Robert Caro's biography of LBJ: Four volumes and counting

Robert Caro wrote what is, to me, the best biography ever published. And he’s still writing it. His multi-volume history of Lyndon Johnson consumes four thick books and counting.

The entire project is “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” with the individual volumes titled “The Path to Power” (1982), “Means of Ascent,” (1990) “Master of the Senate,” (2002) and “The Passage of Power” (2012). The first volume, which I found the most compelling, begins with Johnson’s grandparents, who were pioneers in the Texas Hill Country in the mid-1800s as settlers discovered that what looked like lush, fertile land was only a couple of inches of topsoil that could not sustain agriculture. The book continues through the years when young Lyndon Johnson was determined to be somebody, to make his mark in a way that his poor father and grandfather had not. 

“The Passage of Power” ends in 1964. Lyndon Johnson is in the White House following the Kennedy Assassination, and he has coaxed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, perhaps the most significant legislation of the generation, into law.

Caro initially said he would write a conventional, one-volume biography, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Robert Moses. But he kept finding more and more facts about Johnson, so he wrote a second volume and a third and a fourth. The fifth volume is not finished yet, and there is no guarantee that it will be the final one.

Reading these books taught me more about Lyndon Johnson than I ever wanted to know. He was conniving, egotistical, stubborn, cruel and abusive at times, and focused on being the Great Man he had wanted to be since childhood. He cheated on his faithful, adoring wife, destroyed the lives of young men who worked on his staff in Congress and succeeded in part by callously using people who trusted him.

He was also probably the most effective legislator in American history. He could be persuasive, even charming, and if that didn’t work, he could be threatening, vindictive and backstabbing to get his way. His success in getting passage of civil rights bills is extraordinary. You can love him or hate him for that and for his “Great Society” programs, but you have to admit he changed this country.

The minute detail in these books is astonishing. Caro describes long-ago events in great detail. He uncovers episodes that had never been made public, including a hard-to-believe years-long affair between Johnson and a glamorous, wealthy member of Washington’s social elite.

            Caro wrote a long article for The New Yorker (Jan. 28, 2019, edition) that explains how he got so deep into the life of LBJ. He began his research in 1976 and has worked continuously on his expanded biography since then.

            The New Yorker article makes a good textbook for young historians or news reporters learning how to research and interview. Caro digs deep into files stashed away in libraries and archives to find facts he was looking for or facts he’d never considered. No mention is too insignificant for him to not follow up. Any name he sees is followed up with an interview or several interviews of the same person, peeling away the lies and the cover-ups until he gets to the bottom of the matter. I recommend the article to anyone doing historical research.

            Although I tend to be a slow, plodding, easily distracted reader, I dove into each of Caro’s LBJ volumes  (which average close to 1,000 pages) with excitement and eagerness. I’m looking forward to the fifth installment, but Caro is 84 and admits that his ambitions for this biography might exceed his mortality. I’m counting on that final volume.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor of The Wilson Daily Times. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

This post originally appeared in The Wilson Times.

What we might learn from Nixon

I've recently watched PBS' "Presidents" series on John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Oh, the memories of the sixties and seventies! The JFK program affirmed my admiration for the man whose presidency and influence were cut tragically short. The LBJ series made me want to go back and re-read all four volumes of Robert Caro's extraordinary biography of Johnson, one of the most influential and tragic of presidents. I had commented in the past about what President Obama could learn from LBJ, who knew how to cajole members of Congress to pass his tectonic civil rights legislation.

The segment on Nixon brought back so many memories of the early 1970s, when I was working in Washington, Nixon was in the White House and the "plumbers" were in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. I've always thought that Nixon's problems as president were the result of his own paranoia, his distrust of everyone and his resentment of people born wealthier and luckier than he. The PBS segment bolsters that impression but also gives credit to Nixon's visionary foreign policy. Under Nixon there was a global strategy for building peace through alliances with other nations. His opening to China, his Middle East negotiations, and his arms accord with the Soviet Union were portions of an overall strategy to balance global interests and power for peaceful progress. Even his Vietnam strategy, although never successfully implemented, sought a peaceful, political exit from a military stalemate.

In an election year, it would be comforting to think that our presidential candidates have a grand strategy for balancing trade, military power and national interest. I'm not hearing that from either national candidate this year, so we might well stumble into another war or a disastrous series of protective tariffs that cripple world trade and the global economy.

Fix the presidential nomination system

This week and the next, the two dominant political parties will nominate the least popular major-party nominees in modern political history. Many Republican leaders are appalled that their party's nomination has been hijacked (legally and within the rules but hijacked nonetheless) by a man with no electoral experience and no real allegiance to his party's principles and viewpoint. Democrats next week will nominate Hillary Clinton, who is despised by many Americans and distrusted by a majority of the electorate.

A majority of Americans wish they had some other options on election day.

Where did we go wrong?

Perhaps it's time to reconsider the steady shift from party elites making the rules and picking the nominees to a series of party primaries illustrated by numerous nationally televised candidate "debates." This new system was born out of efforts to correct the excesses within both parties in the 1960s. Republicans wanted to avoid another debacle like the 1964 election, when Lyndon Johnson, one of the least likable candidates of the century, swamped the GOP's Barry Goldwater in the most one-sided election in modern history. Democrats wanted to involve the masses and avoid the violent demonstrations that wrecked the 1968 Chicago convention and handed the election to Richard Nixon.

In 1968, Hubert Humphrey could win the nomination without even entering a party primary. Most delegate votes were decided by party officials, not by rank-and-file voters. Reforms enacted for the 1972 election reversed that. Primaries would determine the party nomination, so the Democrats got George McGovern, a one-issue candidate who motivated primary voters to his cause but had little appeal in the general election.

Then came the debates. Kennedy and Nixon held the first presidential debates in 1960, then the format was abandoned for several years. Only in the 1980s did candidate debates become standard fare. Ronald Reagan thrived in the debates while his opponents stumbled. Voters swooned. The precedent was set.

This year's crop of 17 GOP candidates made candidate debates a three-ring circus, not a debate; nevertheless, the candidates and the networks promoted the events, and voters watched. The staged free-for-alls handed the party a leading candidate who was not informed on major national and international issues and whose debate style was insults, bombast and bragging.

On the Democratic side, potential candidates declined to take on Clinton, the presumptive party nominee since 2009. But Clinton was a weaker nominee than potential challengers realized. Only Bernie Sanders, a socialist with little allegiance to the Democratic Party, was willing to reveal Clinton as an unlikable and untrustworthy candidate.

No matter how the general election turns out, both parties should be willing to rethink the nomination process. There has to be a better way. Primaries that begin nearly two years before the election are not useful, especially when the first primaries are in states with demographics unlike the nation at large. Debates among a dozen or more candidates aren't helpful in determining who is best qualified to run the country, especially when questions to candidates are more focused on personal traits or foibles than national issues. The parties should retake possession of the debates. They should find a better way to hold primaries. A single, nationwide primary has been suggested. That might help. Primaries that go on week after week for more than a year are guaranteed to put short-attention-span voters to sleep.

This election year may have to be a write-off, but let's fix this mess before the next presidential election.

Fifty years later, our loss is still felt

It is a Friday again. It is Nov. 22 again. The insulation of half a century — longer than our youthful hero lived — is stripped away as we remember that terrible day of shock, quashed dreams and lost inspiration.

For my generation — the surging youth cadre that the young president inspired and challenged — the memories are clear. We all can recall how we heard the news. For me, it was a public address announcement at the end of a routine high school Friday. The principal passed along the news without emotion or inflection, just the flat, neutral statement of an educator: President Kennedy was killed. I rode the bus home that afternoon trying to put the news into context. It must have happened in Washington, I thought. I had not read anything about a political trip to Texas. Once I got home, I filled the emptiness inside me with news gleaned from non-stop television coverage, which was nearly unprecedented at the time (only manned space launches and political conventions had warranted such coverage), and fat newspapers filled with news of the crime. I ran to the television as I returned from church that Sunday and turned it on in time to watch, in what is now called "real time," the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Fifty years have given us time to reconsider Kennedy, beyond the emotions of 1963, and to learn that he was not angelic or flawless. He was a man with faults, like all of us. He was imperfect after all. He was sickly and kept private secrets. Historians have pushed him lower and lower in the ranking of presidents. His legislative achievements are scant. He was not the negotiator or legislator that his successor was.

But even with the perspective of 50 years, Kennedy stands tall in so many intangible ways. He embodies the term often used to describe him in his day: charisma. He was charming and disarming. His wit was as quick as a stand-up comic's, and he could turn a press conference into a situation comedy as reporters, some admiring, some hostile, tried and failed to get the best of the young president.

What we lost in Dallas that fateful day was inspiration. Watch Kennedy's Berlin speech or his inaugural address. Watch his news conferences or his brilliantly disarming response to Lyndon Johnson's veiled criticism at the 1960 Democratic Convention. The Berlin speech — brief and brilliantly using repetition ("Let them come to Berlin!") — is a lesson in rhetorical technique. His inaugural was a call to Cold War militancy but also a call for national service. Kennedy knew the power of words like few presidents before or since (only Lincoln and Reagan come close). He knew leadership required inspiration, and he inspired a nation, especially young people, in a way that has not been reached since. In his inaugural, he challenged Americans to ask "what you can do for your country." He challenged Congress to put a man on the moon within a ridiculously short time period. He boldly proposed cutting taxes and even more boldly cracked open the door toward peaceful negotiations to end the Cold War.

What would have changed if the FBI and Secret Service had done their jobs and kept a pathetic assassin away from the motorcade route? We might have avoided the tragedy of Vietnam, but that is not a certainty. We might not have achieved an end to legal segregation as soon as we did (JFK did not have the legislative skills of LBJ), but it would have come. We might have avoided the cynicism and the youthful rebellions of the 1970s. Kennedy, who bridged the divide between fiscal conservatism and a liberal world view and human rights, might have reshaped American politics.

On this 50th anniversary, as we are immersed in the verbal and visual reliving of those horrific days, the loss we felt so long ago is still a loss. The youthful confidence, the "great vigor" of a young president, the challenge to serve others and not think only of yourself cannot be recovered.

And now we, the last ones to remember him, are fading into the sunset, our inspiration soured by sarcasm and the next generation unable to understand the depth of our loss.

If Sirhan Sirhan had been stopped, what the world might have been

I dragged myself out of bed the morning of June 5, 1968, and turned on the television — something I wouldn't normally do — but I wanted to find out what happened in the California presidential primary. I was home from my first year of college and had not yet started a summer job. The newscast left me confused. Instead of reciting the primary results, the reporters were all gathered around a hospital, talking of wounds and prognosis and hopes. It took me a while to realize that they were talking about a shooting that had happened hours earlier in a back hallway at the Ambassador Hotel. Sen. Robert Kennedy lay gravely wounded with a bullet to the head. He would survive less than a day.

Forty-five years later, I wonder at how different the world might have been if someone had stopped Sirhan Sirhan in that hallway, taken away his pistol and stopped the nightmare. Could Kennedy have rested the Democratic nomination away from Vice President Hubert Humphrey? Late getting into the race, Kennedy had won a string of primaries and had instigated a wave of enthusiasm and hope — hope that the Kennedy legacy, cut short five years earlier in Dallas, might be revived.

But the odds were long. Party pols still controlled the nomination process, and they weren't lining up behind Bobby. The president, Lyndon Johnson, hated Bobby, and the feeling was mutual. Would the Chicago Democratic Convention have been as chaotic if Kennedy had been there to give an outlet to the many rank-and-file who felt left out and ignored? Could the Democrats have coalesced around Bobby and denied Richard Nixon his slim victory?

And if Bobby had become president, what might have transpired in Vietnam, in civil rights and in every other issue of the day? Would Bobby have launched a new investigation of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination, an investigative panel not appointed by LBJ, whom Bobby, according to some reports, thought had a hand in the murder?

These are questions that cry out for an alternative history — a fictionalized account of what might have been, of what could have been, of what many people dreamed would happen.