Sunday Review: Who was Lyndon Johnson?—Part 1 (book review)

The Passage of Power

By Jonathan Price

Lyndon Baines Johnson was our 36th President and held office for five years—from the assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963 until 1969 and the inauguration of Richard Nixon. Those of us who, like the writer of this review, lived through that period, do not on the whole, I think, remember Johnson fondly, for he was so intimately associated with the continuation of the Vietnam war and the apparent intransigence with which he pursued its policies and managed to alienate previous supporters and allies, including many of our international allies.
Some of us remember the chants of war protesters: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”...or the defiance of Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Yale graduate and pediatrician whose baby book is regularly revised and reissued, and the man responsible for so many of those who opposed the war and the draft who also became a national leader when he came out against the war and the draft and the President and vowed he would gleefully dance on Johnson’s grave. Or Timothy Leary, who characterized both Johnson and the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh as aging males in power who sent off the seed-bearing young men of both cultures to be killed.
    Eventually Johnson was so unpopular as a President that he could appear only at military bases where security was reliable. However, Johnson was no fool, nor was he so intransigent, and even though he loved politics and had sought the presidency virtually his entire life, he surprised me (and millions of other Americans) when he went on TV in March 1968 to declare he would not run for reelection. Now he is the subject of a massive biography, soon to be five volumes and apparently over 4,000 pages long, taking the reader almost as long to devour as it might have taken to avoid the draft in the 1960s.
    But that’s the virtue of history, and of biographies. Living (and dead) figures are not stuck with the evaluations that surrounded them at the height of their fame or infamy, but are subject to reconsideration and reevaluation. Such a reevaluation is already in the process, seeming to resurrect and reevaluate the Presidencies of both Johnson and Nixon, seemingly doomed to ignominy years ago.
    Robert Caro appears to have made it his life work to reevaluate and resurrect Lyndon Johnson; to date he has written four doorstopper volumes in his epic biography and is apparently working on the fifth. These have occupied his time and energy since 1974, when he published his biography of Robert Moses: The Power Broker. In fact, the key word “power” occurs in the title of three of the five works that have been the focus of Caro’s adult life. Caro’s devotion to the Johnson story is so thorough that he has enlisted his wife as his primary researcher, has moved to Washington, DC, and then to Texas to pursue research on Johnson. He has repeatedly interviewed key figures who knew Johnson and the political-historical context of a major swath of American history over the last thirty years.

    Superficially, LBJ is not an appealing figure, with his Texas magnolia drawl, his obsessive naming of all his kin and pets (Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ ranch, Lynda B. Johnson, Luci Baines J., Little Beagle Junior) and his obsession with and devotion to a war synonymous with American overreach and failure as well as a malign, contentious, and controversial period in American political life. Yet somehow Caro brings this unusual human being to imaginative life and reinvigorates his worth.

The Passage of Power, the latest in the series, focuses on the story of Johnson’s pursuit of the Presidency in the election of 1960, his acquiescence in the role of Vice-President, and his transition to power after the assassination of President Kennedy, culminating in his own election in 1964, his masterful leadership in passing of key civil rights and anti-poverty legislation. Here Johnson already begins at a disadvantage; he is indeed the majority leader in the U.S. Senate and believes the Presidency is within his grasp, though he knows well the opposition by many voters to his (apparent) Southern values and his questionable devotion to Democratic liberalism.
    The obvious contrast and comparison is of Johnson with John F. Kennedy, a far more liberal and personally attractive figure—a war hero, a handsome and even sexy young man with a beautiful young wife who became a fashion plate, who quoted Camus and George Bernard Shaw and used a variety of eloquent and memorable rhetorical figures in his public speeches and inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you....”). Compare this to LBJ, whose role in World War II was virtually noncombatant, and certainly minimal, who spoke with a Southern accent, who was previously associated with opposition to civil rights. I suspect it would be hard to find someone who remembers or could quote a speech given by Lyndon Johnson.

    Despite these surface (and ultimately superficial) impressions (e.g., after all, Kennedy didn’t write those memorable words—it was Ted Sorensen!), Caro manages to fashion an intriguing and remarkable narrative using a variety of strategies. One of his chief strategies is that apparently disabling comparison between the Kennedys and Johnson. In the run-up to the Presidential nomination, Johnson initially dismissed Kennedy as a spoiled rich man’s kid and someone who was a slacker in the Senate, where Johnson had been tireless and the “master.” Caro offers extended sketches of Kennedy’s background revealing the struggles he had gone through as a young man with illness, as well as the political cleverness (to match and contrast with Johnson’s) that had underlined his career in politics and the Senate.
    Caro also uses Robert Kennedy as a kind of foil, underlining the animosity with which RFK and LBJ detested each other, apparently from their first encounter. This involves Bobby’s investment in a last-minute backstairs (literally) manipulation to remove Johnson from his brother’s Presidential ticket. Caro traces Bobby’s movements up and down the backstairs of the nominees’ hotel through the varying accounts of what happened and who was responsible. The contrasts suggest of course that John Kennedy understood and valued much of what Johnson might offer, even if it was only a cynical political calculation; Bobby stood, apparently, for a seemingly idealistic opposition to Johnson. But Caro’s strategy personalizes national history and makes it take on the dimensions of Shakespearean tragedy.

    The Caro approach also reveals the conflicts and contradictions in Johnson’s own character, his overweening desire to run for (and be) President in the election of 1960, along with his reluctance to enter any primary and his series of evasions and circumlocutions to explain his position. Despite his initial disdain for the Kennedys and hatred of Bobby, Johnson accepts the offered position of Vice-President unhesitatingly as a road to power, because with his shrewd ability to turn politics into careful counting, he knows his unlikelihood to emerge either in1960 or 1968 as a realistic Democratic candidate from the South; he also knows how being Vice-President improves the statistical odds of succeeding to the Presidency. Then Caro details the ensuing marginalization of LBJ as Vice-President by the Kennedy administration (most Kennedy staffers regarded him as Col. Cornpone and dismissed his offers of aid in the legislative process). Johnson retreated into what seems strikingly like melancholic inaction and depression.

    But Caro also uses some other surprising strategies that make his biography entertaining and meaningful and valuable. He reminds us that succeeding an assassinated President is a traumatic process. We may now take such a succession for granted and without careful examination. But Johnson managed it extraordinarily well, especially since he was not popular with the electorate, with Kennedy’s cadre of staffers, or, obviously, with Bobby Kennedy; in fact there were grim suspicions Johnson may have engineered the assassination. But Johnson insisted on an immediate oath-taking on the plane in Dallas and made sure that Mrs. Kennedy was present;

this notified the nation of the official passing of the baton and continuity of the office, grim as it might be. Legally Johnson was officially President as soon as Kennedy was pronounced dead, but Johnson well understood that emotional and broad acceptance was a far different thing—especially with the nation involved in a war in Vietnam, and an ongoing conflict with the Soviets, and with Johnson himself obviously potentially in strife with Robert Kennedy, the Attorney-General.
    By persuasion and entreaty, LBJ got key Kennedy officials to remain and continue to serve him and the country—including especially Rusk and McNamara and Robert Kennedy and even speechwriter Ted Sorensen for a while. He projected an aura of command and hominess on a vacation at his LBJ ranch, inviting staffers and reporters and appearing like a down-home and welcoming Western cowboy host, even insisting that Pierre Salinger, the rotund press secretary, ride horseback with him. Moreover, Caro underlines the enormous skill and effort of Johnson in passing legislation Kennedy had been unable to move forward, especially the first serious civil rights laws since the late nineteenth century—as well as a series of initiatives associated with his own War on Poverty. It may seem almost irrelevant today, but Caro legitimately makes a stroke of genius of the Warren Commission investigation into Kennedy’s assassination, since it was broad-based, headed by well respected establishment figures (such as Chief Justice Earl Warren), and quieted all sorts of rumors and suspicions about who was really behind the murder of such a beloved figure, succeeded by such a seemingly minor leader as Johnson himself. The commission’s investigation and report was thorough enough to have spawned much criticism and second-guessing over the last 60 years, but no evidence has been unearthed that substantially disputed its conclusions.

Next Sunday: Master of the Senate
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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