You have to deal with the powerless
November 21, 2016 9:14 AM   Subscribe

Means of Descent. An interview with Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker and the series The Years of Lyndon Johnson. An examination of power, getting things done, and the human costs of doing so. posted by Mchelly (30 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
Trumps says that 'The Power Broker' is one of his favourite books. 'Master of the Senate' is one of my favourite books. Thanks for posting this.
posted by My Dad at 9:22 AM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


It hasn’t made me cynical. I think I was more cynical before I started. I have grown more fascinated. I wish I had two lifetimes.

That made my day.
posted by chavenet at 9:25 AM on November 21, 2016 [11 favorites]


These have been my favorite non-fiction books since the sixth grade.

I really hope Caro finishes the next book before his age catches up with him.
posted by Seeba at 9:36 AM on November 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Those bizarre facts aren't actually all that bizarre. A few are kind of unpleaant, but not, you know, bizarre.

I guess this is the place to drop my favorite story about Lady Bird Johnson. The Johnson Presidential Library is a 6 story concrete structure. When you enter, you are in a huge atrium facing a transparent wall that runs up from the 2nd to 6th floors through which you can see the presidential papers, in red archival boxes with the Presidential Seal attached. Apparently, it was the habit of the Library Director to insist that, when the atrium was used for functions, all the spaces for absent boxes be filled in with dummy box fronts, a time-consuming task that the staff hated. Word of this got back to Lady Bird, and, the next time she was at an event stood with the Director, stared up at the wall of pristine red and gold and said "my, it looks like no one is using Lyndon's papers at all." The practice was stopped immediately. This has become my personal metric for diplomacy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:25 AM on November 21, 2016 [38 favorites]


I love Caro, and I've probably read every interview with him, and profile of him, published in the last ten years. It drives me mad to read them now - like this one - and see that yet again, a journalist has failed to ask a single unique, original question of one of the most fascinating writers alive. Publishers are essentially printing the same Q&A over, and over, and over again.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 10:29 AM on November 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


One of my most influential teachers made us watch Johnson and Settin' the Woods on Fire (about Wallace) back to back. So now I can't untangle the two figures in my mind. The deeply empathetic and liberal Wallace, who did the unthinkable to try and save the South from fully rejecting anti-poverty, pro-education policies. While LBJ was a monstrous person who propelled the country forward because it would guarantee he would never become a villain or footnote in history.
posted by politikitty at 11:18 AM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thank you so much for posting this. Such great interviews.

I've been meaning to get* The Power Broker, and now I definitely will, by virtue of putting it on my Christmas List this year.

* and then hopefully read at least some of it, before it goes on the shelf next to The Best and the Brightest ...
posted by intermod at 11:19 AM on November 21, 2016


One-star Amazon review, which a friend pointed out to me a few days ago:
I'm so glad that we have writers such as Robert Caro who help us see the good in all mankind. After reading Caro's books, I have a renewed faith in "the tooth fairy," Santa Claus, and the Easter bunny. I can hardly wait to read Caro's next book: "Adolf Hitler: What a Wonderful Guy, a Lesson in Misunderstanding Humanity."
Perhaps the review had just finished Ronnie Dugger's biography of LBJ, The Politician, another good - but more critical - read.
posted by clawsoon at 11:25 AM on November 21, 2016


Caro's portrayal of LBJ is far from positive. It's entirely possible the Amazon reviewer never even read the books--they are pretty long.

I have a friend from Fort Worth who absolutely loathes Caro, and says he was too hard on LBJ.
posted by My Dad at 11:29 AM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


What is that reviewer even talking about? The entire first volume is quite harsh on LBJ, paints him as a brown-nosing sycophantic coward whose obsessive ambition was driven by a need to dominate and humiliate everyone around him.

The Johnson family themselves can't stand Caro, they even very deliberately refused to invite him to the civil rights summit held at LBJ presidential library.
posted by Ndwright at 11:34 AM on November 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm mystified by the 1 star review Clawsoon cites. Either the reviewer didn't read the books, or they're unable to comprehend text. Caro makes clear that Johnson was a simply awful human being, corrupt, a coward, a bully, a lick spittle to any powerful person of potential use to him, and for most of his political life a pittbull for the segregationists and big oil interests. But the fact remains the 1960's civil and voting rights legislation would not have happened but for him.
posted by mojohand at 11:44 AM on November 21, 2016




Hmm. Maybe the one-star reviewer thinks that LBJ killed JFK?
posted by clawsoon at 11:56 AM on November 21, 2016


I'm surprised the bizarre facts link didn't include anything about his propensity for conducting business in the bathroom. Not to mention his habit of showing off his gallbladder scar, and lifting his beagle by the ears. Regardless of whether you think on the balance he was good or bad, he was certainly strange.

My father was born in rural Texas in 1934 and was always fascinated by Johnson. I need to take a look and see if he ever got a copy of Caro's first two books (he died before the third one). I have been meaning to read them for some time now. I really should get started, so that I can get caught up by the time the last one comes out.
posted by TedW at 12:02 PM on November 21, 2016


The first half of 'The Passage of Power,' where Caro does a mini-bio of RFK, makes for compelling reading.
posted by My Dad at 12:19 PM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


My Dad, similarly, the beginning of 'Master of the Senate' would prepare you well for a graduate level course on the history of the Senate.
posted by mojohand at 12:38 PM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Caro has so many interesting things to say, but whenever I read a Q&A with him, I quickly scan for any updates on how he's feeling and how the fifth book is coming, and then I spend the rest of the Q&A going back and forth between being engaged with the conversation and wondering when the interviewer is going to leave him alone and let him get back to work.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 12:47 PM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


There is a reason that "no man is a hero to his valet" is a proverb. The way politicians get things done isn't pretty. But, I'll take Johnson crazy over Nixon crazy every time. One of them bends toward justice.
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:48 PM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't think the people who lost loved ones in either Operation Rolling Thunder or Operation Arc Light cared who was president.
posted by My Dad at 1:45 PM on November 21, 2016


I can't really agree with that sort of rationalization.
posted by My Dad at 2:08 PM on November 21, 2016


But Johnson didn't bend towards justice. He just happened to become President with a ton of political capital, and the recognition that history would be kind to him if he used his bullying tactics to get some Civil Rights legislation passed. He was a Democrat because all Southerners were Democrats. Because the entire House was full of Democrats. Because you joined the Democratic party if you wanted to be in the Party currently in power.

Nixon's rhetoric bent away from justice because those were the voters that were left. In '62, he was lobbying hard within his party to combat Goldwater's appeal to white supremecists. He still gave us the EPA, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and delayed the inevitable Goldwater takeover that Reagan championed.

It's useful to use Nixon as shorthand for the Southern backlash to Civil Rights Legislation. But not if we try to turn Nixon's power plays as anything other than calculating and rational, appealing to almost 50% of the electorate. If Nixon had won the presidency, rather than Kennedy, it's easy to see a Democratic Party that would have been committed to anti-poverty progressive policies at the expense of civil rights and personal autonomy. (I think back to the suffragettes who pushed for prohibition, and sterilization of the poor, and wonder how I could have split that baby.)
posted by politikitty at 3:03 PM on November 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I hope to read Caro's LBJ books someday and I'm sure I'll enjoy them, but god damn, would I kill to get into the timeline where Caro did that Fiorello LaGuardia biography instead.
posted by enn at 4:18 PM on November 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


That interview is a great read, nikoniko. I wonder if there's been a post-Trump Caro interview.
VONNEGUT

Let me ask you a question, Bob. I was on a panel with Joe Heller down in Florida. We were talking about the war mostly because that’s what we wanted to talk about, but I asked him at one point if he was disappointed about what the country has become. Because I am deeply disappointed. I was a prisoner of war with the Brits and the French and listened to all their plans for after the war, wanting justice and distribution of power in the world and that sort of thing, and Heller said that he was not disappointed-that he was unsurprised that the nation had turned out this way. Are you disappointed?

CARO

I guess, in a way, I am. I think with all our riches and wealth and the fact that we don’t have an enemy now who can threaten us, we ought to be doing a lot more now with the dispossessed of the world and the Blacks and Hispanics in our own country. I don’t think we’re doing very much compared with what we could do.

VONNEGUT

Well, what about your basic trade of journalism. ..What are you, sixty, now?

CARO

Sixty-one.

VONNEGUT

All right, so in the past thirty years, how has journalism done?

CARO

Yeah, I’m very disappointed in that. Aren’t you?
Oh, man.
posted by ignignokt at 6:40 PM on November 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


But Johnson didn't bend towards justice. He just happened to become President with a ton of political capital, and the recognition that history would be kind to him if he used his bullying tactics to get some Civil Rights legislation passed.

I think this is uncharitable to LBJ. Yeah interpersonally he was kind of gross and his Vietnam ramp-up is abhorrent, but from everything I've read about him, he really did care about civil rights. Pretty much as soon as he became president he used all his legislative skills to get it passed.
posted by Automocar at 8:29 PM on November 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


But Johnson didn't bend towards justice. He just happened to become President with a ton of political capital, and the recognition that history would be kind to him if he used his bullying tactics to get some Civil Rights legislation passed.

Oh come on. There were any number of different ways he could have spent his political capital to create a political legacy. Most of them vastly easier in terms of the political battles he would have had to fight, the backlash he would have had to endure, the lifelong allies (like his mentor Richard Russell) he would have had to alienate.
posted by AdamCSnider at 9:16 PM on November 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Thanks for posting this, Mchelly, and thanks for that interview nikoniko.

Robert Caro has been on my to-read list for a long time, primarily because IMO Frank Underwood's character in House of Cards is most informed by Lyndon Johnson. This set of links just put Caro at the top of the list.

One standout point from the Caro profile was his refutation of Acton's axiom: absolute power doesn't always corrupt. I appreciate biography that doesn't rely on pat answers and cliches to understand the motivations and character of human beings. I also expect to observe in people some unexpected things, from time to time: Johnson was a power-hungry brute who cared. It speaks well of Caro not only to bring the degree of rigour to his research that he does, but also not to settle for simplistic explanations and not to aim for coherence where you shouldn't expect to find it anyway.
posted by iffthen at 6:10 AM on November 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


It drives me mad to read them now - like this one - and see that yet again, a journalist has failed to ask a single unique, original question of one of the most fascinating writers alive.

True enough. From curiosity, what would you ask?

If Nixon had won the presidency, rather than Kennedy....

Received wisdom is that he did win, no?

posted by IndigoJones at 9:58 AM on November 22, 2016


similarly, the beginning of 'Master of the Senate' would prepare you well for a graduate level course on the history of the Senate.

For sure. That's my favourite of all the LBJ books. It's an incredible achievement. And it's helped me understand why American politics is the way that it is.
posted by My Dad at 11:24 AM on November 22, 2016


Great interview, thanks for posting. But why is it interrupted/disfigured with those hideous quote-graphics?
posted by Rash at 7:14 PM on November 22, 2016


Jesus Christ for a second I thought this post meant he was dead and I thought PLEASE GOD NO FINISH THE LBJ BOOKS FIRST.

Wait 'til LBJ gets to Westeros, dude
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:03 PM on November 22, 2016


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