Posted by
Bert Chapman on Tuesday, May 22, 2012 8:55:27 PM
Presidential biographies are an important part of American historiography. The presidency wields and continues wielding an enormous influence over national political life and debate and international politics, economics, and security, This year's presidential campaign will again demonstrate the American presidency's global influence and and importance.
The genre of presidential biography fills enormous book shelf space, has chopped down forests of trees, and consumes continually expanding petabytes of computer storage space. Prominent examples of presidential biographies include Dumas Malone's six volume Thomas Jefferson biography, Robert Remini's works on Andrew Jackson, Edmund Morris' Theodore Roosevelt trilogy, and Arthur Link's work on Woodrow Wilson. Presidential biographies can range from character assassination pieces to unrestrained hero worship and everything in between depending on the quality of the author's research and writing and their use of non-use of source materials.
Robert Caro's ongoing saga of Lyndon Johnson has reached its fourth volume covering the Vice-Presidency and the early months of his presidency. Caro has been working on this biography for nearly four decades having produced earlier volumes in 1982, 1990, 2002, and 2012. These volumes chronicled LBJ's insatiable lust for political power and dominance and are exhaustively researched using archival, print, and oral history resources. Caro is an engaging writer who knows how entice you into the narrative of political dealmaking and the uses and abuses of political power in a compelling manner.
This newly published volume covers LBJ's complicated interactions with John Kennedy, how he was often slighted by JFK's political compatriots because he didn't adhere to their "lofty" New England ways, and his transition to the presidency following JFK's November 22, 1963 assassination in Dallas. A particularly enjoyable feature of this latest work is Caro's vivid depiction of the blood feud between LBJ and Bobby Kennedy which would make Survivor or any other reality show look like a children's puppet show. These guys really hated each other! There are many delightful accounts in Passage of Power such as how LBJ and Lady Bird hosted German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and his delegation at his ranch in Texas' pastoral Hill Country whose geographic and topographic features are keys to understanding LBJ's ascension to political prominence. Caro also does a good job describing LBJ's relationships with prominent southern Democrats such as Georgia Senator Richard Russell and Virginia Senator Harry Byrd who chaired the Senate Finance Committee during this time period. Despite Caro's liberal sneering, Byrd's commitment to fiscal conservatism and abhorrence of governmental debt makes him a hero of this work even if that was not Caro's intent.
LBJ's efforts to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act are also noted with Caro's narrative skill and overall this tome is worth reading. However, it's flaws are becoming more apparent. In his concluding chapter, Caro writes of JFK: "...while the wave of emotion, of affection and adoration, for the martyred young President would roll on for decades-is still rolling on today, almost half a century after Dallas" is flat out prepubescent puppy love liberal nonsense! The only people who mourn Kennedy, not long after another recent revelation of his serial philandering, are unreconstructed liberal secularists residing on New York's Upper West Side, Hyannisport, Georgetown (Washington, DC), or Martha's Vineyard who still genuflect at the long tarnished altar of Camelot while their latest object of governmental worship, the Hyde Park, Illinois Obama community organizing train wreck, comes apart at its sordid seams.
Caro is an old school writer who writes prose by hand and is constantly rewriting and editing. While high-quality scholarly biography takes some time, it should not take ten years to cover barely four years of LBJ's life. Caro is 77 and I have no idea how far he has written about the policies of LBJ's presidency such as the Great Society fiasco and Vietnam. He really needs to get introduced to the computer, desktop publishing, and citation management software if he hopes to finish his work before mental deterioration and physical exhaustion fatally compromise its quality. As a liberal, Caro needs to get over his love for "social justice" in LBJ's policies. Social justice is a liberal euphemism for increased governmental control of the economy and society and redistributive policies. Caro needs to acquaint himself with the vast corpus of scholarly work such as Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion and Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy from 1950-1980 to understand the grievous damage done to American societal cohesion and family structure by Great Society Programs. These programs play a major role in the economic debt and societal breakdown we are experiencing today and their roots began in the Johnson presidency.
While there is much about LBJ's Vietnam policies that can be justifiably criticized, Caro must also recognize the disastrous consequences of Communist victory in Vietnam such as the Boat People, the abandonment of an ally, and the murderous rise of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. When writing about Vietnam, Caro must also recognize that our defeat in Vietnam resulted in a drastic increase in Soviet expansionism which only began to be reversed once Barry Goldwater's ideological heir, Ronald Reagan, became President. The Passage of Power has its scintillating and sometimes poignant moments. However, in reading it you get the feeling that the author has become so swallowed up by LBJ and his titanic persona that it's getting hard for the author to come to a definitive summation of his contradictory legacy. While Lyndon Baines Johnson personified the American dream of rags to riches and was a skilled political dealmaker and legislator, his presidency was an absolute disaster whose consequences remain with us today. He was an effective user of political power but often did so in sleazy ways and had poor human relations skills. 21st century American liberals must realize that LBJ, not JFK, reflects their true ideological, political, and policymaking inheritance as we face the economic, moral, and national security damage being done to America by Barack Obama's presidency. Although he doesn't intend this, Caro's work shows that Lyndon Baines Johnson is the true ideological progenitor of Barack Obama!