Robert A. Caro, "The Passage of Power", Part Two

I need to tell you about the rest of this book.  At the time JFK was killed there was an executive logjam, as bills were piled up to prevent a civil rights bill from passing - which LBJ had warned JFK about.  JFK had had the eloquence and promise on this, but LBJ, despite the "taint of magnolias" would now have to be the one to deliver on it.  On the plane, with JFK's body and LBJ on it, LBJ now had to make those decisions.  And when Bobby Kennedy met the plane he ran past LBJ, so as not to have to recognise him as President.

The Kennedy administration had, in October 1963, recommended stepping up the training of the Vietnamese army, so that American military personnel could be withdrawn, and assessed that this could be done by late 1965.  Robert McNamara had said, "We need to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it".  But then there was a coup in South Vietnam, and the National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) was contradictory in its message: it retained the withdrawal pledge, but its soundbite was that the Vietnam conflict was a war against communism, and a war that had to be won, and that it remained "the central objective of the United States isn South Vietnam, to assist the people and government to win".

LBJ was, you could say, populist, or maybe foolhardy, telling Martin Luther King he would "support them all" - Kennedy's policies, which MLK had described as "great... p;regressive".  LBJ told liberals he was going to reform the system, and conservatives that he was going to preserve it as it was.  A great political line he gave to a state governor whose support he needed: "You came to see me when I was sick.  I don't forget that.  Now you let me know if there's anything I need to know out there.  I'm going to depend on you."  While JFK's body was still in the East Room, on the Saturday after he was killed, Arthur Schlesinger, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, hosted a restaurant lunch, in a Washington restaurant with senior economists among others, to discuss the possibility of denying LBJ the nomination at the 1964 Democratic Convention, by running a ticket of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.  So that is what LBJ was up against.

LBJ had an interesting and quite compelling use of language.  He referred, on the night of JFK's funeral, to Jackie "holding his skull in her lap" - Caro calls him a great storyteller, and he is right to do so.

In the illustrations to the book, photographs mostly, all the politicians look overweight, unhealthy and tired.  LBJ,although older than many, towards the end of this book, looks relatively fresh.  Only RFK, in those pictures, is good-looking.

When lBJ made his inaugural address it had to be typed in large type  Because LBJ was in his late fifties, and most people that age need glasses to read.  He started, "All I have, I would have given gladly not to be standing here today".  And almost straight in after that, urging that "Civil rights be written in the books of law".  The southern senators sat silent.  Previous Majority  Leader Reston had written, "President Kennedy had a way of seeing all sides of a question.  President Johnson has a way of concentrating on his own side of a question."  Johnson had a gift for political phrasemaking: To Republicans: "I am the only President you have: If you would have me fail, then you fail, for this country fails."

There is more in this book, and it is a stupendous insight into a brilliant politician, and into the exercise of power.

Robert A. Caro, "The Passage of Power", Part One

the fourth in Caro's masterly series on the years of Lyndon Johnson, a character I thought did not much interest me until I started reading these books a few years ago.  This one is perhaps the most readable of the four (he tells us there is another in preparation) and covers a very short period, that of the transition from Kennedy to Johnson and the early part of Johnson's Presidency.  It is informed by LBJ's hatred of Robert Kennedy, something which was known about in political circles at the time but is explored psychologically most interestingly here.  And made me wonder how it would have developed later, if RFK had lived.  "To watch Lyndon Johnson during the transition is to see political genius in action" - and so it was.  I was too young at the time to understand, but fairly un-political people in the UK were agog with interest in American politics, as they have almost never been since - I remember the adult conversations around me.  Johnson's background - his father going broke, and his family having to walk past shops that would no longer give them credit - made him terrified of failure.  So he said he wouldn't run for the 1960 presidential nomination - because if he didn't run, he couldn't fail.  And then he changed his mind.  Politics was no stranger to fraud,then as now - in Johnson's 1948 Texas Senate race, very late, after polls had closed, 200 new votes were found for Johnson.  All had written their names in the same ink and the same handwriting, and had voted in alphabetical order.  The selection by JFK of LBJ as running mate caused a storm among northern liberals, but one journalist, Doris Fleeson, had it right when she wrote that the choice was "a decision to win the election".  There is a parallel with the UK and recent times too obvious to go into here.

During JFK's brief Presidency LBJ kept silent, mostly, as vice-presidents must.  He was also routinely humiliated and sneered at.  LBJ, the briefer and leaker, did none of this during the Kennedy years.  He never criticised the President, and would not allow anyone else to do so in his hearing.  The Kennedys and their acolytes laughed at LBJ's clothes, his accent and his manners, and LBJ knew they were doing it.  We learn that it was LBJ who told the media that the Cuban missile crisis had erupted.  Johnson's remark on what to do about it was, "All I know is that when I was a boy in Texas, and you were walking along the road when a rattlesnake reared up ready to strike, the only thing to do was take a stick and chop its head off."  We  know of course that that is not what happened in 1962.

A great speech LBJ made, and which has been forgotten until now, is worth quoting from: "One hundred years ago, the slave was freed ... one hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.  The Negro today asks justice.  We do not answer him - we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil - when we reply to the Negro by asking, 'Patience' ... to ask for patience from the Negro is to ask him to give more of what he has already given enough ...the Negro says, 'Now'.  Others say 'Never'.  The voice of responsible Americans - the voices of those who died here and the great man (Lincoln) who spoke here - their voice says, 'Together'.  There is no other way."

A big story which might have destroyed LBJ, to do with a man named Bobby Baker, an associate who later went to prison, and a possible source of LBJ's wealth, was brewing in November 1963.  In those days of much slower-boiling news stories it was building up as November went on.  The headlines on 22 November 1963 were full of LBJ's waning star, and that he was being snubbed by the President's people.

For chapters on end Jackie seems to be wearing the bloodstained pink suit - but a lot was going on, including LBJ being sworn in on board Air Force One.  Jackie was drinking a Scotch at the time, we are told.  The first one she had ever drunk.  And she did not like it.  Lady Bird Johnson had a wonderful, dignified, Southern turn of phrase when asked when the Johnsons would be moving into the executive mansion in the White house, "I would to God I could serve Mrs Kennedy's comfort.  I can at least serve her convenience."

More soon.

the passage of power, by Robert Caro - LBJ

is the title of the new volume in the series which forms the great biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.  It is the best study of political power I have ever read.  I have been waiting years for the latest one, and have just pre-ordered it.  Read the others now if you can, but be warned, it is "du boulot" as the French say, there is a lot in it.  The books are long, and they are detailed, and they are fascinating.  The effect of the coming of electricity to rural Texas on the politics of the state?  How rural women did washing in that state?  How the farming was done?  How the Senate was taken over and controlled?  How civil rights legislation was introduced, after decades of failure?  How the Senate election of 1948 was stolen?  It's all there.  There has been about a ten-year gap between the appearance of each volume, and Caro is 76 now, so I am relieved that he has found the time to write it.  You can read a lovely profile of him here and you can start with volume 1 here if you haven't discovered these books yet.  I love his style - the long looping paragraphs followed by one-sentence ones.  I wish I had had the chance to read these before i went into politics, but they came out during those years.  Highly recommended.