that make it so remarkable - its gentlemanly tradition of unlimited debate - have been the very same traits that lead it to be the greatest opponent to social justice and progressivism in the United States.
Besides the mini-biographies (of the Senate and the aforementioned individuals) what else from the 1,100 pages of Master of the Senate was truly remarkable? The first thing to note is the way the book bears witness to how Lyndon Johnson was able to turn “nothing jobs” into positions of real authority. Just as he was able to transform the Little Congress and DCCC, Johnson breathed new life into the Democratic Party’s “Whip” and “Majority Leader” positions. By elevating these largely symbolic roles to ones that wielded actual authority, he not only made the Democratic caucus run more smoothly, he ensured his complete mastery over all Senate affairs. More than in the first two books, which were largely legislation-free, Master of the Senate revels in how the sausage gets made with all the gory detail. Johnson works the phones and the Senate cloakroom; he’s counting the votes and re-counting the votes; he’s cajoling and badgering and barking and ass-kissing and always looking for his fellow Senators’ weaknesses or hidden desires; he’s even kicking poor Hubert Humphrey in the shins to GO FUCKING VOTE. The end result is nothing short of a maestro conducting his own personal orchestra on the floor of the United States Senate.
The second thing about this book that moved me were the passages about racial discrimination in the south. Caro hints at the emotional gut punch to come in the opening of the book - describing the pure malevolent racism that prevented African Americans from casting votes for decades in the South. And yet for most of the book, the Civil Rights issue does not take center stage. In fact, Johnson spends the first half of the 1950s firmly in the pocket of the courtly but unabashedly racist, Sen. Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia. The last third of this book kicks off with yet another mini-history about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, culminating in the tragic and heart wrenching story of Emmett Till. For as much as The Years of Lyndon Johnson had been an enjoyable read, it could not match the gut punch moments from The Power Broker (notably how Robert Moses treated his brother and how he callously destroyed neighborhoods like East Tremont), that is until Caro turned his full attention to the living nightmare of southern racism, segregation and violence.
The third thing about this book that is simply astonishing is the tale of how those two disparate threads come together - Johnson’s legislative genius and the Civil Rights Movement - in the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Caro spends a lot of time exploring just how much effort Johnson put into the passage of this bill - the first piece of Civil Rights legislation to pass since Reconstruction. By showing the lengths to which Johnson went to ensure its passage, even by having to severely weaken it by removing Section III guarantees to end segregation in public accommodations and adding trial by jury amendments for voting rights, Caro invites the reader to think about the ambiguities of Johnson’s relationship to race and power. By the end of Master of the Senate, Caro flipped the largely negative narrative on its head for the first time in the series. Caro, whose three previous books received criticism from reviewers for being too manichean in their view of power and those who wield it, at last plays around with ambiguity in Master of the Senate. Did Johnson pass the bill only because he needed to in order to be a serious presidential contender? Or did Johnson capitalize on the moment in order to advance a cause that had been long dear to his heart, playing the southern caucus for fools? Caro excels most when he’s exploring the poetically intertwining fates of Johnson’s ambition and compassion in Master of the Senate and to a lesser degree in the following installment, The Passage of Power.
I’m going to give short shrift to The Passage of Power here. Even though it was perhaps the easiest to read, that distinction came from the fact that I found the book to be largely previously covered ground (either previously covered in one of the other three books or in another book). Unfortunately, because I’ve already read plenty of books/watched plenty of documentaries about the Kennedys and Dallas 1963, not much from the first half of the book was particularly new and noteworthy, even if the Camelot years were told from LBJ’s perspective. I had long known of the animosity between Bobby Kennedy and LBJ, so nothing about that sour relationship as described by Caro was particularly new. What Passage of Power does best, in my opinion, is at last make Lyndon Johnson a truly sympathetic or pitiable character. The way the Kennedy men treated Ol’ Rufus Cornpone is quite sad and one genuinely feels sorry for LBJ in the weeks before Dallas - his political career all but dead as his influence waned in Texas, his protege Bobby Baker became implicated in a sex and corruption scandal and RFK looked to be the administration’s heir apparent for 1968. As a brief aside, so powerfully sorry does Caro make LBJ seem in the desperate days of October and early November 1963, it really is tempting to imagine that LBJ truly had “nothing left to lose” and entered into a conspiracy to have his boss murdered. After all, provided the conspiracy was small enough, he almost certainly had the wealth to pay some people to fire guns, keep silence and frame Oswald. In another moment of desperation, the 1948 election, Johnson had cheated to win his senate seat - how much more of a stretch could it have been for “Landslide Lyndon” to at long last reach his lifelong dream by murdering the man who had time and time again publicly humiliated him? But Caro twice denies ever seeing or hearing anything in the course of his prodigious research to implicate LBJ in a conspiracy, so we will leave it at that. Of course, one of the greatest ironies of history, as illustrated by The Passage of Power, is the way Johnson rose to the occasion offered by the assassination to out-Kennedy Kennedy. That the dreamy Civil Rights and social justice aspirations of the Kennedy years became realities under the much more canny, legislatively adoit and aggressive Johnson must make the heads of those who believe in a “saintly JFK slain by an evil LBJ” narrative spin.
Of course, The Passage of Power ends before the high water (and low water marks) of Johnson’s presidency even take place, leaving one feeling as if the entire volume is nothing but an appetizer for the main course. Given that it took Caro 10 years to publish Passage of Power with few truly new revelations, it feels like a sort of literary filling up on bread before a meal. And the meal to come, if it comes, will be rich indeed: Gulf of Tonkin, the landslide victory over Goldwater, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the War on Poverty and Great Society Programs, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam…And therein lies Caro’s great tragedy. That 40 years of researching and writing about Lyndon Johnson have as of yet yielded no new insights about this most consequential of presidencies. I know not what Caro intends to do with this last volume (or the last years of his life for that matter), but if I had to guess, I think he will frame the narrative similarly to Means of Ascent, that is by pitting Johnson against a main foil. Just as Means of Ascent used Coke Stevenson as that foil, Bobby Kennedy will almost certainly be the driving protagonist of the fifth volume. I think this is the right story for Caro to tell, because the Johnson-Kennedy split led to a civil war within the Democratic Party that destroyed the dominant New Deal coalition and set the party on its disastrous 50-year course of abandoning progressive principals for the sake of temporary electoral gains. This, I think, is one of the most important stories about American political history in the 20th century and to not give it the Caro treatment would be a great pity.
So, now that I’ve read 3000 pages, I can give a definitive ranking of all four volumes. Given the narrow focus of The Passage of Power and how little in it which was new ground, I believe this to be the least important of the series. Master of the Senate was easily the best of the series and if you are someone who only has the time or inclination to read one of these books, it would be my recommended volume. It was the only one of the four books that on its own I believed compared to the greatness of The Power Broker, not just in terms of the scope of the research but in terms of the emotional resonance of its passages. Given this volume rehashes enough of Johnson’s pre-Senate life from the first two books and you probably already know enough about John F. Kennedy’s presidency, Master of the Senate is thus the only indispensable volume yet written by Caro about LBJ.
That means the first two books are the #3 and #2 spots on this list. Means of Ascent had more tedious moments and suffers from the Coke Stevenson controversy (Caro is too apologetic towards the racist Texas governor), so that would be my pick for #3 and The Path to Power is #2. My estimation of the first two volumes did grow the further and further I got in the last two volumes. My mind kept going back not just to the vivid images that Caro paints in these initial installments - of Johnson’s desperate, physically draining campaigning by car in 1937 or by helicopter in 1948 and the colorful, unforgettable electoral foils provided by “Pass the Biscuits” Pappy and Coke Stevenson, but also because by the third and fourth books I truly understood what Caro was trying to illustrate. That these first two books, odd as they are for given so much attention to these early years of Johnson’s life, really do illustrate the enormous contradictions of LBJ’s political life - the drive to do something great for the poor and dispossessed and the willingness to hide those liberal instincts to win elections, rise through the ranks and eventually accumulate the power necessary to make those liberal dreams a reality. Yes, Johnson is an astute political opportunist but one every liberal should be grateful for. After losing to Pappy O’Daniel in 1941, he realized that being a New Deal Democrat would be a liability to his political future in Texas. Johnson’s shift to the right in 1948 and his coziness with the Senate’s racist Southern Caucus in the early 1950s was exactly what it would take for him to “stay in the game” long enough to achieve the power to make good on the most ambitious of all liberal promises: combating poverty and ending the stain of legal racial segregation in the United States.
And that, my friends, is why I ultimately believe it was worth reading 3,000 pages about Lyndon Johnson and why maybe you should consider doing the same. If you, like I, are a nominal member of the Democratic Party or someone who at the very least is sick of the reactionary slide in this country, I believe studying the political career of Lyndon Johnson not only offers lessons on what to avoid but very clear examples of good things contemporary Democrats have lost. The Democrats, in my lifetime, have been a party of complacency. A party of, at best, ineffectual resistance to reactionary Republican policies, at worst willing accomplices to the worst impulses of movement conservatism. Much of this has to do with Democrats’ misguided ideas about “civility” in politics and fear of being hypocritical to the image of the “kind, squishy, big hearted” liberal. None of this behavior is ever followed by the kind of power plays LBJ was willing to make to twist arms, deceive and flat out screw over one time conservative allies in order to reach liberal goals. In short, the Democrats have, in so many ways, lost the willingness to go to the mat and FIGHT and WIN. The life of Lyndon Johnson proves that if you want to achieve the greatest of liberal aspirational goals, you might have to resort to some tactics that are not that kind, squishy and big hearted. You might have to get in people’s faces. You might have to bully them, or at the very least cajole them. You might have to kick Hubert Humphrey in the goddamn shins so hard that he proudly shows the scars on his leg for years to come. Could you imagine Chuck Schumer doing that? Of course you can’t and that’s the problem.
Ok, this is largely hyperbole. But I think the bigger point is that modern establishment Democrats do not play to win and roll over too easily into accepting the center-right position as the accepted “centrist” position. After four books, I can assure you that Lyndon Johnson was not a nice guy. He flew into tyrannical rages at his wife and underlings, a sycophant to those in power, greedy, puerile, occasionally self-pitying and always egotistic. Caro won’t explicitly say so, but I’ve read many observers who believed Johnson suffered from bipolar disorder. And yet, when he was at last given the opportunity to push for the goals that liberals had been too soft to achieve for twenty years, he played to win. He sometimes played dirty. But he won and won on behalf of Americans who had spent hundreds of years losing: African Americans and other minorities discriminated against because of the color of their skin, as well as other poor and dispossessed Americans. Lyndon Johnson’s fight for Civil Rights and his attempt to eradicate poverty and give every American a solid foundation from which they could thrive in the world’s richest country makes him a giant for every progressive to emulate. FDR richly deserves credit as a lion of 20th century liberalism, but even the New Deal fell short in terms of putting an end to the national shame of segregation. Had Lyndon Johnson not been mired by the quagmire of Vietnam, he might have created a legacy that made FDR look like an amateur in comparison.
It's surprising that I am leaving reading these books with more sympathy for Lyndon Johnson than I’d ever had in my life. Caro, a man who seems to hate the wielding of power on principle, makes it so easy to loathe a man like Johnson. It’s a testament to Johnson’s later career transformation to be a fighter for civil rights that I reconsidered the price of his vaulting and borderline criminal ambition in light of the good that he achieved.
But just as easily as the cheering throngs of supporters in 1964 that gave “Landslide Lyndon” a victory worthy of that name turned into the crowds taunting the President with chants of “Hey Hey LBJ How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?,” I believe my mind will change again after reading a potential volume 5. Directly or indirectly, decisions Johnson made were responsible for the deaths of the mid-century big government Democratic Party, Bobby Kennedy, and hundreds of thousands of American, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian men, women and children - crimes that no amount of “playing to win” can excuse.
Note: All images are in the public domain
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