Recently, perusing volume two of Charles Moore’s three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher, I read that, returning home from a diplomatic trip during her prime ministership, she stopped at a duty-free shop to buy gin and cigars for her husband, Denis. LBJ was a sadist who enjoyed the discomfort of the people who worked for him and reveled in being abusive to his rabidly loyal staff.” Endless anecdotes confirm this verdict. Johnson was epically corrupt, greedy, vain, manipulative, ambitious, vindictive, and nasty. Unlike Caro, Roger Stone, in his 2013 book The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, gets the real LBJ: “Johnson was a coarse, crude, loudmouthed bully…. On the contrary, he seems over the years (perhaps to make his lifelong job endurable, or to twist LBJ into the liberal-icon mold) to have fashioned an LBJ all his own - an LBJ whose company is more palatable than the real one.
Caro may write like a dream, and he may have spent most of his adult life in the company of LBJ’s ghost, but that doesn’t mean he understands him. “He cared,” Caro contended in one interview.
If you buy Caro’s line, LBJ always had a profound “compassion for poor people” and for “people of color” but, gee whiz, he just wasn’t in a position to act on it in the slightest until he reached the top. LBJ, he’s always insisted, was a supremely complicated person who, for all his venality, was also magnanimous, his merciless crawl to power having been motivated, at least in part, by a heartfelt desire to help the underprivileged. On the other hand, he was a civil-rights hero who cared deeply about the plight of poor blacks and Mexicans. On the one hand, he was colossally corrupt in business, he cheated on an epic scale to win his first Senate election, and he refused to withdraw from Vietnam, at least in part because he was making a mint in payoffs from companies like Bell Helicopter. They read like novels.Īnd as in any good novel, the protagonist, LBJ, was morally ambiguous. Reading his first two LBJ books, I admired more than ever his stately prose, eye for detail, and narrative gift. (If the pattern holds, his final volume should appear in another year or so.) When his first LBJ book came out, Caro was already respected - not least by me - for his 1974 study of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. Johnson, which he’s always described as being about how political power works in America. Then along came Robert Caro, who in 1982, 1990, 2002, and 2012 published the first four massive volumes of his biography of Lyndon B. And as the y ears passed, Best Evidence faded from my memory.
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