Steve Reads

That video is a really beautiful and educational bit by Bill Moyers on what Lyndon Johnson did for black people with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s via Talking Points Memo. It’s exactly the kind of perspective we need more of. People forget what good LBJ did for black people, which is why it’s so easy for tempers to flare over a line like Hillary Clinton’s (which is included in the Moyers video). Moyers doesn’t downplay either the struggles of black Americans, or the importance of LBJ’s legislation; his is a perfectly balanced voice of calm.

Here again I urge you to listen to Johnson’s address to a joint session of Congress, introducing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It brings tears to my eyes every time I listen to it. This section, in particular, always gets me:

To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in their own communities, who want to and who seek to maintain purely local control over elections, the answer is simple: open your polling places to all your people.

Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin.

Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.

There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer.

But the last time a President sent a civil rights bill to the Congress, it contained a provision to protect voting rights in Federal elections. That civil rights bill was passed after eight long months of debate. And when that bill came to my desk from the Congress for my signature, the heart of the voting provision had been eliminated. This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no compromise with our purpose.

I can’t wait for the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s LBJ bio to come out. This will be the volume dealing with (one assumes) everything from the end of Johnson’s Senate tenure to the end of his life. So it will contain the presidential race in 1960, LBJ’s vice presidency, everything that happened during JFK’s presidency (the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs), Vietnam, the fight for civil rights, and Johnson’s abandonment of his erstwhile Southern colleagues — leading, as that did, to 40 years in which the GOP owned the South. It will either be a massive volume, or a brilliantly concise one. Either that, or Caro is wrong and he’ll need a fifth volume to do the story justice. I can’t wait to see what he decides.

I have to re-listen to Lyndon Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech every six or eight months. This is the speech he gave to a joint session of Congress, on the occasion of his introducing the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It is awe-inspiring. Here’s Johnson, before a chamber that Southerners have dominated for a hundred years, who’ve filibustered any attempt to grant rights to black people. They are masters of procedure, able to snarl any racial progress and use the mechanisms of parliament far better than their opponents. And here Johnson stands, face to face with that history. Here he is, spitting the protesters’ “We Shall Overcome” in the face of his former allies. I get a shiver every time I listen to it.

I’ve probably written about this speech before; if so, forgive me.

Reading the first three volumes of Robert Caro’s bio of LBJ gave me a great deal of respect for the man (and for Caro, for that matter). George Packer’s chunk about LBJ from Blood of the Liberals (which you really want to read) sealed the deal:

It wasn’t the two good-looking Boston-born Harvard grads Jack and Bobby Kennedy, but the big-eared vulgarian from the Texas hill country and Southwest Texas Teachers College, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who insisted to Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen: “The Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them. I want to pull out the cannon. The President is the cannon. You let him be on all the TV networks just speaking from his conscience  . . .  I know the risks are great and it might cost us the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway. The difference is if your President just enforces court decrees the South will feel it’s yielded to force. He ought to make it almost make a bigot out of nearly anybody that’s against him, a high lofty appeal, treat these people as Americans.” And yet Kennedy remained — and remains — the liberals’ darling, while Johnson may never be known for anything but Vietnam.

I’ve cached the “We Shall Overcome” MP3, and the transcript is below.

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Whilst in the UK, I finished reading Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. I submit that it is impossible to finish that book without really viscerally despising Moses. Partly out of a desire to leave no hole in his argument unfilled, and partly because he has trouble using one word when forty-five words will do, the book is just really, really long — nearly 1,200 pages. I wanted to get angry at Caro for doing this; every time I considered getting angry at him, though, the next sentence would be some devastating quote from one of Moses’ victims. The book could still stand some editing, but it’s certainly the quickest, most engrossing 1,200-page read I’ve ever had.

It’s far more than just a biography of Moses. It’s a study of how power actually works — how, specifically, dictators amass power, and how even ostensibly democratic systems can evade public scrutiny. For at least 30 years, according to Caro, Moses was utterly beyond democratic control. Anyone who wanted to get anything done in New York City needed Moses’ money, and needed the engineering expertise that he monopolized. Anyone from the City’s government who wanted to talk with the federal highway or public-housing authorities had to talk to Moses, who would relay (his version of) their words to the feds. No one could fire him without bringing down an endless public outcry — an outcry encouraged and protected by the media, which Moses expertly manipulated into printing only what he wanted said and only the statistics that his office generated. Money and media were in his pocket; with those, he was invincible. A purely accidental slipup after 40 years in power led to a crack in the godlike image that the media had sculpted for him. That crack led the media to question one small corner of his power. Having surrounded himself by yes-men, Moses flew in a rage against any such questioning. But you don’t pick a fight with the media. (The phrase one always quotes here is something like “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”) That rage led to still more questioning, which led to still more rages, and by the time it was through his media armor was gone. Down fell the rest of his protection.

That, in the tiniest conceivable nutshell, is the story of Moses’ power and its end. The Power Broker is an in-depth study of the processes that made all of this possible. The argument is watertight, as far as I can tell.

My big lingering question from Caro’s book is whether any amount of legal tinkering could possibly have saved democracy from Moses. The people with the money will probably always own the political process in this country, whether they buy the politicians outright or do it in more stealthy ways. Much of The Power Broker explains the “honest graft” that powered the Moses machine: payoffs to lawyers hidden as fees, payoffs to insurance companies hidden as premiums, payoffs to banks in the form of interest-free loans, and payoffs to unions in the form of contract favoritism. When Moses “pushed a button,” everyone on his side — which is to say, the lawyers, and insurance companies, and banks, and unions — would call anyone whom Moses wanted them to call and state in no uncertain terms that the recipient’s political career would end unless he did Moses’ bidding. No politician could withstand this kind of constant pressure. Moses had to engineer some remarkably clever legislation and get it pushed through without anyone noticing the details, so if anything he’s a worst-case example  . . .  but that’s just the point: you want to look at how the system (in this case representative democracy) works when something fails.

Apart from Moses-hatred, two big themes come out of the book. First, I will probably never read a newspaper the same way again. If we believe Caro, the media’s coverage of anything related to Moses bore no relation to reality — both because Moses wined them and dined them, and because they seem just incapable of reporting political backstories. And all the people who actually wield the power are far too clever to pull the lever themselves. The real power in New York, says Caro, is in places like the Chase Manhattan Bank, but the press never bothers to report from there. And the press is much more attuned to clear-cut scandal — actual bribes, say — than it is to honest graft. For 30 years, no one had the slightest clue what Moses was doing, even when what he was doing involved condeming the homes of tens of thousands of poor New Yorkers.

The Power Broker’s other big theme is that the private automobile is an absolute disaster for American cities. It doesn’t even make mathematical sense to build roads to the exclusion of public transit when you’re trying to address traffic congestion: train tracks can accommodate an order of magnitude more passengers than can highways. And train tracks encourage higher-density development, by encouraging people to walk to their trains. That higher-density development means people can own fewer cars. Conversely, if lots of people own cars, the whole pattern of development centers on cars — which is where strip malls and highway ugliness come from.

That second point illustrates the silliness of one common line of American thought. When an ugly patch of road forms that’s lined with nothing but strip malls and McDonald’s, we’re inclined to say, “It must have happened because people wanted it to.” But what “people want” is defined by the choices available to them. If someone lives in most American suburbs, he can’t “choose” to walk to work. That choice is not available to him. He can’t choose to walk to a movie theatre. He is forced, in fact, to “choose” to own a car. He then chooses, like tens of thousands of his fellow-Americans, to sit in the same traffic jam on the same highway. This isn’t choice: this is path dependence, enforced by the roads that we’ve built. Had the government chosen to invest in subways and high-speed rail, the set of choices and costs would be different. But it doesn’t even make sense to talk about a choice that’s unencumbered by prior decisions or by institutions: the institutions define the set of available choices, and then those choices force future choices of institutions.

The big trouble with a public work like a bridge or a highway is that if society decides in the future that it wants to pursue another path — say, subways — that option is pretty decisively foreclosed. Caro illustrates this point with Long Island: it would have been cheap to have bought a 20-foot right of way for high-speed rail while condemning land for highways on the Island. Once that highway went down, though, the value of the land immediately shot up. It shot up even more when houses starting popping up there. Nowadays, even getting started on laying down track for a high-speed rail would involve tens of millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of dollars in condemnation fees alone. Our earlier choices, in a very direct way, made later choices difficult if not impossible.

So it’s hard, I think, to escape The Power Broker without really and truly despising the automobile. It’s been a disaster for American cities, a disaster for America’s rural areas, and of course a disaster for American foreign policy. Robert Moses may have done more than any one man to unite the evils of the automobile with the evils of undemocratic public planning.

P.S.: For sheer misstatement of what The Power Broker is about, it would be hard to do better than the New York Times’s ‘balanced’ coverage of Caro’s modern opponents. This is rather funny, considering that The Power Broker levels its biggest guns against the Times’s role in whitewashing Moses’ achievements. Plus ça change . . . 

Before I leave for the UK, I want to recommend that you read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. In Caro’s telling, which seems unimpeachable and documented out the ass, Moses was an incredibly productive engineer (or rather engineering planner) who brought parks and swimming pools and beauty and Long Island to the people of New York. So they put all their trust in him. So he destroyed block upon block of poor people’s homes to pursue his highway and bridge dreams. When those highways and bridges failed to reduce traffic congestion, and in fact made it worse, he continued to pile on more highways and bridges and destroy more neighborhoods. At no point did he ask neighborhoods what they thought. In Caro’s telling, Moses understood The People as an abstract body, but couldn’t identify with anything as small as a neighborhood. Maybe more to the point, he actually hated the little people, and hated black people. Hence all of his public works in New York disproportionately favor the upper middle class and wealthy, and disproportionately harm Harlem. His first big project — building roads out to Long Island — cut poor farmers’ land in half while dodging around Long Island’s barons’ estates. Every subsequent project destroyed thousands of homes and ignored the voices of those who lived there — even those who pleaded with him not to destroy Third Avenue with the Gowanus Expressway. They told him that if he just moved it one avenue block over, it would go over a largely industrial area. He ignored them and gutted the 3rd Avenue neighborhood within months: the expressway darkened the area underneath it, which made it less safe, which made people leave, which meant that businesses couldn’t continue to thrive, which made more people leave, and so on, until that neighborhood became famous as the home of prostitutes and drug addicts and little else.

The power politics are all inevitable if you understand what Moses was trying to get done. Farmers and the poor have no power. The barons do. To get anything done, Moses had to listen to the latter and could ignore the former. And that’s what he did. The early parts of The Power Broker treat this as a mixed blessing: the book understands that Moses brought New York City’s residents their first access ever to the beaches (beautiful beaches, which Caro sculpted) of Long Island — including Jones Beach, which was Moses’ baby and which Caro describes in lush detail. Every chapter in those early stages of Moses’ career is similarly structured: Benefit followed by Warning Sign followed by Destruction.

As the book progresses, it’s all destruction. Moses’ arrogance fed on his increasing power, which meant that he didn’t have to listen to anyone else. He made it a point to destroy those who injured him even slightly; Caro says that he did so for the sheer sadistic fun of it, when there was absolutely nothing to be gained from it. Caro paints him as a perfect bully: he only ever fought with those who were certain to lose. This included his subordinates, who were fired quickly if they didn’t become yes-men.

And where was the public throughout this? They were hoodwinked. Moses knew how to manipulate the press, so he had them in his pocket for thirty years. The dissenting voices were silenced, and the media never bothered to research Moses’ press releases.

Caro feels the pain of those poor people and their neighborhoods. A more heartfelt, scathingly documented, yet still fair critique of its subject is hard to imagine. And as far as I know, Caro’s biography is the final word on the subject: my limited research suggests that no one has contested Caro’s portrayal. I suspect the same will be true of his Lyndon Johnson biography when it’s completed; it’s hard to imagine anyone beating Caro at this game, unless some hitherto unknown cache of documents comes out after Caro dies. Caro has interviewed most everyone (including Moses himself) who could have had anything to say on the subject.

As with that Johnson bio, Caro artfully skips back and forth between the man himself and the power structure he reveals. In The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro wanted to understand how the exercise of legislative power worked — what, specifically, is happening in the back rooms whilst bills are being shaped. In The Power Broker, he has focused on a man for whom power is a drug and a means to an end. While never losing sight of the humans whom Moses destroyed, Caro never takes his eye off the power that made Moses as dangerous as he was.

P.S.: Moses is most famous, perhaps, for having built overpasses on his highways to Long Island 13 feet above the roads below them, so that buses couldn’t get out to the Island. Buses = poor and black people = not Moses’ desired audience.

Related to what Jason said, I’d like to propose a small axiom: honesty is highly prized in theory, but never in practice. People would really rather you not be honest with them. So don’t be. Don’t lie, but learn the art of the dodge. Say just enough that they think you’ve answered their question, but in fact you’ve said nothing. The two big lessons from Caro’s three-volume bio of Lyndon Johnson are these:

1. Johnson did his best never to stand for anything — so that he could then never be held to account for his views when running for president. And he eventually won.
2. It is never possible to kiss someone’s ass too much. Lyndon Johnson may be the greatest kiss-ass that the world has ever known.

I have yet to internalize these rules. But I am trying to learn.

My only complaint about Master of the Senate — and indeed, about the entire 2,000-odd pages of the first three volumes in The Years of Lyndon Johnson — is that it doesn’t really give a convincing explanation of whether Johnson, at heart, cared about black people. Caro explains quite clearly why Johnson suddenly shifted toward the cause of civil rights — namely, that black people were gaining political and economic power, and were moving to northern industrial cities in droves. Without support from blacks, the Democratic party would be in the thrall of its racist southern faction, and would lose the many electoral votes that Illinois, New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had to offer.

So the best explanation seems to be that Johnson was looking out for his own electoral chances in 1960. What’s not clear is whether he actually had any feelings for his fellow-men. Caro spends three volumes carefully mapping out Johnson’s ambition, and only really spends a chapter laying out a weak case for Johnson’s compassion. It’s largely built on his years teaching in a school for poor kids in Texas on the border of Mexico when he was quite young, and helping the people in his Congressional district get electricity during his early years in Congress. And it seems largely contradicted by the rest of the books.

My basic problem with Caro’s analysis here is that it reduces to the following: whenever it was good for Lyndon Johnson, Johnson helped other people. But this doesn’t prove that the man was moral; in fact, it suggests that he’s entirely amoral. If you never do anything that sacrifices your own well-being for someone else’s, you can’t be said to have an ounce of altruism in you. The only way out of this that I can see is if Johnson had a very long term plan that involved his assuming the presidency and then helping people; in the meantime maybe he felt that he could be a ruthless politician, on the road to greater ultimate goods. The morality of this road is debatable, but in any case Caro gives no sense that Johnson had it in mind.

I’m as confused as ever about the two major political parties. For one, I don’t understand what beliefs held 1950′s- and 60′s-era Democrats together. The story seems to be that the South stuck with the Democrats because they never forgave the Republicans for Reconstruction. Northern Democrats throughout the ‘50′s and ‘60′s — people like Hubert Humphrey — agitated for civil rights, and the Southern Caucus continually fought them off using clever parliamentary maneuvering (particularly the filibuster). Is it really only hatred of Reconstruction that kept the party together?

As for the Republicans, my sense as I near the end of this book is that they were looking to be the first party to move on civil rights, as a way to undermine the Democrats and draw more blacks into the fold. This is around 1956. So what happens between 1956 and 1964 that forces the Democrats to be the champions of civil rights, forces the south to break off from the Democrats, and leaves the Republicans as the party of “states’ rights”? If anything, it looks as though the Republicans are in a better position by 1956 to reap the benefits of desegregation and voting rights. Did Nixon (presiding over the Senate as vice president in 1956) really have the Southern Strategy mapped out that far ahead of time? Were Republican moves toward civil rights really meant as a cynical move to destroy the Democrats? If so, then I have to give Dick Nixon a lot of credit as a brilliant political strategist. If he could foresee that Lyndon Johnson would be running for president in 1960 (not hard to guess, from what I can tell), and that Johnson would need to get the Southern monkey off his back if he was to stand any chance at the presidency, and if Nixon moved appropriately to force the Democrats to do something self-destructive then  . . .  I’m actually kind of in awe.

My next book, or one soon thereafter, will have to be The Politics of Rage, about George Wallace and, presumably, the period between the 1950′s and Nixon’s presidency. It certainly makes today’s politics a little easier to understand.

P.S. (12:15 a.m., 5 Feb): I just finished it. I might add on another word of warning, which is that I think Caro really enjoys hearing himself talk. The final 300-odd pages of Master of the Senate could probably have been compressed to 150 pages without losing terribly much. That said, those 300 pages are also a very tightly described journal of the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, down to insanely minute particulars. If you’re into that, cool. If you think that the larger story arc would have come through the muck a bit more clearly had there been less muck, then you might be inclined to scream for an editor.

But these books — all three volumes of them — are such masterpieces that any such comments seem like senseless griping. Caro is a master, and I will gladly buy anything else that he writes. Once I’ve had a little time away from him, I intend to read his bio of Robert Moses.

Oh, I should also note the conditions under which I finished this book. I went cold turkey on coffee on Thursday and today (Saturday), and will do the same on Sunday. (I’ve not decided yet whether I’ll make this a permanent habit. I do love the taste of coffee, but it’s also an addiction that’s getting stronger as the years go by.) My brain was not happy with me for the abstinence, and refused to turn on for hours and hours. Around noon I fell asleep for two solid hours, and really didn’t have a brain to speak of until I took a little pre-emptive Advil to dilate some capillaries and get things moving up there. I probably could have finished Caro’s opus a few hours earlier, had my head coöperated.

This third volume of the Johnson bio is by far the best of the three. (Forgive me, but there will be little else I’ll want to talk about until I’m done this book — which I will be within a few days, at which point I will be deeply sad that the Caro Experience is over — for now.) The first two are fantastic, and fantastically well-written, investigations into the inner workings of Lyndon Johnson’s mind, scrupulously supported by interviews and previously unread documents. They are also — more importantly — studies of how institutions give power and take it away, and how humans exploit their peers and their employers for maximum advantage. They follow alongside a master politician at work, and they thereby help us to understand political power generally.

Master of the Senate is the payoff for the previous two volumes, just as Johnson’s Senate career is his payoff for almost 30 years of politicking. We see him in a political institution whose potential has gone unexploited. We see him understand the structure of the place better than anyone alive at the time or, possibly, alive before him. We see him take the job of majority whip when no one wanted it, because no one understood the power that was available from that position, and watch him mercilessly exercise that power on those around him. It is, I suggest, impossible for anyone — or at least any male — to read Caro’s books and root against Johnson. It’s the story of a man harnessing power, spiced up every now and again by stories about the sex that that power bought him — in particular with Alice Glass, whom many people in the books describe as the most beautiful woman they have ever seen. Which male could resist smiling and feeling envious? (An exception: I think it would be very hard for anyone, male or female, to support Johnson against Coke Stevenson while reading Means of Ascent.)

But these books aren’t just the story of one man; if that wasn’t clear in the first two books, it’s certainly clear in Master of the Senate. This is an institution that had, for nearly 150 years, been a joke: old, doddering men arguing endlessly and deciding on nothing, stalling all forward progress on civil rights as the South dominated, and occasionally calling into question the entire basis of our republican system of government; if the Executive Branch is the branch that does all the work, and a bunch of sleepy octogenarians kill all progress, then perhaps we’ve got this democracy thing all wrong. I now understand that the Senate’s label of the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” was probably not intended as a compliment.

The basis of this (intentional) slowness in governance, Caro notes, is its tradition of unlimited debate. The Framers intended the Senate to be a check on the passions of the grimy masses, with all the positive and negative connotations that go along with that. Caro’s pervasive fairness brings out both the benefits and the harms that this endless deliberation delivers. The tradition of filibustering — only possible in the Senate, and only then possible because unlimited debate is allowed — killed civil-rights legislation for 100 years. But unlimited debate also cooled the public’s desire for blood when Douglas MacArthur returned from Korea. And it’s here that Caro delivers his best punches.

Through careful, plodding deliberation, the Senate managed to convince the American people that even their hero MacArthur may not have understood the dangers he was getting into by provoking the Chinese. MacArthur attacked President Truman quite publicly for following a policy of “appeasement” in Korea, but prolonged questioning revealed that MacArthur — by his own admission — wasn’t thinking outside of the immediate theatre of war in which he was fighting. When asked whether intervention in China would lead to Russian advances on Europe, or a Russian invasion of Japan, MacArthur gave no satisfactory answer. Into this vacuum moved George Marshall and Dean Acheson to present the Truman Administration’s case that they were thinking of the wider world, and MacArthur simply wasn’t. They won the battle of ideas, and Caro makes the case brilliantly that this battle could only have been fought in the U.S. Senate. For all its failings, it’s filling a role that the House could never hope to fill.

Caro’s understanding of legislative power fills a vacuum, as he points out: everyone understands viscerally how executive power works (this is the power of guns, and of individual men pounding out policies), but few have studied legislative processes. Caro’s study is brilliant, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand American history or power politics.

Should you be curious about the fourth and ostensibly last volume of Robert Caro’s Johnson bio, the Times interviewed him in 2002. Just in case that’s behind some kind of paywall (I’m using a friend’s Times Select account), I include the text below the fold.

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I found the New York Times’s review of Master of the Senate, and I’m kind of amazed by how silly a review it is. This is a review that says of Caro’s earlier work,

The second volume, ”Means of Ascent,” was so harsh on Johnson that Caro seemed an anti-biographer. He even made a saint of Coke Stevenson, the far from saintly Texas politician who was Johnson’s opponent in his 1948 Senate race.

Caro takes a good bit of time at the end of Means of Ascent to point out that he thought badly of Coke Stevenson too — before he bothered to research him. As Caro studied him more, he realized that Johnson and his henchmen had even managed to smear the history books.

Means of Ascent is about the seven years between Johnson’s first, failed run for the U.S. Senate, and his successful theft of the election in 1948 that finally elevated him to the Senate. Caro documents in excruciating — but still unfairly captivating — detail how Johnson stole it, and how everything in his life up to that point was about to be destroyed, and his lifelong ambition for the U.S. presidency ended, if he didn’t steal it. So he stole it. It’s not a pretty story, but neither is it unnecessarily bitter. Caro tells the story of the theft with all the fairness of a good scholar.

The first two volumes of this biography detail Johnson’s ambition, his secrecy, and the obvious plans he was always hatching to run for the presidency. I’m sure that it was the publisher’s decision to separate Means of Ascent from The Path To Power, not Caro’s; there’s no reason in the content of the books why they should be cut there.

So then the Times reviewer drops bits like this as though they were revelations:

How can his empathy with blacks be squared with his racist talk? Caro’s compelling insight is that two forces competed in Johnson: compassion and ambition. And ”whenever those two forces collided, it was the ambition that won.” He needed support and money from rich Texans who were vicious racists, so he talked to them in their terms, and they were convinced to the end that he shared their views.

Anyone who had read both of the first two volumes would have seen very little compassion. The reader sees moments where Johnson helps the people from the dirt-poor country in which he grew up (a country that Caro spends ample time documenting), but in large part he is constantly grasping his way upward, and the power itself appears to be the goal. Johnson rarely speaks on the floor of the House, rarely introduces a bill, almost never enters a bill of national scope, and almost never helps his people. These are all documentable facts. The Times reviewer seems to think that pointing out these facts — as Caro did in Means of Ascent — is anti-biographical, when in fact it’s just painting the truth.

If, by the time we enter Master of the Senate, Johnson has gained a measure of compassion, those who’ve read the first two volumes are not surprised: he’s nearly reached his goal, and he may have time to use that power to do some good. In Means of Ascent, Johnson is virtually at the nadir of his power, so he’s spending most of his time trying to get more.

As an aside, Caro’s story of how Johnson financed his long-shot 1948 Senate campaign is fascinating. He built his Congressional career out of money from the construction firm of Brown and Root, to whom he gave massive construction projects (dams, military bases) in Texas by exercising his connections to Sam Rayburn and FDR. He forever altered Texas politics with his 1941 Senate campaign, which was extravagant and was funded almost entirely by Brown and Root — and specifically, by illegal contributions from them. Johnson and Brown only avoided IRS sanctions because Johnson had some sway with Roosevelt. So by the time the 1948 election came around, Brown had no choice but to give Johnson whatever he needed: if Coke Stevenson were elected, Brown’s goose would be cooked. Not only would the flood of contracts stop, but the IRS would probably put someone in jail. So they gave him whatever he wanted, and he won.

Anyone who thinks he or she has the patience for 2,000 pages of tight storytelling, and who wants to understand why 20th-century American politics worked the way it did, should read all three of Caro’s books. They won’t let you down.

P.S. (27 Jan 2006): Reading more of Master of the Senate, I come to Caro’s description of Johnson’s hat tip to the Texas oil industry, namely his smear of Truman’s candidate for a federal energy-regulatory position. It is at least the equal of any of the damning material in Means of Ascent. I don’t understand why the Times would have such an easy time with this new book but not the older one.

I’m speeding through Means of Ascent just as quickly as I possibly can, pulled along by how effortlessly gripping a storyteller Robert Caro is. Just a few observations, then back to the book:

• Down to the level of very detailed specifics, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Coke Stevenson for one of the Texas Senate seats mimics George Bush’s smear campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election: find your opponent’s biggest strength, then undermine it in ways that you know your opponent won’t bother to rebut. The Swift Boat smear was just an updated version of Johnson’s charge that Stevenson was an old man (60 years old) who cared only about the wealthy. Everyone in the state knew this was false, and Stevenson had built a reputation as the most respected man in Texas. He had run — against his will — for half a dozen positions in the Texas state legislature and Governor’s mansion over the years, and had consistently refused to be political. He never made a campaign promise, instead telling the people of Texas that they should pay attention to what he had done. Johnson knew that Stevenson would never respond to scurrilous personal attacks, and he was right.

• The New York Times’s review of Master of the Senate, as I recall, said that it was much improved over Means of Ascent, which the Times (or that reviewer, anyway) thought was vicious and at some level tasteless. It’s certainly not possible to assert that MoA is tasteless if you don’t assert the same thing about the first volume, The Path To Power. They are both just telling the story of Lyndon Johnson; both emphasize the man’s relentless drive to be president, with all the hard work, passion, greed and dirty politics that that involved. Means of Ascent and The Path To Power really could be one book.

• Every now and again one of the people whom Caro interviews in Means of Ascent will mention The Path To Power — because apparently there was enough of a gap between the publication of the two books for his subjects to read the first one. This is interesting at a few levels. First, it’s weird to see the author inject his own works (often needlessly) into other works, though it’s not really a big deal. But secondly, I wonder whether Caro’s extensive interviews with Johnson’s intimates in his first book led other people to come out of the woodwork for his second book.

• It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, in the fourth volume of Caro’s work, he speculates that Lyndon Johnson had John F. Kennedy killed. I’d say the probability of this happening is .2 or so, which is still well above the normal statistical thresholds for surprise. After 2,000 pages of biography preceding the fourth volume (which hasn’t been published yet), two Book Critics Circle Awards and a Pulitzer, such an assertion would seem much more plausible than coming from some random conspiracy theorist. To this reader, anyway, it seems as though nothing would stand in the way of Johnson’s desire to be president.

Lots more to say. Caro’s basic premise is that twentieth-century politics is impossible to understand without understanding Lyndon Johnson, in all the good and bad senses of that description. The politics of race; the politics of Vietnam (hence Watergate); campaigns based around glitter and flash and personality rather than around issues; smearing other candidates; the rise of the South (Johnson being the first Southern president)  . . .  it was all there in Johnson. I can’t imagine anyone else telling the story as well as Caro does.

Now back to the book.

I wrapped up Robert Caro’s The Path To Power last night — the first volume in his frankly obsessive bio of Lyndon Johnson, which is now up to the third volume and which hasn’t, I believe, reached the presidency (the third volume is called Master of the Senate; it follows Means of Ascent, about Johnson’s theft of the 1948 Senate election).

Path To Power is extraordinary. It is one of only two books I’ve read — the other being The Making of the Atomic Bomb — which manages to pack incredible detail while still telling a brisk story. And as far as I can tell, Caro is telling a story that has never been told before, because of Johnson’s obsession with secrecy; at times during college, Johnson wrote letters to friends and instructed them to burn them immediately. This is one of the supporting bits of information — one of many — to Caro’s thesis that Johnson knew from very early on what he wanted (namely the presidency), mapped out how he would get there, and pursued the path mercilessly.

There are so many great stories in this book that I don’t know where to begin. My favorite is probably Johnson’s betrayal of House Majority Leader (and later Speaker of the House) Sam Rayburn, who had been Johnson’s mentor and who loved Johnson like a son. After setting up the backstory and all the political intriguing over perhaps 200 pages, Caro delivers the payoff: Johnson maneuvers Rayburn into signing a letter to FDR that strongly suggests that Rayburn is a member of the Anti-Roosevelt crowd. Because Johnson knew how much FDR prized loyalty, he knew that this would shut Rayburn out of all dealings with the president. He had gone through the rest of the Texas delegation in his head, and realized that with Rayburn out, Johnson would be FDR’s Texas man in the House; when Roosevelt wanted to know what Texas was doing behind closed doors, he would have to come to Johnson. And he did. As a result, Johnson got power well beyond his mediocre seniority. Caro spends most of the rest of the book tracking what he did with this power — brilliantly parlaying it into financial backing from wealthy Texas investors, getting them to fund his failed 1941 Senate campaign, and so on.

A brief note on that Senate campaign: the whole process was corrupt beyond recognition. Johnson lost the campaign because he didn’t buy as many votes as the winner. But not even the winner bought those votes; for reasons that Caro maps out, the winner in the 1941 Senate race attained office not because he won, but because the alcohol lobby didn’t want him to keep his current position as governor of Texas. So they bought out enough votes to send him to the Senate, where he wouldn’t do any damage to Texas’s own business interests.

There’s so much to say about this book and not nearly enough time to say it. I’ve got the next volume in the series — Means of Ascent, which I understand is a vicious attack on Johnson. If the first volume is any indication, Johnson deserves every attack that could possibly be slung at him.

Robert Caro’s bio of Lyndon Johnson — currently at its third volume, and probably passing four before it’s done — is quite remarkable. I’m in the middle of Volume 1. I’ll have much more to say about it in time, but for now I have a question. Caro writes,

The passion for deception, the obsession with secrecy — they were there [at Johnson’s college], too. Johnson’s entire career, not just as a Congressman but as a Congressman’s secretary, would be characterized by an aversion to ideology or to issue, by an utter refusal to be backed into firm defense of any position or any principle.

Caro’s claim is that Johnson was entirely amoral, focused on self-aggrandizement in extraordinarily clever ways. He was a brilliant political strategist in college, but it was strategy in the defense of nothing. The goal of Johnson’s politicking was the advancement of Lyndon Johnson, everyone else be damned.

But then here’s George Packer, from Blood of the Liberals:

It wasn’t the two good-looking Boston-born Harvard grads [Jack and Bobby Kennedy], but the big-eared vulgarian from the Texas hill country and Southwest Texas Teachers College, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who insisted to Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen: “The Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them. I want to pull out the cannon. The President is the cannon. You let him be on all the TV networks just speaking from his conscience  . . .  I know the risks are great and it might cost us the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway. The difference is if your President just enforces court decrees the South will feel it’s yielded to force. He ought to make it almost make a bigot out of nearly anybody that’s against him, a high lofty appeal, treat these people as Americans.” And yet Kennedy remained — and remains — the liberals’ darling, while Johnson may never be known for anything but Vietnam.

It’s entirely possible that both these accounts are correct. But if they are, that’s intensely fascinating: how did we get from a man who was secretive, power-hungry and apolitical, to one who gave us the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act? How could a man whose only project was self-aggrandizement sign the Civil Rights Act and declare to Bill Moyers soon after, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come”?

The answer must be nuanced, complicated, and deeply revealing about American politics. And Caro is the right guy to tell the story.