VOLUME XIII, NUM BER 1, WINTER 2012/13

A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship

A Republic...If You Can Keep It Essays and Reviews by Michael Burlingame, Charles C. Johnson, Michael Nelson, Ronald J. Pestritto, Richard Vedder, William Voegeli, and Ryan P. Williams Plus Victor Davis James Hankins: Hanson: Christopher Caldwell: Protestants Algis Valiunas: Imperial Burdens Gay Rites Gone Wild Leo Tolstoy Martha Bayles: Cheryl Miller: Benjamin Balint: Lincoln & Downton Abbey Salman Rushdie Django Unchained

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Book Review by Michael Nelson Too Much Information The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert A. Caro. Alfred A. Knopf, 736 pages, $35

obert a. caro began working on Caro turned 77 in October, however, and has Caro’s interpretation. Although the Johnson a biography of Lyndon Johnson in been requiring more time to account for his of Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant is almost R1974, the year he published his award- subject’s life, which is understandable since it as unattractive as the man Caro describes, winning : and grew increasingly complex and consequential. Dallek argued that Johnson’s personal ambi- the Fall of . He meant The Years of At every stage of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, tion served a larger lifelong cause: to integrate Lyndon Johnson to be a six-year, three-volume Caro has underestimated the number of in- the South into the nation by developing its project. Instead, Caro’s first volume,The Path stallments to come and the number of years economy and ending racial segregation. In to Power, appeared in 1982—eight years of his he’d need to complete them. What’s more, Dallek’s view, Johnson’s “liberal nationalism” life spent recounting the first 33 years of John- he’s also writing a book about the writing of only went wrong when he tried to extend son’s. Means of Ascent was published in 1990. his books, a project that can only prolong the it to Southeast Asia, where he committed It covers seven years, culminating in Johnson’s completion of the LBJ biography. 550,000 troops in a bootless effort to stop election to the Senate in 1948 (widely suspect- North Vietnam from bullying South Viet- ed but not proven to have been stolen until s one of caro’s faithful and, on nam and, notoriously, promised the north a Caro uncovered clear documentary evidence). balance, admiring readers, I’m in a billion dollars to stop fighting and let him de- Master of the Senate, published in 2002, spans Aminority among presidential scholars. velop the Mekong River valley with a foreign the first ten years of Johnson’s career as a sena- The three previous volumes ofThe Years of aid counterpart to Franklin Roosevelt’s Ten- tor and Senate Democratic leader. The Passage Lyndon Johnson won most of the Pulitzer Priz- nessee Valley Authority. of Power, published last year, covers the period es and National Book Awards for which they Dallek diminished himself, however, by from 1958 to early 1964: ten years from Caro; were eligible…and left academic historians picking fights with Caro in that favorite five years of Johnson. notably unimpressed. Stanford in Washington scholarly sniping ground, the footnotes, and Devoted readers of this biography can take professor Robert Dallek’s two-volume biogra- sometimes seemed to think he had won just little encouragement from the actuarial tables. phy—Lone Star Rising (1991) and Flawed Giant because he cited a fellow academic historian If Caro levels off at his current pace, taking (1998)—was hailed as the corrective to Caro. who interpreted an incident differently from two years of research and writing to chronicle As best I can tell, neither of Dallek’s volumes Caro. In one case, Caro called Johnson’s one year of Johnson’s life, it will be another received a single adverse review by any history failure to vocally support Franklin Roos- two decades before Caro publishes the vol- professor in any scholarly journal. Many re- evelt unprincipled. Dallek quoted William ume that takes Johnson through his presiden- viewers mentioned Caro, almost always for the Leuchtenburg saying it was not unprincipled, cy—that is, through the 1964 election, the purpose of saying how much better Dallek was. and then lazily or tendentiously treated that Great Society, Vietnam, the 1968 election— And, indeed, Dallek captured LBJ’s com- opinion as conclusive. In another footnote, and into retirement as a former president. plexity in ways that compare favorably with Dallek said Caro was wrong to criticize John-

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son’s conduct as a naval officer because Caro “Here’s a guy who has…enough power to turn From the is “ever ready to put Johnson in the worst the entire state around, and you don’t have the possible light”—as if attacking Caro sufficed slightest idea how he got it. And I determined to defend Johnson. Dallek went after Caro in then that I wanted to understand.” his notes 13 times in Lone Star Rising, exactly Caro knew Moses was powerful. But sim- Land of Lincoln 13 more times than he criticized all his other ply knowing that left two important questions sources combined. unanswered. First, how had this man “shaped University of Arkansas historian Randall New York and its suburbs in the image he Woods called and raised Dallek’s hostility personally conceived”? Moses built 13 vehicu- to Caro in his able but testy 2008 book LBJ: lar spans, including the Verrazano-Narrows Architect of American Ambition. Woods didn’t Bridge, still the longest suspension bridge in criticize Caro, as Dallek did; he simply dis- North America and, at the time of its comple- missed him. “I do not quote him once,” Woods tion in 1964, the longest in the world. He also said in an interview and, reminded that he ac- was the main reason for the construction of tually did cite him—once—replied, “I meant public housing units for 550,000 tenants and to take that out.” Woods also said he refused 15 expressways, adding more miles of major to read any of Caro’s books about Johnson be- highway than the total mileage of any other cause, “when you read you absorb things in- city, even car-crazed Los Angeles. Second, Mary Lincoln’s Insanity Case directly and his work is just not trustworthy. why had Moses, who initially sought power as A Documentary History And, too, he’s such a compelling writer, and so a means to accomplish great ends, become a JASON EMERSON that book is going to make an impression on monster who sought “power for its own sake”? “This book is the fi rst to capture and provide you whether you want it to or not.” in one resource all of the documentation he nine months caro set aside to relevant to Mary Lincoln's long-controversial heir snobbery notwithstanding, write The Power Broker became seven insanity trial and treatment. Jason Emerson Dallek and Woods have virtues as his- years. Answering the first question— distils the full body of evidentiary material T torians that correspond to weaknesses how Moses was able to wield power so skill- into an easily accessible chronology. T Caro displays. The latter is usually at his worst fully—was the main obstacle. To be sure, the An essential reference for anyone interested when he turns to “political power and how it answer included some familiar elements of po- in the subject.”—Harold Holzer shapes our lives,” which he insists is the true litical leadership. Moses forged alliances with subject of all his books. Robert Moses, on the powerful figures in business, politics, and the local and state level, and Lyndon Johnson, on media. In public, he successfully cultivated a the national and international scene, inter- reputation as a reformer while privately chan- est Caro because they sought political power neling jobs, legal fees, insurance premiums, more ardently, wielded it more effectively, and and other benefits to powerful machine politi- lost it more tragically than any other Ameri- cians. Convinced that no court or elected body cans of their time. How well he illuminates could stop one of his massive projects once he power, then, is the standard by which Caro’s had driven the first stake, Moses mastered work ultimately must be judged. And because the art of the fait accompli. He was a hands-on nearly every one of his insights into Johnson is taskmaster whom devoted subordinates both transposed from his study of Moses, one can’t loved and feared. understand The Years of Lyndon Johnson with- Caro’s genius lay in discovering how Mo- out knowing what Caro learned from writing ses’s power relied not just on these familiar The Power Broker. elements but also on tools and techniques Lincoln’s Political Generals Caro’s passion for understanding politi- he essentially invented. After turning an ob- DAVID WORK cal power in general and Moses in particu- scure student literary magazine at Yale into a “In this thoroughgoing study of sixteen lar flowed from his work as an investigative vehicle for becoming a Big Man on Campus, ‘political generals’ in the Union army, David reporter for New York’s suburban newspa- Moses spent his life devising ways “to take an Work demonstrates convincingly that these per in the mid-1960s. After Caro institution with little or no power…and to generals' efforts signifi cantly aided the Union wrote a series attacking Moses’s plan to build transform it into an institution of immense war effort in their capacity as administrators, a bridge across the Sound, “the power.” The “public authority” was just such political supporters, recruiters and organizers paper sent me up to Albany to ‘lobby’ against an institution. Historically, governments cre- of troops, and advocates of the Union cause Moses’s bridge.” Governor ated public authorities to sell bonds to build a among key political and ethnic constituencies.” and every legislator Caro talked with agreed single toll road or bridge. The authority went —James M. McPherson that the bridge was “the worst idea in history.” out of business when enough tolls had been But a week later, after Moses paid a visit to the collected to pay off the bonds. Moses realized UNIVERSITY OF legislature, they voted to approve it “by some- that if he could write the powers of the Tri- ILLINOIS PRESS thing like 138-4.” “You think you understand borough Bridge Authority, which he headed, politics, and in fact you don’t have any idea into the contract between the authority and www.press.uillinois.edu what you’re talking about,” Caro concluded. its bondholders, then the authority could

Claremont Review of Books w Winter 2012/13 Page 40 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm continue to float bonds, long after the bridge Broker. The writing remains dramatic and was built, to finance other projects of his own compelling. This is no accident. Caro has de- design. The state government that had cre- scribed Johnson’s 1948 Senate election as a ated the authority might want to put it out of “thrilling campaign,” and said, “If your account business, but the contract clause of the U.S. of that campaign isn’t thrilling, it’s false, even Constitution, which prohibits states from im- if it’s factually accurate.” Caro has lost none of pairing contractual obligations, would deny it his capacity either to thrill or, when the ma- that right. The millions, then billions of dol- terial calls for it, to inspire, outrage, intrigue, lars that the Triborough authority accumu- frustrate, or fascinate. Only one bit of flab has lated over the years made it the most powerful crept into his prose: increasing resort to as-I- institution—and Moses the most powerful have-written references to the previous three man—in New York. volumes. By my count, he does this 16 times Despite Caro’s nuanced explication of in The Passage of Power, occasionally quoting how Moses accumulated power, his analysis several hundred words at a crack, and every of why Moses sought power in the first place single time it’s annoying. is as subtle as one of his subject’s bulldozers. The research that forms the basis for Caro’s Caro first trots out Heredity with a capital Johnson books is even more impressive than H, through which Moses’s mother’s side of the writing. It’s one thing to say he conducted the family endowed him with “[t]he strain of thousands of interviews and reviewed mil- brilliance, idealism, and arrogance…passed lions of pages of documents. It’s something on through her—undiluted, strong but some- else again to see the fruits of that diligence. what formless—to her son Robert.” Caro For example, surely every previous Johnson then brings in environment (small e, not quite biographer had heard that, as a junior mem- as important): the Oxford education that in- ber of the House of Representatives, John- stilled “the British belief…in the duties—and son acquired enormous influence with his the rights—of those born to wealth and privi- colleagues by raising and channeling Texas lege.” The duties, as Moses understood them, oil and contractor money into their 1940 re- entailed a career in public service. The rights election campaigns. But as New Deal insider included deciding which services the public and Johnson confidant Tommy Corcoran told needed, regardless of whether it wanted them Caro, “[Y]ou’re never going to be able to write or not. On “the edge of the bright gold of his about that…. Because you’re never going to idealism,” Caro writes, was “a darker shadow,” find anything in writing.” Caro dug and dug and “with each small increase in the amount and ultimately found the evidence—who do- of power he possessed, the dark element in his nated the money, how much, when, and who nature had loomed larger.” received it—in previously neglected boxes of Johnson’s House papers. aro’s account of moses’s ultimate fall from power is a mechanistic tale of he true test of the johnson books, Chis hereditary arrogance overcoming as of The Power Broker, is Caro’s own the idealism he gleaned from his environment Tcriterion: how well do they explain po- or, as Caro repeatedly writes, of the “dark litical power? Johnson’s lifelong genius, like shadow” dimming the “bright gold.” With the that of Moses, was “taking ‘nothing jobs’ and passage of time, Moses increasingly surround- making them into something—something ed himself with yes-men who, as one reporter big.” As an undergraduate at Southwest Tex- said, “nodded when he wanted them to nod,… as State Teachers College, Johnson joined a laughed when he wanted them to laugh.” With fringe social group called the White Stars no one brave enough to steer him from politi- and transformed it into the most powerful cal error, Moses picked and lost unnecessary, political organization on campus. When he tabloid-hyped fights with upscale patrons of was a young aide to a Texas congressman he a playground and with Joseph became speaker of the somnambulant “Lit- Papp, impresario of Shakespeare in the Park. tle Congress,” and used the organization of Worse than the ensuing loss of popularity was House staffers as a vehicle to network with the death of Moses’s reputation for invincibil- prominent Washington officials. As a junior ity. Neither loved nor, at the end, feared, he member of Congress, Johnson turned the was maneuvered into retirement by Governor politically insignificant Democratic Con- Rockefeller in 1968. (And that bridge over the gressional Campaign Committee into an in- was never built.) strument of personal power, steering Texas Caro’s portrayal of Lyndon Johnson has all money to grateful, and then obligated, Dem- the strengths and weaknesses of The Power ocratic candidates.

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More important, not just for Johnson but as their leader and get Kennedy to sign an ing well? Choose ambition, and you’ll be right also for Congress and the nation, was his use executive order granting him a large staff, a every time. of the position of Senate party leader. The job West Wing office, and authority as a de facto Sometimes, though, doing the right thing Johnson sought and won in 1952 offered lead- national security adviser. No such luck: both coincided perfectly in Johnson’s life with do- ership in name only of the Democrats, newly his Capitol Hill colleagues and the presi- ing the selfish thing—that is, venting his returned to the Senate minority by the Eisen- dent rebuffed Johnson’s power grabs. “Power compassion for poor people and the victims hower landslide. Committee chairmen wield- is where power goes,” Johnson had boasted of discrimination (Mexican Americans when ed the real power in the chamber, but because when accepting the vice presidential nomina- he was a young man in Texas, African Ameri- the party leader had “leader” in his title, the tion. Not this time. “Being vice president is cans when he moved to Washington) while si- press and public held him responsible for the like being a cut dog,” he said after holding multaneously feeding his ambition for power. Senate’s failings. No wonder Johnson, still a the office for a while. According to Caro in Master of the Senate, that first-term senator, faced little opposition As in The Power Broker, Caro’s virtues as a is exactly what happened in 1957 when John- when he sought the post—another “‘nothing biographer make it all the more disappointing son faced pressure from Senate liberals and job’…that no one really wanted.” that his analysis of why Johnson sought power the Eisenhower Administration to advance a But as Caro showed in Master of the Sen- is so shallow. Once again, heredity (the “Bun- civil rights bill. The right thing, Caro asserts, ate, Johnson transformed the role of party ton strain” of “pride and ambition” from John- was to get a bill. For a Texas senator whose leader into a position of power, just as Mo- son’s paternal grandmother’s side) combines unblemished, two decades-long, anti-civil ses had transformed the role of public au- with environment (his father’s steep descent rights record had helped keep him in office thority chairman. Facing a Democratic cau- from respected state representative to “embar- but who now wanted to win the presidential cus divided between Northern liberals and rassment, disgrace, humiliation” as a landless, nomination of a party dominated by North- Southern conservatives, Johnson first took low-paid road crew foreman when Johnson ern liberals, the best route to power was also on the seniority system. As a way of winning was 13) to bind the fate of Caro’s protagonist. to get a bill. So Johnson worked all the levers the loyalty of younger members like Hubert “It was the interaction of his early humiliation at his considerable command and passed the Humphrey and Mike Mansfield, the new first civil rights act since Reconstruction. leader instituted the “Johnson Rule,” which The story of Lyndon the Compassionate provided that no senator would receive a sec- The true test of the picks up in the second half of The Passage ond major committee assignment until every of Power, which takes him through the early senator had received his first. He took the Johnson books is Caro’s weeks of his presidency. Once again, civil Democratic Policy Committee, a relatively own criterion: how rights was the main issue and Johnson big- new body that liberal activists had hoped heartedly wanted to do the compassionate would highlight the differences between well do they explain thing. And once again, passing a civil rights the two parties in starkly ideological terms, political power? bill was the smartest move on the political and turned it into a forum in which Demo- board for someone who desperately wanted cratic senators of all political hues, overseen the acquiescence of the Kennedy crowd to sat- by Johnson, privately hammered out com- with his heredity,” Caro writes, “that gave his isfy his ambition to be nominated and elected promise positions they could unite behind. efforts their feverish, almost frantic intensity, president in his own right. Caro nicely identi- With these and other maneuvers, including a quality that journalists would describe as fies an element that further raised the degree the vaunted “Johnson treatment” of physi- ‘energy’ when it really was desperation and of difficulty for Johnson’s accession: “The cally and verbally engulfing senators whose fear.” Again, as with Robert Moses, the ex- President, the King, was dead, murdered, but votes he needed, he took a scorned position perience of college only made Johnson worse: the King had a brother, a brother who hated of nominal leadership and turned it into a job “obsequious to those above him…overbearing the new King. The dead King’s men—the more powerful than any in Washington, ex- to those who were not…[a] mixture of boot- Kennedy men, the Camelot men—made up cepting the presidency and, possibly, Speaker licker and bully.” in Shakespearean terms, a faction.” of the House. Caro portrayed Moses’s character as a pat- The brother, Robert F. Kennedy, hated tern of bright gold gradually blotted out by a Johnson, whom he described as “vicious, an ohnson thought he could work sim- dark shadow. His image for Johnson is nearly animal in many ways.” But with flattery and ilar magic on the vice presidency, which identical—and just as crudely Manichean. feigned humility, the new president peeled off Joccupies much of the first half ofThe Pas- Now, there are two threads, one “bright” and various members of the Kennedy faction, es- sage of Power. Caro demolishes in detail Ar- one “dark,” that “run side by side,” chiaroscu- pecially in the national security arena and the thur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s argument that John ro-like. In what the historian Ronald Steel cabinet. No longer the cut dog of his miserable F. Kennedy was merely extending a political criticized as “language that seems a bit clearer thousand days as vice president, Johnson took courtesy by asking LBJ to leave the Senate than truth,” Caro identifies the bright thread to the presidency “like Popeye after a can of majority leadership and become vice presi- as compassion and the dark thread as ambi- spinach,” in Rutgers political scientist David dent. Johnson reasoned that he could take tion—“a hunger for power in its most naked Greenberg’s phrase. With skill and sensitivity the then-despised office, transform it into a form, for power not to improve the lives of that Caro chronicles in brilliant detail, John- cockpit of political power, and ride it into the others, but to manipulate and dominate them, son persuaded a Senate ill-disposed to do any- presidency as Kennedy’s successor. Specifi- to bend them to his will.” Guess which mo- thing more than dilute JFK’s civil rights bill cally, he thought he could persuade Senate tive dominates the “tapestry” of Johnson’s to pass a full-strength version. And then, af- Democrats to let him continue functioning character when doing good conflicts with do- ter RFK somehow convinced himself that his

Claremont Review of Books w Winter 2012/13 Page 42 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm brother had been on the verge of trying to end Path to Power, Caro asserted that Johnson’s poverty at the moment of his death, Johnson character was fixed at an unusually early age, took away that issue (and gave rein to his com- certainly no later than the end of his child- New From SIU Press passionate streak) by launching the War on hood and college years. The character of many Poverty as the initial salvo in the Great Society. other “famous figures” continually develops through life, Caro noted, but Johnson’s did 1863 Lincoln’s Pivotal Year icholas lemann has identified not. “All the traits of personality which the Edited by Harold Holzer some of the ways that Caro’s Moses nation would witness decades later—all the and Sara Vaughn Gabbard resembles Caro’s Johnson. Both are traits which affected the course of history— cloth, 28 illus. N $32.95 “big-time government doers, nearly superhu- can be seen at San Marcos naked and glar- man in their abilities, workaholic, monstrous, ing,” Caro concluded. “The Lyndon Johnson dominating, obsessed with the getting and of college years was the Lyndon Johnson who the using of ‘power,’ and prone to flipping would become president.” Available March 2013 back and forth between good and evil.” Other qualities belong on this list as well. Johnson hen johnson succeeded ken- Grant at Vicksburg and Moses both cared more about power than nedy on November 22, 1963, Caro The General and the Siege money, but used money to win the support of wrote in that 1982 book, his rigidly Michael B. Ballard W cloth, 27 illus. other politicians who cared about it avidly. fixed personality turned out to be crucial in $32.95 Both were unsurpassed in their ability to take two important ways. In explaining the main previously meaningless jobs and organiza- events of his administration, both the Great tions and transform them into power bases, Society (definitely the bright thread, accord- notwithstanding Johnson’s failure as vice ing to Caro, who never mentions a Big Gov- president and Moses’s as a defeated candidate ernment program—even federal rent con- Available April 2013 for governor of New York. And both men trol—except to praise it) and the war in Viet- Lincoln as Hero hated subordinates who said no when all they nam (bad, bad, bad—the really dark thread), Frank J. Williams wanted to hear was yes. Johnson regarded that “Johnson’s personality bore, in relation to cloth, 10 illus. kind of staffer as “a defeatist,” and “soon he other factors, an unusually heavy weight.” Be- $19.95 was no longer on the payroll.” yond that, Caro argued, his personality ac- As for Lemann’s observation that Moses counts for developments even more lasting and Johnson each oscillated between good and significant than his five years as president. and evil, he is right about Johnson but not In Caro’s view, the emergence of a deeply in- about Moses, who just got worse and worse grained distrust by Americans of their gov- as his power grew. The war between the dark ernment and the unhappy “evolution from a and bright threads in Johnson was ongoing. ‘constitutional’ to an ‘imperial’ Presidency… Lincoln and Medicine Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein To be sure, every time “compassion had been were to a considerable extent a function of cloth, 5 Ilus. in conflict with ambition, invariably ambition this one man’s personality.” $19.95 would win.” But the compassion was never People can dispute Caro’s claims that per- extinguished. sonality determines individual behavior and The greatest contrast inThe Power Broker that individual behavior directs the course and The Years of Lyndon Johnson is not between of history. That’s an age-old argument, and the bright gold and dark shadow of Moses and Caro’s position in the “great men or great forc- the dark and bright threads of Johnson, but es” debate is both legitimate and, even if he’s between Caro’s deep, even granular accounts wrong, understandable in a biographer. What Lincoln and Race of these leaders’ actions and his dualistic, is less defensible is that Caro reached his con- Richard Striner cloth, 4 Illus. mechanistic view of their motives. Politics in clusions about the Johnson presidency before $19.95 all its forms is complex and fascinating, and no doing what he said he would do first—namely, one conveys this better than Caro. But where finish the research. There will be good rea- does that subtlety go when it comes to assign- sons to read anything Caro writes in the fu- ing motive to his protagonists? No one, much ture about Johnson, not least the pleasure of less larger-than-life men like Johnson and Mo- his prose and the biographical and historical ses, can be reduced to just two opposed quali- nuggets he will uncover that academic histori- ties. Caro ought to know that politicians are ans have overlooked. But gaining new insights Phone orders and inquiries: 1-800-621-2736 Online Oders: www.siupress.com every bit as complex as politics. into “political power and how it shapes our Use Promotion code CRB25 for a 25% Although he long refused, with gruff sanc- lives” won’t be one of those reasons. discount on individual direct orders timony, to discuss the subject with interview- ers because he “hasn’t finished my research on Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Politi- the presidency,” the truth is that Caro reached cal Science at Rhodes College and a senior fellow his conclusions about the Johnson presiden- at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of cy a long time ago. Thirty years past, inThe Public Affairs.

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