A One-sided Johnson (July/august 1990 | Volume: 41, Issue: 5)

A One-sided Johnson

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5

In the autumn of 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt was spending what seemed to Washington insiders like a remarkable amount of time in the company of the congressman from the Tenth District of Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The 32-year-old legislator’s reasons for cultivating the President of his party were not hard to ascertain, but FDR’s evident fondness for the big-eared Texan was less easily understood. To be sure, Johnson had first been elected to Congress three years earlier as a champion of the president’s doomed Court-packing scheme, and he had more recently demonstrated, as an assistant to the Democratic Congressional Committee, a precocious ability to find big money and distribute it where it would do the most good during the fall elections. Still, most of those whom Roosevelt sought out in his private moments were men of his own class and upbringing, not graduates of Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas.

 

Later, LBJ was uncharacteristically modest when asked to account for his youthful proximity to the president. Eleanor was often away, he explained; FDR was simply lonely, so “He’d call me up” and “I used to go down sometimes and have a meal with him.” But Washington teemed with young men equally eager to help fill the president’s lonely hours. FDR himself hinted at a likelier explanation in a private talk with his Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. Johnson, he said, reminded him of himself; he was just “the kind of uninhibited young pro” he might have been if he “hadn’t gone to Harvard.”

For all his outward geniality FDR, like LBJ, was a hard-eyed judge of his fellow politicians, and his words came back to me often as I reread The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert A. Caro’s monumental but disturbing The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and then moved on to its new, no-less-compelling, no-less-troubling sequel, Means of Ascent.

Caro is a tireless, resourceful researcher and a fine storyteller. There isn’t a dull passage in either book, and his second volume is filled with fascinating new information about the seven fallow years that Johnson endured between the Senate race apparently stolen from him in 1941 and the one he surely stole in 1948. Like its predecessor, it is riveting when describing the mechanics of campaigning and untangling the intricate, clandestine links between government and business. No one interested in history or government should pass it up.

But as a full-scale portrait of its protagonist, it seems to me unpersuasive. Caro’s Johnson never changes, never grows. Just a quarter of the way through his first volume, when LBJ is still just 22, a big man only on a very small campus, the author asserts that he was already set in his nefarious ways, characterized by a “lack of any discernible limits. Pragmatism had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver