LBJ – an amoral, and narrow, political genius

BOOK REVIEW

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power by Robert Caro (Alfred A. Knopf)

Political junkies will love this book: conspiracy buffs will be disappointed.

Robert Caro, now in his mid 70s, has invested a fair chunk of his life in charting the political machinations and tergiversations of the 36th President of the United States.
Caro’s first book on Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, came out as long ago as 1983 and covered LBJ’s rise to political influence as a New Deal bureaucrat and political operator in 1930s Texas.

His rise was by way of the huge expansion of the US government which took place from that time on.  Johnson never seems to have held a non-government job, instead working his way up as political aide to a Congressman, then as a manager of government work schemes – a job which gave him power to dispense or withhold political favours – and then running for office himself.

This is the fourth volume and it is one many readers will have been waiting for: it covers Johnson’s defeat by John F Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960; his surprise acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination; the narrow win against Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon; and on to his eclipse as vice president and then replacement of Kennedy after the latter’s assassination.

The last volume, Master of the Senate, covered Johnson’s years as Senate Leader in the 1950s, and was the most fascinating of the lot thus far. Caro analysed in minute detail how Johnson, a southerner, managed to get a Civil Rights bill through the Senate despite determined opposition from fellow southern senators.

It was a mix of high road aims and low road political acts – and with LBJ the low road was very low. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and a stream of accolades from existing politicians from all sides of the political spectrum – and not only in the US. At least two British Conservative leaders – William Hague and Michael Howard – raved about the book, with Hague even nominating it as his one book he’d take when he appeared on Desert Island Discs.

As an analysis of politics when high political goals mix with political chicanery at its most base and convoluted, it has not yet been beaten.

Caro’s latest effort doesn’t quite beat it either. True, he comes close, and he has given himself a hard act to follow. But there is a bit too much harking back to his earlier volumes (the reader soon loses count of the references to Caro’s previous works).

Another is that Caro appears to have imbibed a touch of the Camelot Myth Kool-Aid, albeit in slightly diluted form. JFK is portrayed as something of a lost philosopher king, and not as the charismatic but corrupt rich kid whose Dad bought him the presidency and who initiated an era of show-biz presidential contests.

Caro is more measured about Kennedy’s brother, Robert, whose poisonous feud with Johnson began in the 1950s and which reached its toxic heights when Johnson inherited the presidency.

LBJ and RFK were both good haters, and they hated each other with unsparing venom – a hatred borne at least in part out of fear of the other’s political skills and also, one suspects, because both recognised something of themselves in the other.

It was a hatred which had its policy impact, not least over the Vietnam conflict, a subject which Caro’s next volume will deal with.

Robert Kennedy had been a lawyer for Communist-hunting Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and Johnson feared a re-run of the Red Scare if he “lost” Vietnam the way McCarthy and others had charged President Harry Truman with “losing” China to communism, and he saw RFK as the most likely leader of such a movement. Such are the ironies of history that when Kennedy did finally challenge Johnson in 1968, it was as an anti-war candidate. 

Johnson was often, as other authors have recorded, to defend the Vietnam escalation on these narrow political grounds.

Political junkies have greeted Caro’s latest volume much like Harry Potter aficionados greet J K Rowling’s latest efforts.

The fascination is not just because of Johnson’s amoral political genius, but because the period concerned is a crucial one, and not only for the United States: it is when big government hubris turned to nemesis, and the US – and the world – is still dealing with the fallout from that.

Johnson believed big government could do everything, it seems - right wrongs, eradicate poverty, and fight large and expensive wars at the same time. People could have guns and butter.

From the perspective of the mid-1960s, it seemed that way: Johnson’s to power coincided with the US’s rise to world power, through World War Two and the post-war boom and it seemed the horizons were endless.

The ambitious ‘Great Society’ and ‘War on Poverty’ programmes turned sour and the combination of these with the Vietnam military build up made a large contribution to the glowing global inflation which began hurting the world eocnomy from the late 1960s. 

Caro has not – at least thus far – delved into those issues very much. His speciality is more the minutiae of LBJ’s unscrupulous power plays.

So there is voter fraud, in the 1960 presidential election. This was a feature of Johnson’s politics, going back to his running for student political positions as a young man, and he was first elected to the Senate by a mere 87 vote margin, in an election where a number of voters not only voted in alphabetical order but also thoughtfully returned from the dead to do so.

Caro shows much the same tricks were played in the 1960 presidential election in Texas, as they were in Illinois, helping Kennedy win the presidency by the smallest margin last century.

Other low-road stuff includes Johnson leaning on a newspaper editor to call off an enterprising young reporter, Margaret Mayer, of the Dallas Times-Herald, who was asking awkward questions about the kind of concessions being granted by Federal authorities for the Texas Broadcasting Company, a firm owned by Johnson’s wife Lady Bird.

Johnson, who began recording his presidential conversations as soon as he took office, is on tape telling the editor to tell his board members that tax and other investigations would ensue of Mayer was not called off: “We might want to ask for some of you all’s records up there. I imagine I could get that done.”

Mayer was also sniffing around the way the company was being used both as a covert fundraiser and also as a way of delivering political graft.

It is here that conspiracy theorists’ ears will prick up: Life Magazine, along with a Senate committee was investigating this, and other allegations of graft, involving Johnson in 1963 and were starting to get very close to the truth. In fact, the senate committee was meeting to discuss the matter the very day Kennedy was shot. 

Amid the wave of grief which following the assassination, and also the wave of approbation which greeted LBJ’s handling of the post-assassination period, both investigations were dropped.

This, plus a recorded comment Johnson made when he accepted the vice-presidency (“One in four vice presidents died in office,” he apparently said to the wife of Time publisher Clare Luce Booth. “I’m a gambling man, honey, and this is the only chance I’ve got”) tend to get the conspiracy theorists’ noses twitching.

Yet Caro, who has been an assiduous cataloguer of LBJ’s villainy, says that in all his research he found nothing to suggest Johnson had anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination.

There’s no doubt Johnson benefited from the Dallas shooting – the investigations could have seen him dumped from the ticket in the 1964 election and even have, like another vice-president a decade later, have gone to prison for corruption.

Caro though says there is no smoking gun, on the grassy knoll or anywhere else.  And there is plenty of other, more substantive, villainy for him to chronicle.