This was definitely the most entertaining review so far, the book sounds incredibly interesting - there's always an apppeal to larger than life figures. (I also want to watch the TV series about LBJ, PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE!)
I liked this one a lot! For one, it's the first review I wish was longer. Also LBJ is just a super fascinating person, I've been meaning to read Caro for a long time, and this is a good prod towards picking up The Power Broker or this LBJ series. I'm ranking it highly but not quite at the top, I like what was there but I think there could be more there there.
Anywho, new rankings:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties
3rd The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
4th The Wizard and the Prophet
5th Double Fold
6th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Good point, FWIW this was intended as a way to organize track for myself, and just kind of work out by writing down my thoughts what I thought the relative rankings would be. But _Caesar's wife must be above all suspicion_, so I'll sit on my hands for the last review
I posted some rankings myself but stopped after a while for vaguely similar reasons. I think I only posted them over on the subreddit tho, not sure how many folks read that.
A thought, how about posting the rankings in ROT13? That way I can keep working things out but won't be swaying anyone unless they take an extra step to know what I'm thinking, which honestly I don't think many will
If you do that, I'd suggest obfuscating the names; Double Fold and Are We Smart Enough... in particular would stand out even rot13ed. "The One About Land Value Taxes", "The One About the Dead Roman", "The One About the President", ...
There is an old Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China.” With being soft on communism the blood libel for democrats at the time, what honest options did LBJ really have in Vietnam?
I feel like you're projecting back from the later Carter years or something. Being soft on the Commies wasn't a problem just for Democrats in those days. It sunk Robert Taft, a member of the non-interventionist Republicans who used to dominate that party in the early 20th century. JFK used the "missile gap" stick fairly effectively to beat up Nixon in 1960.
I don't think the quote about Nixon is entirely based on him being a Republican, but has a great deal to do with him being Nixon -- who had a long personal history of being savagely anti-Communist -- and, to the extent it's admiring, reflecting the fact that Nixon *was* fairly unique among American Presidents up to that date in being interested in Asia, learning extensively about it, and thinking the US had strategic interests there that were at least as complex and worthy of thought as those it had in Europe.
As for the LBJ's options: maybe just declare victory and go home? That worked for Eisenhower in Korea, and JFK certainly didn't double down on the Bay of Pigs. I don't think Americans in 1964 were that gung-ho about yet another bloody "police action" in Southeast Asia, I'm guessing he could have politically survived cutting and running (as his opponents might have called it). He would have had the victories of the "Space Race" in 1965-1968 to burnish his We're #1! credentials and set him up for victory in '68.
I read McNamara's memoirs just last month (and did some double checking on this particular point), and he's very clear that he, Kennedy, and Kennedy's whole team, was totally convinced by domino theory. They spent a lot of time during the transition from the Eisenhower administration, which was also totally convinced by domino theory. That started to change by 68 among a few people (in particular, McNamara), but I couldn't find any evidence that either Kennedy or LBJ thought just going home was an option in Vietnam.
Well, we know LBJ didn't think going home was an option, because he didn't. On the other hand, Nixon thought it was an option, and did so, successfully. So clearly it *was* possible, politically as well as militarily. LBJ just didn't think of it, or wasn't (politically) smart enough to pull it off.
How did this manage to be a whole article on the insanity of LBJ without even getting to the craziest single story?
When LBJ was President, a reporter once asked him why the US was in Vietnam. His response - and yes, this actually happened - was to unzip his pants, pull out his dick, wave it at the reporter, and say "This is why!".
LBJ had a car that was also a boat. He liked to go driving with people who didn't know it was a boat. He'd pretend the braked failed and "accidently" drive into a lake.
When I read the first half of this review, I was thinking "what is this fascinating biography of Johnson that *isn't* the Caro one?" But then I learned that this *is* the Caro one, and it's just being reviewed in a way that is very different from everything else I've read about the book (and the Robert Moses one, which is also a classic).
"it's another thing to elect someone who named his kids Lynda Bird Johnson and Lucy Baines Johnson in order to make the public think about the initials LBJ."
I was wondering if he'd only married Lady Bird Johnson because of her name, but I looked it up and Lady Bird's actual name was Claudia, and Lady Bird was just a nickname which eventually seems to have displaced her real name.
Well, I haven't gone over the sources with a fine-toothed comb under the suspicion that there was a giant conspiracy to hide that she was never called Lady Bird until she married Lyndon B., but everything I've ever read says that it was a childhood nickname that was universally adopted early on.
As wikipedia describes it, Black struck down Stevenson's injunction on the grounds that the federal government can't interfere with the state election. So it sounds like the mistake Stevenson made was filing a federal injunction rather than a state injunction? Or were the state judges already in LBJ's pocket?
(Quick note: these books are available on Audible with a great narrator, which is a boon because they're HELLA long. Official recommend.)
These books are riveting, like, way more riveting than I expected them to be. I spent several weeks while I was making my way through them complaining to everyone about what an asshole LBJ was. fwiw my husband (who only read the Robert Moses biography but also heard me talk about The Years of Lyndon Johnson a lot) thinks Caro comes into his biographies with biases and is really good at telling the story he wants to tell. I do feel somewhat suspicious that I came out of this with an extremely strong conviction that LBJ ruined America and was also a garbage human being on an interpersonal level.
But I haven't read Caro's book Working, maybe that would clear things up in terms of figuring out how much bias Caro has room to introduce. Also, I've been fed hero and villain narratives about US presidents my whole life (e.g. Bush villain, Obama hero; also FDR hero, Nixon villain, etc), and I wonder if perhaps it's just really hard to holistically assess an individual who wields such outsized power over the span of several years, and is subject to such a dizzying array of conflicting incentives.
To take an example from LBJ's presidency, escalating the Vietnam War was terrible for America (and for tons of other people, obviously), but it wasn't trivially easy to know this in advance. And even if it's the case that LBJ went into it knowing it was a bad idea, Caro makes it sound like he essentially had no choice in the matter. For another thing, it may very well be the case that LBJ was personally racist, but he did do a ton to advance civil rights. Presidents are ultimately judged based on their legacy, and that includes things they did (or didn't do) for the wrong reasons, things that everyone expected to go well that went poorly (or vice versa), and world events that happened during their presidency that were largely or entirely out of their control (like World War II? hard to think of a perfect example). It's only in retrospect that we can say that LBJ was the president who destroyed the American public's trust in the presidency as an institution, but it's not like he was the first president to be an asshole and make bad decisions.
I'm having trouble making a clean point here, because I'm confused about the subject. Perhaps what I mean to say is that I should separate the Lyndon Johnson who was privately a total asshole (making his staff cry, making secretaries stand in the bathroom to take dictation from him while he pooped, openly cheating on his wife, etc) from the Lyndon Johnson whose presidency left a lasting legacy of both good (civil rights) and bad (Vietnam). Perhaps that's the right way to look at presidents. And yet Caro's biographies intertwine the two really inextricably, and so I come a way with a gut sense of hating LBJ.
Ah, that wasn't really my point, but I know I didn't make my point very well. He was definitely an asshole on a personal level, no question. But I think it's still definitely possible that he did his honest best to do the right thing as president, and I think my monkey brain has trouble separating the two things, and Caro's presentation doesn't help me separate them.
LBJ largely seems to do what's best for LBJ. Sometimes, mind you, that includes doing what LBJ knows is right even though that may cost him politically. But when you're that selfish and awful a person to everyone around you all the time, it is not unreasonable to conclude that even when you do good things they are probably for pretty selfish reasons. It just may be that you're right this time.
Because he thinks he'll be proved right in the long run, for one. Or because he just likes telling people what to do. Or because people told him not to. Any number of reasons. I just strongly suspect they were selfish ones. Certainly one of his former aides apparently told Caro that the man had zero principles at all and was just in it for the historical legacy.
Though, to quote from an MSNBC article about the man: "But we shouldn't forget Johnson's racism, either. After Johnson's death, Parker [Johnson's black former chauffeur] would reflect on the Johnson who championed the landmark civil rights bills that formally ended American apartheid, and write, "I loved that Lyndon Johnson." Then he remembered the president who called him a nigger, and he wrote, "I hated that Lyndon Johnson.
Sounds about right."
Sums it up well, really. Absolutely terrible human being. Morally correct sometimes. Hard to reconcile the two.
I started off "I don't care about LBJ, why should I read this review?"
And darn it, you convinced me! I had to look up Pappy O'Daniel because I went "what kind of half-Irish name is that?"
This is a man who started a hillbilly band to sing for his employer's radio show and naturally, since his employer was a flour mill, called them The Light Crust Doughboys (they even wangled a spot playing in a Gene Autry movie). Then he went off and started his own flour business, and founded another hillbilly/Western swing band to play for his radio show which "extolled the values of Hillbilly brand flour, the Ten Commandments and the Bible" and called them Pat O'Daniel and the Hillbilly Boys, and they sang the theme song which gave him his "Pappy" nickname https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxQmj788X2o
And that launched him into politics, running as a Democrat in Texas, which seems to have been about as corrupt when it came to vote-counting as the review alleges.
And that's just *one* guy, I'm afraid to look up the others! 😀
I was surprised, I thought Pappy O'Daniel was a figment of Coen Bros' imagination in their comedy-drama-musical reinterpretation of the Odyssey called O Brother, Where Art Thou? Instead, judging by this review, it appears their Pappy O'Daniel was partly reality-based satire.
Who knew it was a documentary? But maybe this kind of thing explains why there is a literary genre called Southern Gothic. You couldn't make it up! as they say.
Nitpick to appease my slightly pedantic sense of accuracy: the reason LBJ would be eligible to run again (and was eligible in 1968, although he chose not to) is specifically that he'd served less than 6 years in office. Had JFK been assassinated and LBJ ascended ~10 months earlier, it would not have been possible for him to run for further term even after having only been elected once.
A good review that captures Caro’s quirks! I love all of the Caro books. A commenter once suggested that the key to Caro is to view him as a performance artist rather than a historian (none of his books are traditional biographies) because he goes to genuinely insane lengths (moving to the Hill Country, walking around the Senate with Bill Bradley to understand the importance of height in personal relations between politicians, etc.) to nail down bits of apocrypha and add novelistic details to his books. I still remember reading what seems like hundreds of pages in The Passage of Power about RFK’s attempts to get LBJ off the ticket...
The factor that isn't to be underrated in assessing these books is the time period in which Caro is writing each. When he was writing Means of Ascent, LBJ was the monster behind Vietnam in the minds of Caro's peers - so kinda ordinary politician guy Coke Stevenson got transfigured into a literal saint as a foil for the demon. These days, we're a little removed from Vietnam and people have noticed, you know, the Civil Rights Act, so things are a bit different...
I heard the story second-hand from my father-in-law, but I did actually meet the main figure of the story (a friend of my wife's family, from Texas).
Unnamed figure used to work for the CIA (verified fact), and presumably still did at the time of the story or at least had active connections (from the timing, I think it had to be during LBJ's vice presidency). Anyways, story goes, one day our main character gets a call, and he picks up a briefcase filled with money (I forget the amount, but it was like a million or something like that, all in cash). He's handcuffed to it, and gets on a plane. When he arrives at his destination he makes the handoff right on the tarmac and flies straight back.
Not long after the handoff, it's announced that NASA will be located in Houston and that Brown & Root was awarded some prominent contracts related to the construction.
I have no way to verify any of it but this article makes me update from "crazy story my father in law told me" to "Yaknow that one was probably true."
Second story is less conspiracy-mysterious, and more just personal and emotional.
My uncle used to be in the army in the 60's, and he was a journalist for Stars & Stripes (the US Army's in-house newspaper/propaganda publication). IIRC, he was assigned to either the president or the VP's entourage. I think it was VP. Anyways, he was waiting at the airport the day of the assassination, waiting for JFK & co to move on to the next speech he was going to give that day after Dallas.
Well, the assassination happened and everything became total bedlam and secret service was all over the place, and it was hard for even folks like my uncle to figure out what was going on. Secret service went and grabbed one of LBJ's daughters and put her straight on a plane; she happened to have been a classmate with my uncle at UT, so they knew each other. As she was boarding he says she looked back at him, and as he puts it, "I'll never forget the look on her face for the rest of my life."
As someone who grew up in Florida I always thought it was dumb to have mission control so far from Cape Canaveral. Why not colocate? I know central Florida in the early 60s was not very developed, but the land was cheap!
My favorite Johnson anecdote is not exactly about Lyndon:
So it's 1941 or so, and Jessica Mitford, 24 year old daughter of a British nobleman, is newly come to America. She's moving in high New Deal circles, and writes to her mother back in England that she has met "Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird." So her mother writes back,
"Who is Lady Bird? I looked her up in the Peerage, but could find no trace."
Sounds like a hit piece. I know almost nothing about that time in America or Lyndon B Johnson in particular, but it sets off a lof of red flags to me. Not in the sense that something is literally wrong, but that the book constructs an entertaining picture that is fun to read, but that doesn't reflect the essence of the person well. I read a bit on wikipedia about him in different languages, and the feeling got stronger.
Why do you feel that the "bit on wikipedia" you read, not coupled with any preexisting knowledge, is more likely to have given you an accurate impression of LBJ than the celebrated 3,000-page biography?
The feeling did not come from the wikipedia page, but from the review itself, which basically tells me that LBJ was Bad. Of course, I do not know whether it is the review or the book.
For example, there is a huge story about the Texas election. It was clear that LBJ manipulated the election. The review (book?) implies that that the following process at supreme court was somehow cooked. But the argument of the judge given at wikipedia makes sense to me (jurisdiction over naming a nominee rested with the party, not the federal government). There was a similar decision when George W. Bush was elected, and the re-counting in Florida was stopped: not because it was clear that Bush had won, but rather because you need a decision process that actually converges.
But then, LBJ had apparently lost the previous election by manipulation, too. While the other is a big story, this is only a sidenote. So my explanation is: This election was manipulated, yes, and this does tell me something about LBJ. But why is it a central story? Probably not because the mere fact is so extraordinary, but because the circumstances were so exciting. It was so few votes, the Democratic State Central Committee accepted it with 29-28 (again so close), it went up to supreme court. So probably the book selected it not because it makes LBJ stand out against other politicians of this time, but rather because it was an exciting event. But if I want to learn about LBJ, then picking events by excitingness is a bad choice.
Btw, German and English wikipedia rely not just on one biography, but on many. There are also sections on LBJ's personality. And the factuals are compatible (e.g., on the "Johnson treatment"), but without the attitude that this makes him Bad.
Just a small comment, some people can work with appendicitis getting bad; my uncle had such a high pain tolerance that his appendix exploded before he could tell it's painful enough for getting a doctor. (He didn't get serious health problems from that situation.)
I've always been a little bemused by the fact that so many people who ordinarily love Democrats despise LBJ. It's not quite like the disappointment people who love Republicans have in Nixon. It does have a little of the feel of the contempt with which Trumpsters view George W. Bush. But whence?
The only thing that vaguely comes to mind is that they bitterly resent LBJ for having "inherited" Camelot and squandered it. Certainly among my parents' generation who were thrilled with the Right Stuff promise of the election of 1960 -- the torch has been passed! To a new generation! That's us! -- the actual events circa 1965-1975 were a staggering let-down.
In my limited experience, old Democrats (65+) , at least old Bay Area Democrats, like(d) LBJ a lot. Not least his impressive ability to strike deals/flatter/coerce reluctant House&Senate representatives to accept his Great Society legislation. They compare(d) him admiringly to Clinton and Obamas more laclustre performance in this regard.
Younger Democrats are different; for better or worse they are more "moral", and less result-oriented.
They tend to like what Max Weber dubbed Gesinnungsethik (the ethics of good intentions) rather than Verantwortungsethik (the ethics of actually achieving your sought-after goals) in their relationship to the world in general, and to politics in particular.
He did flip-flop on Vietnam. Hard. That sort of thing tends to breed resentment. Also, he was notoriously a terrible person. There's a lot he can be criticized for. And, as you say, compared to Kennedy it was a hell of a letdown.
You have to remember how at the time LBJ was only a side character in the slowly developing competition for power between two clans, where on one side you had the old "liberal" "international" oil companies and Wall Street banks with the Rockefeller family at the center, and on the other side the new "reactionary" "independent" (mostly) Texan oil companies and the CIA with the Bush family at the center, with the presidents Johnson, Nixon (though he later betrayed them) and (of course) Bush-father siding with the "Texans".
Kennedy, among other things, wanted to end the "depletion abatement" tax deduction critical to the "independent" oil companies, so the "Texans" likely got rid of him, likely with CIA's help to cover it up. (The murderer was patronized by a Texan oilman and only had 3 degrees of separation from Bush-father.)
"During LBJ's second decade in Congress, he revealed that he was a racist just like Senator Russell, and he helped Russell block civil rights bills. During LBJ's third decade in government, he did the most of any politician to enact civil rights, having pretended to be racist just to get power."
I don't think this is an accurate summary of Caro on LBJ and civil rights. (And can we not throw around the term "racist" as if it had an agreed-upon definition?) Caro doesn't think that LBJ "pretended to be racist" for political reasons and then later revealed his true beliefs. Rather, LBJ took anti-civil-rights positions at one time and took pro-civil-rights positions at another time for the same reason—because he thought it would be politically advantageous to him. LBJ was a consummate politician, and whatever he might secretly have thought in his soul about civil rights is impossible to determine from looking at his political positions. Caro thinks the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a great success, but it's a success LBJ kinda stumbled into.
Also, fun fact: the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in DC is named after this Russell.
I agree with you, it's rather like the swing on gay marriage where at a certain date politicians were all "no way, we stand for the defence of marriage" and then at a later date were draping themselves in rainbow flags.
It's possible their views genuinely matured. It's also possible they didn't care one way or the other but were being pragmatic on "what does the electorate think?" It's even possible they genuinely were/are anti-gay marriage but don't feel so strongly about it that they will not go with the current of later pro-gay marriage public opinion.
Same with LBJ. Hard to know what he really thought, or if he had any genuine convictions on the subject as distinct from how he was raised and the opinions inculcated in him as "everyone thinks this".
I looked up Frank Hamer on wiki, and it turns out he's the one who led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde. The B&C article describes him: "Hamer was tall, burly, and taciturn, unimpressed by authority and driven by an "inflexible adherence to right, or what he thinks is right."
This guy must have been the model for at least one Clint Eastwood character.
Having read all the other comments I'm hesitant to express an opinion - generally when I disagree with the bulk of SSC commenters, it means I've misunderstood something.
But taking the plunge, this review didn't do much for me. The writing style was fine, no problems, and as other people have noted, it was quite short. However I had two fundamental problems with it. Firstly the beginning read like an introduction, a sort of setting the scene. This carried on for a bit, and then suddenly it was finished - there wasn't anything other than the elongated prologue!
Secondly it didn't actually feel like a review of a book, but more of a precis. The information about LBJ that was provided by the book, its slant etc was taken at pretty much face value and this was summarised as if it was gospel truth. The interest in the review seemed to hinge primarily on the fact that LBJ was interesting, not how well the book managed whatever task it had set itself. It felt like a whole layer of meaning had been ignored and we were just left with a summary of interesting 'facts' about LBJ and those surrounding him.
Having said all that, I will have another read and see if there was something squiffy about my initial reading.
Yes, agreed. I like the departure form the SSC format, but I didn't come away understanding what exactly the book covered, what the reviewer thought of it, how it differed from Caro's other LBJ books, etc.
This reviewer's choice to go for brevity is highly admirable, though it's not really fitting in this particular case because it's the opposite of Caro's approach
Having read "Path to Power", which covers LBJ from birth through young adulthood, I wholly endorse this book review. In fact I may now finally get around to picking up the next one and the next one.
(Also Caro's book about Robert Moses remains one of the greatest nonfiction works I've ever read, a serious contender for my personal "choose five books that wash up with you onto the deserted island" list.)
A Lyndon Johnson joke my father once told me: Lyndon Johnson's in the street the day after his election and he sees a little Mexican boy in the street, and he's crying. So Lyndon goes up to him and says, "Juan, why are you crying?"
And Juan says, "My father died."
And Lyndon says, "But your father died years ago."
And Juan says, "I know, but yesterday he came back and voted for you and he didn't even come to see me."
Excellent review. I was introduced to Caro in grad school. Sections of his books on LBJ and Robert Moses were used to illustrate the accumulation, exercise and manipulation of raw power. I was fascinated by the passages and in the interceding years have read The Power Broker and all four of the LBJ books. For anyone interested in political power and the mindset of the political class, these books are a fascinating read.
The review does a great job of getting across how interesting and entertaining the source material is. Beyond that, though, it... doesn't do much? Each of the 4 main sections drops me in the middle of some history without giving me the context I'd need to appreciate it. It feels like a pile of anecdotes and assertions that tries to grab the reader's attention rather than conveying what the book says. I kept waiting to get to the meat of the review and being disappointed. It succeeds pretty well at emulating the entertaining, I-can't-believe-this-is-history part of SSC book reviews (e.g. the posts on Herbert Hoover or Ken Kesey) but not at emulating the part where one actually learns the history.
To be fair to LBJ, when building his library he was asked if he wanted the Vietnam section to be 'buried'. He's supposed to have said, "no, put it all out." (and the other irony is that he wanted to pull out of Vietnam but felt inadequate to his cabinet, all of whom had PhD's, who told him to stay in. Then Kissinger sabotaged the Paris talks in 67 so he could work for Nixon. The Peace Deal in 70s was the same deal, except more American soldiers had died between then and 67, than before it. What a waste). Robert Dallek has written an excellent smaller series of books on LBJ if Caro is too deep a read to start with.
For people who don't have the patience to read the books, here are two articles discussing LBJ and his legacy/persuasive tactics.
https://hbr.org/2006/04/lessons-in-power-lyndon-johnson-revealed
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/presidents/lyndon-b-johnson-the-uncivil-rights-reformer-1451816.html
If you can only read one of the books, I think Master of the Senate is the best of the set so far, although they are all excellent.
This was definitely the most entertaining review so far, the book sounds incredibly interesting - there's always an apppeal to larger than life figures. (I also want to watch the TV series about LBJ, PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE!)
Seconded. Very entertaining.
Excellent review. Very entertaining and informing
I agree. Excellent.
yup!
It certainly does make history come alive, in an almost Lovecraftian way :-)
As someone who never heard of Lyndon Baines Johnson before this review, it was really chaotic and hard for me to follow.
"On the back cover of his first LBJ book, Caro looks like this:
On his most recent book, Caro looks like this:"
I think there should be images here? Or is this just a bug on my side?
It’s a bug for me too. If you want to see the photos you can follow the last link in the essay to the so called “canonical version” of the review.
Sorry, fixed.
I liked this one a lot! For one, it's the first review I wish was longer. Also LBJ is just a super fascinating person, I've been meaning to read Caro for a long time, and this is a good prod towards picking up The Power Broker or this LBJ series. I'm ranking it highly but not quite at the top, I like what was there but I think there could be more there there.
Anywho, new rankings:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties
3rd The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
4th The Wizard and the Prophet
5th Double Fold
6th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
7th Through The Eye Of A Needle
8th Order Without Law
9th Why Buddhism is True
May I request you not post rankings like this, please?
Well jeez you probably should have made that request a little sooner.
Also, why not?
If this is a competition, it does seem improper to have even the appearance of trying to sway others. Let everyone be their own judge.
Good point, FWIW this was intended as a way to organize track for myself, and just kind of work out by writing down my thoughts what I thought the relative rankings would be. But _Caesar's wife must be above all suspicion_, so I'll sit on my hands for the last review
Is there only one review left to come? I thought there were 14 for some reason.
You're correct! I'll sit on my hands for quite some time then
I posted some rankings myself but stopped after a while for vaguely similar reasons. I think I only posted them over on the subreddit tho, not sure how many folks read that.
First time I've noticed; possibly due to the shorter length which meant we both finished while there weren't a lot of other comments yet.
As for why, the “media covers the serious contenders, who are those whom the media covers” effect is irritating.
Thanks, glad to hear it's not that my writing style odious :)
A thought, how about posting the rankings in ROT13? That way I can keep working things out but won't be swaying anyone unless they take an extra step to know what I'm thinking, which honestly I don't think many will
If you do that, I'd suggest obfuscating the names; Double Fold and Are We Smart Enough... in particular would stand out even rot13ed. "The One About Land Value Taxes", "The One About the Dead Roman", "The One About the President", ...
You got it!
A delightful review!
There is an old Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China.” With being soft on communism the blood libel for democrats at the time, what honest options did LBJ really have in Vietnam?
I feel like you're projecting back from the later Carter years or something. Being soft on the Commies wasn't a problem just for Democrats in those days. It sunk Robert Taft, a member of the non-interventionist Republicans who used to dominate that party in the early 20th century. JFK used the "missile gap" stick fairly effectively to beat up Nixon in 1960.
I don't think the quote about Nixon is entirely based on him being a Republican, but has a great deal to do with him being Nixon -- who had a long personal history of being savagely anti-Communist -- and, to the extent it's admiring, reflecting the fact that Nixon *was* fairly unique among American Presidents up to that date in being interested in Asia, learning extensively about it, and thinking the US had strategic interests there that were at least as complex and worthy of thought as those it had in Europe.
As for the LBJ's options: maybe just declare victory and go home? That worked for Eisenhower in Korea, and JFK certainly didn't double down on the Bay of Pigs. I don't think Americans in 1964 were that gung-ho about yet another bloody "police action" in Southeast Asia, I'm guessing he could have politically survived cutting and running (as his opponents might have called it). He would have had the victories of the "Space Race" in 1965-1968 to burnish his We're #1! credentials and set him up for victory in '68.
I read McNamara's memoirs just last month (and did some double checking on this particular point), and he's very clear that he, Kennedy, and Kennedy's whole team, was totally convinced by domino theory. They spent a lot of time during the transition from the Eisenhower administration, which was also totally convinced by domino theory. That started to change by 68 among a few people (in particular, McNamara), but I couldn't find any evidence that either Kennedy or LBJ thought just going home was an option in Vietnam.
Well, we know LBJ didn't think going home was an option, because he didn't. On the other hand, Nixon thought it was an option, and did so, successfully. So clearly it *was* possible, politically as well as militarily. LBJ just didn't think of it, or wasn't (politically) smart enough to pull it off.
How did this manage to be a whole article on the insanity of LBJ without even getting to the craziest single story?
When LBJ was President, a reporter once asked him why the US was in Vietnam. His response - and yes, this actually happened - was to unzip his pants, pull out his dick, wave it at the reporter, and say "This is why!".
Because Caro hasn't gotten that far yet.
LBJ had a car that was also a boat. He liked to go driving with people who didn't know it was a boat. He'd pretend the braked failed and "accidently" drive into a lake.
When I read the first half of this review, I was thinking "what is this fascinating biography of Johnson that *isn't* the Caro one?" But then I learned that this *is* the Caro one, and it's just being reviewed in a way that is very different from everything else I've read about the book (and the Robert Moses one, which is also a classic).
"it's another thing to elect someone who named his kids Lynda Bird Johnson and Lucy Baines Johnson in order to make the public think about the initials LBJ."
He also had a dog called Little Beagle Johnson.
I was wondering if he'd only married Lady Bird Johnson because of her name, but I looked it up and Lady Bird's actual name was Claudia, and Lady Bird was just a nickname which eventually seems to have displaced her real name.
Yes, but that displacement had occurred long before she was married. Lyndon always knew her as Lady Bird.
Do we know this from sources other than the couple themselves?
Well, I haven't gone over the sources with a fine-toothed comb under the suspicion that there was a giant conspiracy to hide that she was never called Lady Bird until she married Lyndon B., but everything I've ever read says that it was a childhood nickname that was universally adopted early on.
Wouldn't have to be giant. LBJ making the story up and convincing her to roll with it seems plausible to me: He was good at controlling people.
However, the story itself does seem to involve her family/school environment too heavily for that.
That's why it would have to have been a giant conspiracy.
A recent biography of Lady Bird says she got the nickname as a child from a nanny, as per the New Yorker book review I read.
As wikipedia describes it, Black struck down Stevenson's injunction on the grounds that the federal government can't interfere with the state election. So it sounds like the mistake Stevenson made was filing a federal injunction rather than a state injunction? Or were the state judges already in LBJ's pocket?
My reviews of vol. 3 in this series
https://dbratman.net/lbj3.html
and v. 4.
https://kalimac.blogspot.com/2013/05/books-of-too-much-detail.html
Admiring of some aspects of Caro's work, critical of others.
God, I hate LBJ.
(Quick note: these books are available on Audible with a great narrator, which is a boon because they're HELLA long. Official recommend.)
These books are riveting, like, way more riveting than I expected them to be. I spent several weeks while I was making my way through them complaining to everyone about what an asshole LBJ was. fwiw my husband (who only read the Robert Moses biography but also heard me talk about The Years of Lyndon Johnson a lot) thinks Caro comes into his biographies with biases and is really good at telling the story he wants to tell. I do feel somewhat suspicious that I came out of this with an extremely strong conviction that LBJ ruined America and was also a garbage human being on an interpersonal level.
But I haven't read Caro's book Working, maybe that would clear things up in terms of figuring out how much bias Caro has room to introduce. Also, I've been fed hero and villain narratives about US presidents my whole life (e.g. Bush villain, Obama hero; also FDR hero, Nixon villain, etc), and I wonder if perhaps it's just really hard to holistically assess an individual who wields such outsized power over the span of several years, and is subject to such a dizzying array of conflicting incentives.
To take an example from LBJ's presidency, escalating the Vietnam War was terrible for America (and for tons of other people, obviously), but it wasn't trivially easy to know this in advance. And even if it's the case that LBJ went into it knowing it was a bad idea, Caro makes it sound like he essentially had no choice in the matter. For another thing, it may very well be the case that LBJ was personally racist, but he did do a ton to advance civil rights. Presidents are ultimately judged based on their legacy, and that includes things they did (or didn't do) for the wrong reasons, things that everyone expected to go well that went poorly (or vice versa), and world events that happened during their presidency that were largely or entirely out of their control (like World War II? hard to think of a perfect example). It's only in retrospect that we can say that LBJ was the president who destroyed the American public's trust in the presidency as an institution, but it's not like he was the first president to be an asshole and make bad decisions.
I'm having trouble making a clean point here, because I'm confused about the subject. Perhaps what I mean to say is that I should separate the Lyndon Johnson who was privately a total asshole (making his staff cry, making secretaries stand in the bathroom to take dictation from him while he pooped, openly cheating on his wife, etc) from the Lyndon Johnson whose presidency left a lasting legacy of both good (civil rights) and bad (Vietnam). Perhaps that's the right way to look at presidents. And yet Caro's biographies intertwine the two really inextricably, and so I come a way with a gut sense of hating LBJ.
LBJ may have more awful stories about his assholishness than Richard Nixon or Donald Trump.
I am confident that Caro is not the one doing the work to make him look bad. LBJ did that for him.
Ah, that wasn't really my point, but I know I didn't make my point very well. He was definitely an asshole on a personal level, no question. But I think it's still definitely possible that he did his honest best to do the right thing as president, and I think my monkey brain has trouble separating the two things, and Caro's presentation doesn't help me separate them.
LBJ largely seems to do what's best for LBJ. Sometimes, mind you, that includes doing what LBJ knows is right even though that may cost him politically. But when you're that selfish and awful a person to everyone around you all the time, it is not unreasonable to conclude that even when you do good things they are probably for pretty selfish reasons. It just may be that you're right this time.
If he does what's best for himself, why would he do something that costs him politically?
Because he thinks he'll be proved right in the long run, for one. Or because he just likes telling people what to do. Or because people told him not to. Any number of reasons. I just strongly suspect they were selfish ones. Certainly one of his former aides apparently told Caro that the man had zero principles at all and was just in it for the historical legacy.
Though, to quote from an MSNBC article about the man: "But we shouldn't forget Johnson's racism, either. After Johnson's death, Parker [Johnson's black former chauffeur] would reflect on the Johnson who championed the landmark civil rights bills that formally ended American apartheid, and write, "I loved that Lyndon Johnson." Then he remembered the president who called him a nigger, and he wrote, "I hated that Lyndon Johnson.
Sounds about right."
Sums it up well, really. Absolutely terrible human being. Morally correct sometimes. Hard to reconcile the two.
I started off "I don't care about LBJ, why should I read this review?"
And darn it, you convinced me! I had to look up Pappy O'Daniel because I went "what kind of half-Irish name is that?"
This is a man who started a hillbilly band to sing for his employer's radio show and naturally, since his employer was a flour mill, called them The Light Crust Doughboys (they even wangled a spot playing in a Gene Autry movie). Then he went off and started his own flour business, and founded another hillbilly/Western swing band to play for his radio show which "extolled the values of Hillbilly brand flour, the Ten Commandments and the Bible" and called them Pat O'Daniel and the Hillbilly Boys, and they sang the theme song which gave him his "Pappy" nickname https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxQmj788X2o
And that launched him into politics, running as a Democrat in Texas, which seems to have been about as corrupt when it came to vote-counting as the review alleges.
And that's just *one* guy, I'm afraid to look up the others! 😀
I was surprised, I thought Pappy O'Daniel was a figment of Coen Bros' imagination in their comedy-drama-musical reinterpretation of the Odyssey called O Brother, Where Art Thou? Instead, judging by this review, it appears their Pappy O'Daniel was partly reality-based satire.
Who knew it was a documentary? But maybe this kind of thing explains why there is a literary genre called Southern Gothic. You couldn't make it up! as they say.
Nitpick to appease my slightly pedantic sense of accuracy: the reason LBJ would be eligible to run again (and was eligible in 1968, although he chose not to) is specifically that he'd served less than 6 years in office. Had JFK been assassinated and LBJ ascended ~10 months earlier, it would not have been possible for him to run for further term even after having only been elected once.
A good review that captures Caro’s quirks! I love all of the Caro books. A commenter once suggested that the key to Caro is to view him as a performance artist rather than a historian (none of his books are traditional biographies) because he goes to genuinely insane lengths (moving to the Hill Country, walking around the Senate with Bill Bradley to understand the importance of height in personal relations between politicians, etc.) to nail down bits of apocrypha and add novelistic details to his books. I still remember reading what seems like hundreds of pages in The Passage of Power about RFK’s attempts to get LBJ off the ticket...
My favorite Biography of all time. This series sparked my interested in American politics even though I'm not American. Recommended.
Somebody made a mistake, this is a review of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms"
This review convinced me to read a book I had not known of, the system works!
The factor that isn't to be underrated in assessing these books is the time period in which Caro is writing each. When he was writing Means of Ascent, LBJ was the monster behind Vietnam in the minds of Caro's peers - so kinda ordinary politician guy Coke Stevenson got transfigured into a literal saint as a foil for the demon. These days, we're a little removed from Vietnam and people have noticed, you know, the Civil Rights Act, so things are a bit different...
I have not one but TWO LBJ stories!
I heard the story second-hand from my father-in-law, but I did actually meet the main figure of the story (a friend of my wife's family, from Texas).
Unnamed figure used to work for the CIA (verified fact), and presumably still did at the time of the story or at least had active connections (from the timing, I think it had to be during LBJ's vice presidency). Anyways, story goes, one day our main character gets a call, and he picks up a briefcase filled with money (I forget the amount, but it was like a million or something like that, all in cash). He's handcuffed to it, and gets on a plane. When he arrives at his destination he makes the handoff right on the tarmac and flies straight back.
Not long after the handoff, it's announced that NASA will be located in Houston and that Brown & Root was awarded some prominent contracts related to the construction.
I have no way to verify any of it but this article makes me update from "crazy story my father in law told me" to "Yaknow that one was probably true."
Second story is less conspiracy-mysterious, and more just personal and emotional.
My uncle used to be in the army in the 60's, and he was a journalist for Stars & Stripes (the US Army's in-house newspaper/propaganda publication). IIRC, he was assigned to either the president or the VP's entourage. I think it was VP. Anyways, he was waiting at the airport the day of the assassination, waiting for JFK & co to move on to the next speech he was going to give that day after Dallas.
Well, the assassination happened and everything became total bedlam and secret service was all over the place, and it was hard for even folks like my uncle to figure out what was going on. Secret service went and grabbed one of LBJ's daughters and put her straight on a plane; she happened to have been a classmate with my uncle at UT, so they knew each other. As she was boarding he says she looked back at him, and as he puts it, "I'll never forget the look on her face for the rest of my life."
As someone who grew up in Florida I always thought it was dumb to have mission control so far from Cape Canaveral. Why not colocate? I know central Florida in the early 60s was not very developed, but the land was cheap!
My favorite Johnson anecdote is not exactly about Lyndon:
So it's 1941 or so, and Jessica Mitford, 24 year old daughter of a British nobleman, is newly come to America. She's moving in high New Deal circles, and writes to her mother back in England that she has met "Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird." So her mother writes back,
"Who is Lady Bird? I looked her up in the Peerage, but could find no trace."
Sounds like a hit piece. I know almost nothing about that time in America or Lyndon B Johnson in particular, but it sets off a lof of red flags to me. Not in the sense that something is literally wrong, but that the book constructs an entertaining picture that is fun to read, but that doesn't reflect the essence of the person well. I read a bit on wikipedia about him in different languages, and the feeling got stronger.
Why do you feel that the "bit on wikipedia" you read, not coupled with any preexisting knowledge, is more likely to have given you an accurate impression of LBJ than the celebrated 3,000-page biography?
The feeling did not come from the wikipedia page, but from the review itself, which basically tells me that LBJ was Bad. Of course, I do not know whether it is the review or the book.
For example, there is a huge story about the Texas election. It was clear that LBJ manipulated the election. The review (book?) implies that that the following process at supreme court was somehow cooked. But the argument of the judge given at wikipedia makes sense to me (jurisdiction over naming a nominee rested with the party, not the federal government). There was a similar decision when George W. Bush was elected, and the re-counting in Florida was stopped: not because it was clear that Bush had won, but rather because you need a decision process that actually converges.
But then, LBJ had apparently lost the previous election by manipulation, too. While the other is a big story, this is only a sidenote. So my explanation is: This election was manipulated, yes, and this does tell me something about LBJ. But why is it a central story? Probably not because the mere fact is so extraordinary, but because the circumstances were so exciting. It was so few votes, the Democratic State Central Committee accepted it with 29-28 (again so close), it went up to supreme court. So probably the book selected it not because it makes LBJ stand out against other politicians of this time, but rather because it was an exciting event. But if I want to learn about LBJ, then picking events by excitingness is a bad choice.
Btw, German and English wikipedia rely not just on one biography, but on many. There are also sections on LBJ's personality. And the factuals are compatible (e.g., on the "Johnson treatment"), but without the attitude that this makes him Bad.
Just a small comment, some people can work with appendicitis getting bad; my uncle had such a high pain tolerance that his appendix exploded before he could tell it's painful enough for getting a doctor. (He didn't get serious health problems from that situation.)
I've always been a little bemused by the fact that so many people who ordinarily love Democrats despise LBJ. It's not quite like the disappointment people who love Republicans have in Nixon. It does have a little of the feel of the contempt with which Trumpsters view George W. Bush. But whence?
The only thing that vaguely comes to mind is that they bitterly resent LBJ for having "inherited" Camelot and squandered it. Certainly among my parents' generation who were thrilled with the Right Stuff promise of the election of 1960 -- the torch has been passed! To a new generation! That's us! -- the actual events circa 1965-1975 were a staggering let-down.
Now I think of it, there may be some parallel to the low esteem in which Truman was held during his actual Presidency by people who loved FDR.
In my limited experience, old Democrats (65+) , at least old Bay Area Democrats, like(d) LBJ a lot. Not least his impressive ability to strike deals/flatter/coerce reluctant House&Senate representatives to accept his Great Society legislation. They compare(d) him admiringly to Clinton and Obamas more laclustre performance in this regard.
Younger Democrats are different; for better or worse they are more "moral", and less result-oriented.
They tend to like what Max Weber dubbed Gesinnungsethik (the ethics of good intentions) rather than Verantwortungsethik (the ethics of actually achieving your sought-after goals) in their relationship to the world in general, and to politics in particular.
I miss the old guys.
He did flip-flop on Vietnam. Hard. That sort of thing tends to breed resentment. Also, he was notoriously a terrible person. There's a lot he can be criticized for. And, as you say, compared to Kennedy it was a hell of a letdown.
You have to remember how at the time LBJ was only a side character in the slowly developing competition for power between two clans, where on one side you had the old "liberal" "international" oil companies and Wall Street banks with the Rockefeller family at the center, and on the other side the new "reactionary" "independent" (mostly) Texan oil companies and the CIA with the Bush family at the center, with the presidents Johnson, Nixon (though he later betrayed them) and (of course) Bush-father siding with the "Texans".
Kennedy, among other things, wanted to end the "depletion abatement" tax deduction critical to the "independent" oil companies, so the "Texans" likely got rid of him, likely with CIA's help to cover it up. (The murderer was patronized by a Texan oilman and only had 3 degrees of separation from Bush-father.)
"During LBJ's second decade in Congress, he revealed that he was a racist just like Senator Russell, and he helped Russell block civil rights bills. During LBJ's third decade in government, he did the most of any politician to enact civil rights, having pretended to be racist just to get power."
I don't think this is an accurate summary of Caro on LBJ and civil rights. (And can we not throw around the term "racist" as if it had an agreed-upon definition?) Caro doesn't think that LBJ "pretended to be racist" for political reasons and then later revealed his true beliefs. Rather, LBJ took anti-civil-rights positions at one time and took pro-civil-rights positions at another time for the same reason—because he thought it would be politically advantageous to him. LBJ was a consummate politician, and whatever he might secretly have thought in his soul about civil rights is impossible to determine from looking at his political positions. Caro thinks the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a great success, but it's a success LBJ kinda stumbled into.
Also, fun fact: the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in DC is named after this Russell.
I agree with you, it's rather like the swing on gay marriage where at a certain date politicians were all "no way, we stand for the defence of marriage" and then at a later date were draping themselves in rainbow flags.
It's possible their views genuinely matured. It's also possible they didn't care one way or the other but were being pragmatic on "what does the electorate think?" It's even possible they genuinely were/are anti-gay marriage but don't feel so strongly about it that they will not go with the current of later pro-gay marriage public opinion.
Same with LBJ. Hard to know what he really thought, or if he had any genuine convictions on the subject as distinct from how he was raised and the opinions inculcated in him as "everyone thinks this".
I looked up Frank Hamer on wiki, and it turns out he's the one who led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde. The B&C article describes him: "Hamer was tall, burly, and taciturn, unimpressed by authority and driven by an "inflexible adherence to right, or what he thinks is right."
This guy must have been the model for at least one Clint Eastwood character.
Kevin Costner, actually. Excellent film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highwaymen_(film)
Having read all the other comments I'm hesitant to express an opinion - generally when I disagree with the bulk of SSC commenters, it means I've misunderstood something.
But taking the plunge, this review didn't do much for me. The writing style was fine, no problems, and as other people have noted, it was quite short. However I had two fundamental problems with it. Firstly the beginning read like an introduction, a sort of setting the scene. This carried on for a bit, and then suddenly it was finished - there wasn't anything other than the elongated prologue!
Secondly it didn't actually feel like a review of a book, but more of a precis. The information about LBJ that was provided by the book, its slant etc was taken at pretty much face value and this was summarised as if it was gospel truth. The interest in the review seemed to hinge primarily on the fact that LBJ was interesting, not how well the book managed whatever task it had set itself. It felt like a whole layer of meaning had been ignored and we were just left with a summary of interesting 'facts' about LBJ and those surrounding him.
Having said all that, I will have another read and see if there was something squiffy about my initial reading.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. I spent a few moments trying to figure out where I could find Part 2 before I realized there wasn't one.
Yes, agreed. I like the departure form the SSC format, but I didn't come away understanding what exactly the book covered, what the reviewer thought of it, how it differed from Caro's other LBJ books, etc.
I did take away quite a dislike of LBJ. :P
Is it just me or is the guy a pretty obvious psychopath (and halo effects are suppressing that meme)?
I think we're lucky he had a personal distaste for brute force.
This review left me wanting to read more of the review. Kudos.
This reviewer's choice to go for brevity is highly admirable, though it's not really fitting in this particular case because it's the opposite of Caro's approach
Having read "Path to Power", which covers LBJ from birth through young adulthood, I wholly endorse this book review. In fact I may now finally get around to picking up the next one and the next one.
(Also Caro's book about Robert Moses remains one of the greatest nonfiction works I've ever read, a serious contender for my personal "choose five books that wash up with you onto the deserted island" list.)
Re "cheat"
I am reliably, constantly, and recurrently informed, by people who alternate insulting me between sentences, that:
1) that doesn't happen,
2) we never did that,
3) we don't do it any more,
4) I can't tell you when or why we decided to stop doing it,
5) its never mattered anyway,
6) if you keep bringing this up, you are threatening the very foundations of our great secure nation, and are trying to incite a civil war,
7) you bigot.
I do not exaggerate this, at all.
Can someone more sympathetic to LBJ's political party *please* steelman this for me, or at least reframe it into someone more persuasive?
A Lyndon Johnson joke my father once told me: Lyndon Johnson's in the street the day after his election and he sees a little Mexican boy in the street, and he's crying. So Lyndon goes up to him and says, "Juan, why are you crying?"
And Juan says, "My father died."
And Lyndon says, "But your father died years ago."
And Juan says, "I know, but yesterday he came back and voted for you and he didn't even come to see me."
Excellent review. I was introduced to Caro in grad school. Sections of his books on LBJ and Robert Moses were used to illustrate the accumulation, exercise and manipulation of raw power. I was fascinated by the passages and in the interceding years have read The Power Broker and all four of the LBJ books. For anyone interested in political power and the mindset of the political class, these books are a fascinating read.
Brief review-of-the-review:
The review does a great job of getting across how interesting and entertaining the source material is. Beyond that, though, it... doesn't do much? Each of the 4 main sections drops me in the middle of some history without giving me the context I'd need to appreciate it. It feels like a pile of anecdotes and assertions that tries to grab the reader's attention rather than conveying what the book says. I kept waiting to get to the meat of the review and being disappointed. It succeeds pretty well at emulating the entertaining, I-can't-believe-this-is-history part of SSC book reviews (e.g. the posts on Herbert Hoover or Ken Kesey) but not at emulating the part where one actually learns the history.
To be fair to LBJ, when building his library he was asked if he wanted the Vietnam section to be 'buried'. He's supposed to have said, "no, put it all out." (and the other irony is that he wanted to pull out of Vietnam but felt inadequate to his cabinet, all of whom had PhD's, who told him to stay in. Then Kissinger sabotaged the Paris talks in 67 so he could work for Nixon. The Peace Deal in 70s was the same deal, except more American soldiers had died between then and 67, than before it. What a waste). Robert Dallek has written an excellent smaller series of books on LBJ if Caro is too deep a read to start with.