This is a fitting week to finally share notes from the most significant work that I read all year: Robert Caro’s presidential biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982-). Well, all four published volumes, that is—the fifth and final volume is forthcoming.
Sharing everything from what amounted to more than 80 pages of handwritten notes is obviously unwieldy, so I’ll limit myself to a key insight or two from each book, and try to focus on what I’ve yet to see appreciated elsewhere. If you’re truly curious, though, there’s just no substitute to turning every page for yourself.
The Path to Power (1982) traces Johnson’s roots in Texas Hill Country to his early career in federal politics as a member of the House of Representatives. That Caro moved to Texas, for a time, seems, at least to me, as much about achieving total mastery over his subject as it is about cementing the uniquely comprehensive method he developed during his first book, The Power Broker (1974). The uncompromising detail isn’t strictly necessary, and may well be fair game critically, but it is the definitive feature of Caro’s work and what will no doubt endure. The chapters about FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s effort to deliver rural electrification (14 and 27, respectively), for example, describe in detail a poverty that the affluent world has since traded for progress. It’s possible tell this story without more than a cursory acknowledgment of the way that things were before, but we’d be poorer for it—worse, we wouldn’t be any wiser about what we were missing.
Here’s a great example of Caro’s extraordinary ability to maintain concision at depth (and my favourite sentence from this volume): “His opponents’ charges about Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures were buried under Johnson denials, broadcast thanks to Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures.”
You can hang The Means of Ascent (1990), which follows Johnson’s uh, let’s say, legally successful effort to get a seat in the Senate, on this sentence alone: “In the landscape of Lyndon Johnson’s life, already littered with stolen elections, the 1948 election was simply one more detail.” This is the shortest volume in the series and is ultimately as much about Johnson as his one-time opponent, former Governor of Texas, Coke Stevenson. In my reading, if you take the penultimate chapter to heart, Stevenson ended up with the greater prize. Here’s a quote from him, that I think deserves a little sunlight, and one we ought to keep in mind today: “A conservative—he’s one who holds things together,” he told the reporter. “He shouldn’t fight all progressive movements, but he should be the balance wheel to hold the movement to where it won’t get out of hand.”
Master of the Senate (2002) stands taller than the other volumes for me, almost entirely on the merit of Caro’s opening gambit: rethreading the history of America through the desks of the Senate. A 50 page opening chapter that focuses on furniture definitively proves that it’s not what you’re teaching but how. Wanting to read this volume is what attracted me to the series, because I wanted to understand how Johnson was able to move legislation—any legislation, let alone civil rights—forward so successfully. That’s a skill we seem to have misplaced of late.
The answer is twofold. First, for all of our deadlock, tribalism, and obstructionism, we all too often forget how to navigate the machinery of government. In Johnson’s context in the Senate, this meant a body that had been “…created to be independent, to stand against the tyranny of presidential power and the tides of public opinion.” Understanding how the hardware functions is the key to getting anything done. Second, and once you have mastered that, you can leverage it to get a better result from the software (i.e. the members of the body) by creating common ground, compromising, and counting the votes. Putting that all together is not simple, but the essence of how to put it together really is that simple.
The Passage of Power (2019) follows Johnson’s sudden pivot from being relegated to the vice presidency, after commanding unprecedented power in the Senate, to suddenly presiding over a remarkably clever continuity of government in both program and personnel as president. Caro is correct that this tough hand played extremely well remains under-appreciated. As is this distinction between the two presidents, which offers a harsh lesson for idealists: “Where Kennedy had been polite and sympathetic on all matters of basic principle, more often than not he had been evasive on action.”
Caro’s account in Chapter 4 (“The Back Stairs”) of the immediate aftermath between the respective Kennedy and Johnson camps, following JFK’s offer to LBJ of the vice presidential spot on the ticket, should he want it, would make an exceptional film. The key to this would not involve any formal effort to reconcile the divergent accounts of those involved, but to give the viewer enough whole pieces to try and put it together form themselves. Here’s Caro breaking the the fourth wall, as it were:
“And then,” Connally was to say, “Bobby Kennedy showed up, and said he wanted to see Mr. Johnson”—and from that moment, and for approximately the next three hours, nothing was settled, and during those hours what had previously remained, despite all the tension, within the boundaries of normal political behavior, was transformed, with the admixture of personal hatred, into confusion and chaos, a chaos whose aftermath would, during the next eight years, affect profoundly the shape of American politics and, to a lesser but still surprisingly significant degree, the shape of American history.
No two people of the many who were involved can agree on anything that happened during those hours. Each account, and some are quite detailed and convincing, contains statements that are impossible to reconcile with, or that directly contradict, statements in other accounts—which are also quite detailed and convincing. […] Chronologies of that afternoon's events were later compiled by more than one of the participants—but no two chronologies are the same.
Isn’t that remarkable? Have you ever heard about this before—or, in the event that you have, with the same confident resignation from a man who has obviously read every account and knows? I’m telling you: this would make a compelling film, even if it relied almost exclusively on hard cuts and walking-and-talking silhouettes.
Overall, my sense is that we can’t fully appreciate the real work that the forth volume is setting up until we have our hands on the fifth and final volume. Here’s looking forward to that—and, to a new year ahead. Happy reading.
