The Wall Street Journal of April 27, 2012 contains a lengthy review by Robert Draper of Robert Caro’s new book, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power.”
Here are some highlights of the book review:
“…Mr. Caro has revealed that Johnson had accepted the ignominy of the vice presidency in large part because (as he told Ed Clark, a key consigliere [sic] and later a key Caro source) ‘seven of them got to be president without even being elected.’”
“What commands the most attention in ‘The Passage of Power” is an unforgettable 65-page elaboration of November 22, 1963, the day of infamy on which the assassin’s bullet elevated Johnson to the presidency.”
Despite Caro’s claims, a great deal of evidence points to Johnson’s foreknowledge of the event if not his active complicity.
A Texan Ascendant
A crass and visceral political animal, he was also a shrewd standard-bearer for progressive ideals
By ROBERT DRAPER
BOOKSHELF
April 27, 2012, 4:30 p.m. ET
In 1993, Robert Caro traveled to Dallas to receive a literary-achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters for his mammoth LBJ biography, which at that time consisted of two volumes. Mr. Caro’s work was far from universally admired back then, however. I attended his acceptance speech, and I recall several institute fellows in the audience conspicuously snickering as Mr. Caro described his subject with schoolboy enthusiasm. These were writers of the liberal persuasion—but they were Texans first and foremost, and in their view Mr. Caro was a journalistic carpetbagger bent on casting their icon as an uncouth, unprincipled megalomaniac.
To be fair, Mr. Caro had done himself no favors with this crowd by pumping up in his second volume (1990’s “Means of Ascent”) Johnson’s rival in the 1948 U.S. Senate race, the racist Coke Stevenson, as the radiant if somewhat old-fashioned counterpoint to Johnson’s dark star. To them, the preferred characterization of LBJ was to be found in a work of fiction: Billy Lee Brammer’s classic “The Gay Place” (1961), in which the Lone Star State is lorded over with profane benevolence by Gov. Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker.
Nearly two decades and two more volumes later, Mr. Caro has shredded any quaint stereotypes. The Lyndon Johnson he gives us—not as lovable as Fenstemaker but certainly more human—is a crass and visceral political animal half-deranged by the memory of childhood humiliations . . . but also a shrewd, affecting and thoroughly effective standard-bearer for progressive ideals. In the process, Mr. Caro’s almost monastic 36-year-long dedication to his subject has succeeded in winning over virtually all of his critics, including almost every Johnson confidant.
With his fourth volume, “The Passage of Power,” Mr. Caro at long last reveals Johnson as president and in so doing presents a portrait of executive leadership so evocative as to be tactile. A master of physical detail, the author is ideally suited to his bristling subject. In Mr. Caro’s depiction, a despondent vice president—who would slouch in cabinet meetings with “his elbows on the table and his head in his hands and stare down at the mahogany”—is, upon his ascension to the top job, carrying himself almost regally with a stride that “was shorter, measured . . . as if he was actively controlling his body.”
Each of Mr. Caro’s four volumes has featured a defining centerpiece. In the first volume, it was the haunting poverty of the Texas hill country. In volume two, it was LBJ’s theft of the 1948 Senate election. The third volume’s center of gravity was Johnson’s brilliant legislative maneuvering, as Senate majority leader, to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act. What commands the most attention in “The Passage of Power” is an unforgettable 65-page elaboration of Nov. 22, 1963, the day of infamy on which an assassin’s bullet elevated Johnson to the presidency.
By then Mr. Caro has revealed that Johnson had accepted the ignominy of the vice presidency in large part because (as he told Ed Clark, a key consigliere and later a key Caro source) “seven of them got to be president without ever being elected.” Even if Johnson was essentially lying in wait for the chronically ill Kennedy to die in office, his shock and numbness following the crack of the rifle are as palpable in this devastating set piece as the blood on Jackie Kennedy’s suit.
The trick is getting there. Exactly half of Mr. Caro’s 605-page narrative deals with the three years preceding that fateful day in 1963, and these pages capture our usually frenzied protagonist in a state of torpor. Whole chapters are devoted to Johnson’s indecision about running for president in 1960; to his waiting to see if his nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, would undercut his bid to be the older Kennedy’s running mate; to his days as a neutered veep with nothing whatsoever to do; and to a scandal involving Johnson protégé Bobby Baker (accusations of pandering and bribery on Capitol Hill) that never bears fruit. It’s like watching a pitcher on the mound who has temporarily lost his control and is stalling for time—shaking off signals, throwing to first—while the crowd rumbles impatiently for the action to resume.
Then comes Dallas and, following its dramatic events, the book’s unexpected treat: the chapter titled “EOB 274,” which shows the new president, still ensconced in his ignoble VP’s office (No. 274 in the Old Executive Office Building across the street from the White House), holding the United States government together single-handedly while people weep for his predecessor.
In this remarkable chapter, Johnson cajoles Kennedy’s loyalists into staying on board, coaxes congressional leaders to honor the fallen leader by swiftly passing his legislative agenda, and then delivers a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress that is as exquisitely calibrated to the jangled nerves of the moment as his fellow plain-spoken Texan George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speech would be 38 years later. Like Mr. Bush in the wake of the terrorist attacks, Johnson was rewarded with a stratospheric approval rating (77%). As with the 43rd president, of course, the 36th was undone by the slog of war—though that’s a subject for Mr. Caro’s next volume.
Surely the scrappiest reporter among America’s heavyweight biographers, Mr. Caro takes delight in giving the lie to accepted historical truth. In “The Passage of Power,” his chief target is the highly influential and JFK-friendly biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who maintained that Kennedy never expected Johnson to accept the No. 2 slot and that Kennedy was well on his way to passing his full legislative agenda before death claimed him. Mr. Caro demolishes these fragments of conventional wisdom. Though he makes liberal use of a resource he lacked in his previous volumes—namely, Johnson’s actual voice on the tapes he made of his telephone conversations as vice president and president—Mr. Caro’s best stuff in the fourth volume comes from his own interviews.
“Being vice president is like being a cut dog,” LBJ glumly told Sam Rayburn (in front of another many-termed member of the House, Richard Bolling, who in turn told Mr. Caro). Earl Deathe, the general manager of Johnson’s Austin-based TV station, confesses that his boss “lived in fear . . . and I think rightfully so” that the many kickbacks he received through KTBC from individuals seeking political influence might one day be revealed. Another interviewee recalled the insecure new president fretting privately: “I’m not sure I can lead this country and keep it together, with my background.”
Here and there the digging comes up short. Why exactly did Kennedy ignore his brother Bobby’s advice and select Johnson as his running mate? Mr. Caro doesn’t say. And why did Johnson pass on the chance to offer constructive advice during the Cuban missile crisis (which presumably led JFK to cut his veep out of the crucial final meetings on the matter)? Particularly jolting is Mr. Caro’s laudatory treatment of the Warren Commission charged by Johnson to report on the Kennedy assassination. Rather than deploy the historian’s benefit of hindsight and point out its serious investigative lapses in the apparent interest of putting the whole shady matter to rest, he praises the now widely ridiculed commission (on which my grandfather served, I should disclose) as one that helped a nation “build confidence” in the new president. (While conspiracy buffs will be riled by Mr. Caro’s statement that “nothing I have found in my research leads me to believe that whatever the full story of the assassination may be, Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with it,” most of us will probably be relieved that the narrative doesn’t wallow in innuendo.) In this single instance, it feels as if Mr. Caro found himself on a narrative roll and wouldn’t let LBJ’s expeditious but hardly heroic commission slow his story’s locomotion.
Contrast this with the depiction in “The Passage of Power” of Johnson’s 1963 Christmas vacation on his hill-country ranch. These days were scrutinized at close range by the press—or so we thought. Mr. Caro plays the long con masterfully, unspooling one sunny anecdote after another of the new president winning over the establishment media with his family’s Southern hospitality and lavish barbecues under the stars. Just as our hearts start swelling, however, Mr. Caro lifts the curtain to reveal Johnson working the phone backstage, threatening the editors of two Texas newspapers with economic misfortune if one didn’t quash an investigation into KTBC and the other muzzle a reporter Johnson particularly disliked.
“I’d get me a good man covering the White House,” the president ominously advises the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s owner, who sees to it that the offender is pulled off the presidential beat. This is LBJ’s world of brutal realpolitik, and Robert Caro welcomes us in: hardly a gay place but, like the best of thrillers, a many-shaded one.
—Mr. Draper’s “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives” was published this week by the Free Press.
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