In preparation for the latest in the Years of Lyndon Johnson biographies of Robert Caro, I went back and re-read the first three volumes. For those who don't know, Robert Caro started writing this back in 1976 when many of the people in the Johnson story, from families to politicians to aids, where all still alive and he was able to capture their memories and emotions in a striking fashion. He has literally spent his entire adult life doing nothing but studying and writing about Lyndon Baines Johnson and his quest for the presidency and power. The only other historians I can think of in the modern era who have literally devoted their entire lives to one figure are Dumas Malone (Thomas Jefferson) and Arthur Link (Woodrow Wilson).
What has emerged from Caro's work is perhaps the most sweeping epic of modern American history I have ever read. And I've read a lot. The care in which Caro treats Johnson and his background is astounding. The first volume remains the most impressive as he sets the context of Johnson's life through the duel context of the grueling life of the Texas Hill Country and the failed life of his Populist-politician father Sam Ealy Johnson. His vivid descriptions of Texas, perhaps one of the most iconic states in our Union with a history like no other, is tremendous. The quiet loneliness of the Hill Country, the teeming poverty of South Texas in Cotulla where Johnson taught, the wild life of Austin (three Bs: bourbon, blonds, and beefsteak), and the emerging oil barons and businessman of Dallas-Fort Worth are covered in all their color. The populist liberals like Sam Rayburn, the outlandish goofs like Pappy O'Daniel, and the crusty reactionaries like Jack Garner . . . all are profiled. I think volume 1 is the single best biography I've ever read (perhaps second, The Politics of Rage by Dan T. Carter is just as good).
History today is written episodically. Historians now take moments of a politicians life and examine, then extract why it is so important to the larger picture. Its a formula of This happens, and I will tell that story, and because This happened, That happened and here is why it still effects us today. At least three books have come out in the last five years about FDR's war against the Supreme Court, for instance, and another about FDR's tenure at the Navy Department is out now. I just finished a book about Ronald Reagan's Texas campaign in 1976. Another about the first congressional election between James Madison and James Monroe is a good example. If you do find a biography, it probably is no more than 300 pages or a little more. The more sweeping histories are of entire Eras that incorporate politicians and social movements. Liberal historian Rick Perlstein's two volumes on the rise of the American Right and the fracturing of the liberal consensus is one (two volumes) or Sean Wilentz's Rise of American Democracy. You see social history more closely woven into these stories, to the point where someone like Perlstein puts as much emphasis on someone like Clarence Manion as he does to Barry Goldwater. What Caro has either returned to, or attempted to salvage, is the classic political biography. Not that Caro discounts social history, if you read Master of the Senate the first scene is that of a black women in a registrars office in Barbour County, Alabama in 1957 trying to register to vote. But its politics that Caro delves into. Turn of the century Texas politics, New Deal politics, post-war politics, Eisenhower era politics, and everything Texas politics. In that way, his history is a complete throwback to the political histories of old that we no longer see. The last major political figure to be given a high-profile multi-volume history is Andrew Jackson by Robert Remini.
But as I've re-read these books as a more mature political person, someone who has been involved in the process and have come about the ideas that I have, I find myself re-thinking Caro's very premise. What Caro finds fascinating, and what drew him to Lyndon Johnson to start with, is the pursuit and application of political power. Caro shows Johnson's dogged, almost maniacal pursuit of the power and presidency with all its warts, but I can't help but feel that Caro approves in the end of everything Johnson did to be able to enact the change he did. It was worth stealing elections, stealing money, serving Texas business interest, bullying and belittling friends and foes alike, because in the end Lyndon Johnson got his power and was able to do marvelous (to some) and horrendous (to all) things with it. We have been conditioned through the way history is taught by eras of Presidents - Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt/Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Reagan. Eras of congressional authority - Antebellum, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Roaring Twenties - these are largely laughed at and considered times of failure in American history. It is a much more complicated story. Generally the times of executive power are dominated by wars while much of the times of congressional authority are times of great economic growth in our history. Yet history often teaches us differently.
Given my own political philosophy, I can't help but think should Johnson have ever been allowed to be that successful? More to the point, should we as a country rally to politicians who want power that badly? Should historians celebrate these figures? That is the key question I have yet to see Caro address in discussing Lyndon Johnson, and perhaps should be the most important question concerning not only Lyndon Johnson but other politicians who wanted to be president so badly . . . Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton all shared that thirst for executive power. But is executive power good for the country? Is it good that we have allowed presidents to enter our health care or start wars almost cart blanche? LBJ was probably the first president to truly expand this power that we know today, and expansion of both internal and external power at the same time. Even FDR had congressional and judiciary push-back. Every president since Johnson has expanded on one, the other, or both rails of guns and butter that Johnson almost single-handily expanded. Whether its liberal presidents pushing domestic agendas or conservatives pushing foreign policy agendas where both are without full congressional authority, I can't help but think that Caro is missing a crucial lesson of Lyndon Johnson, that we need to start question executive power to begin with.
But perhaps it is a lost cause. Both parties vie so fiercely for the presidency because that parties both want that power that Caro talks about. Very few run not to have power, few want to enter public life in order to limit power. Which is why I am very much looking forward to Amity Shlaes biography of Calvin Coolidge she is releasing a month after Caro's fourth LBJ installment. It will allow for an interesting bookend to this.
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