30 The Nation. December 10, 2012 LBJ PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY/YOICHI OKAMOTO LBJ PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY/YOICHI President Lyndon B. Johnson, October 22, 1968 Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls by THOMAS MEANEY obert Caro has been tracking his great The Years of Lyndon Johnson simply to be always the greediest, most ambi- white whale for thirty years now. As The Passage of Power. tious and ruthless man in the room. with any undertaking of this scale, an By Robert A. Caro. This is a serious criticism, but like the Knopf. 712 pp. $35. aura of legend attaches to the labor. journalistic halo over Caro, it confuses First there is the Ahab-like devotion to post-1960 scholarship. All of this fact- the trappings of his achievement for its Rwith which he has pursued the life of Lyndon hunting and what you might call Method core. Caro has always been more valuable Baines Johnson. In 1977, not long after pub- research has made Caro—who started his as a guide to how power works in postwar lishing his epic biography of Robert Moses, career as a reporter for Newsday—something America in particular than how it works New York City’s master builder, Caro de- of a hero for American journalists: he is the in some general abstract sense. Biography camped to Texas Hill Country for three years guildsman who made good and raised their would not initially seem to be the form best to take in the air of LBJ’s childhood. He spent craft to a level that academics can only envy. suited to his purpose. The locus of power in a night outdoors in a sleeping bag to better But he is far from universally admired by his- this country is never fixed; it doesn’t reside fathom the desolation of the territory. Along torians. Garry Wills and Sean Wilentz have in one person or single power elite, or in with his wife, Ina, he has combed through dismissed him as a myth maker who rhapso- one institution, agency, economic interest, every possible archive and ballot box; his ap- dizes the life of Johnson into a morality play. media outlet or popular movement, but petite for firsthand impressions from LBJ’s In their view, Caro is hopelessly committed to in the shifting imbalances among them. entourage is matched only by his allergy seeing the thirty-sixth president through the Caro’s fortune in choosing LBJ as an entry prism of good and evil: LBJ the civil rights for understanding the elements of Ameri- Thomas Meaney is a doctoral candidate in history crusader versus LBJ the scourge of Vietnam. can power is that Johnson moved through at Columbia University. He last wrote for these Caro’s anatomy of political power is too so many of them—and responded to and pages on Charles de Gaulle. crude, they argue; he thinks LBJ’s secret was manipulated so many more—throughout December 10, 2012 The Nation. 31 his long career. Indeed, the great drama of furnish atmosphere, as when he tells us into place with easy grace. Kennedy would reading The Years of Lyndon Johnson comes whether or not a room was air-conditioned, never wander into the bedroom, of course; in watching LBJ master the machinery of or breaks into an aside about the evolving he would be shot in Dallas. James Davis American politics like one of those security décor of the Oval Office. An especially rich would never get to pour champagne on ice contractors hired by companies to test the passage appears halfway through the new the way he’d been taught. strengths and weaknesses of their systems. volume. It’s November 1963, and Lady This spread of detail is there not only The Passage of Power, the fourth install- Bird Johnson is fretting over the arrival of to be savored; it also evokes anew the full ment of Caro’s LBJ saga, takes us from JFK and Jackie, who are scheduled to stay contingency of the day’s events and the Johnson’s last two years in the Senate to his at the Johnson ranch after a brief stopover rupture of JFK’s assassination. It reminds unsatisfactory days as vice president—the in Dallas. “Everything had to be perfect,” us too that part of Caro’s justification for one office whose riddle he was never able writes Caro. telling the life of LBJ in 3,000-plus pages is to crack—to the summit of his political that he is not merely telling the story of a When [President Kennedy] had been might in the year following President Ken- life, but also recovering a world. Readers of asked if there was anything he’d like nedy’s assassination. With unshakable faith the previous three volumes of The Years of to do at the ranch, he had said that in the value of repetition, Caro shows, again Lyndon Johnson—The Path to Power (1982), perhaps he’d like to ride. This ca- and again, how LBJ was not only an expert Means of Ascent (1990) and Master of the Sen- sual remark brought an influx of new counter of votes and “reader of men” but ate (2002)—may hear additional resonances horseflesh.… A Tennes- also a sensitive monitor of the national see walking horse, with pulse. In The Passage of Power, that pulse its easy gait, might be is determined by the civil rights struggle, Caro writes in three distinct a good horse for Jackie; and LBJ rallies his matchless skills to the Lady Bird’s Tennessee cause. But however sincere his convictions registers: the antiquarian, the walker was at that mo- were—and Caro convinces us that they were ment back in Tennes- sincere—it’s nevertheless clear that LBJ see, undergoing further monumental and the critical. seized on civil rights because it was po- training; a horse trailer litically sensible to do so. His brilliance in this passage. We know, for instance, was dispatched to get it back before as a politician lay not in his idealism but that LBJ repeatedly, and sadistically, told the Kennedys arrived. Supplies of his opportunism. His career also mani- Lady Bird to be more elegant, which must the President’s preferred beverages— fested a corollary dynamic: the more adept have increased her anxiety. When Robert Poland water, Ballantine’s Scotch— a democratic politician is, the more perfect Kennedy visited the ranch for a deer hunt were laid in; inquiries were made to a demagogue he or she will be. LBJ’s cal- four years earlier, LBJ gave him a shotgun determine the temperature (“tepid”) culated populism identified tidal shifts in with a nasty recoil so he could help him up at which he liked to drink the water. public opinion and then sought to assuage from the ground and say, “Son, you’ve got Jackie sometimes preferred Newport them with just the right degree of reform to learn to handle a gun like a man.” But cigarettes, sometimes Salems; ade- that would ensure his continued rise within now LBJ had to serve the older brother quate supplies of both were laid in. the power structure. As president, Johnson like a king, because he worried that Ken- The champagnes she preferred had could rise no further, and so Caro claims nedy wouldn’t need him for a second term. of course been purchased, but then it that his true nature can be discovered by Finally, there is the loaded detail about was learned that she sometimes liked chronicling his exercise of executive power. the president’s chronic health problems, to drink them over ice; Bess Abell was “Power always reveals,” he insists. But in which LBJ had tried to exploit by leaking assigned to show one of the house- fact something like the opposite happens: information to the press during his primary men, James Davis, “This is how you we witness how LBJ’s lifelong lust for power campaign against Kennedy, but which now pour champagne on the rocks for Mrs. prevented him from being much more than he must succor with the right sort of mat- Kennedy.” A trip to Austin produced an opportunistic pursuer of political gain. tress. The way Caro redeems these details new terry-cloth hand towels for Jackie. This is hardly a novel insight about and makes them variously meaningful is one Then it was learned that she pre- democratic politicians; nevertheless, by dra- of the reasons so many readers are drawn ferred smooth hand towels; another matizing the capacities and limitations of to him. You read him at times wishing that 120-mile round-trip was made. Liz the most talented politician of the postwar the entire topography of American history Carpenter recalls “many telephone era, Caro aims to make his readers shrewder could be completely Caro-ized, with each calls and drives into town…to bring citizens, ones who will better appreciate significant figure getting his or her portrait back the very nicest perfumes, scented the constraints within which the leaders we in the finest possible grain. soaps for Mrs. Kennedy’s bathroom.” elect must operate. As a student of power, And one thing wasn’t perfect. The Caro is a Machiavelli for democrats, who ut LBJ was not just any elevation on the bedboard and horsehair mattress for instead of addressing the prince, addresses map of postwar America. It is out of a the President’s bad back hadn’t ar- the people. deep conviction that he was the sort rived on schedule, and the empty bed of political genius seen in this country seemed to loom over all the prepara- aro writes in three distinct registers: only once or twice a century that Caro tions; Mrs. Abell kept thinking, “Will antiquarian, monumental and criti- Bstrives for the monumental. He signals it with he wander in to bare springs?” cal. The antiquarian is what he is best an incantatory mode, such as when he refers known for: the excavation of huge The passage is vintage Caro: the cascade of repeatedly to “Lyndon Johnson,” or through C amounts of historical arcana used to hard-won—almost ostentatious—facts rush the careful staging of unabashedly heroic 32 The Nation. December 10, 2012

scenes. In Master of the Senate, Caro describes Senate was in distancing himself from his “A powerful and how LBJ treated the Senate like a saloon in reputation as a tactician for the Southern compelling book.” his own private John Ford production: bloc and making himself palatable to the liberal North (he had been instrumental in —STEPHEN PIMPARE, author of Shortly before noon, the tall double halting anti-lynching legislation in the Sen- A People’s History of Poverty in America doors at the rear of the Chamber’s ate in 1951, so this was not easy). We watch center aisle would swing open—wide as Johnson strokes and comforts bleed- open, so hard had they been pushed— ing hearts like Humphrey and reactionary and Lyndon Johnson would be com- shellbacks like Richard Russell—not out ing through them. As they swung, he of any holy notion of “bipartisanship,” but would, without pausing, snatch the because he knows it’s his only way to the brown file folder Gerry Siegel was top. The vital center was not a position of holding out to him, and toss an order principle for Johnson, but a launching pad to George Reedy out of the side of his for the presidency. mouth. And then he would be com- LBJ had one of the most spectacular ing down the aisle’s four broad steps careers in the history of the Senate, yet with a long, fast stride. Seeing the Caro opens The Passage of Power with his journalists’ heads turn, [Republican protagonist making a series of uncharacter- minority leader William] Knowland, istic political blunders. He enters the 1960 realizing Johnson was approaching, race for the presidency too late; he fails to would stop talking. He would sit register how urban the American electorate KILLING THE POORMASTER down at his desk, waiting to hear what has become; and he fatally underestimates A saga of poverty, the Majority Leader had to say. corruption, and the appeal of Kennedy, whom he had pre- murder in the This passage can be faulted for its my- viously known only as “a young whipper- great depression thologizing flair, but it conveys Johnson’s snapper, malaria-ridden and yellow, sickly, BY HOLLY METZ sense of political theater. Caro has always sickly,” who “didn’t know how to address” been committed to isolating his subjects’ the Senate chair. But these miscalculations (ARDCOVERs animating essence, and in Johnson it’s his were followed by one strikingly deft wager: will to become president. (Caro’s conviction asked whether he wanted to join the Ken- about his subjects having some locatable nedy ticket, LBJ had his staff run the num- essence began at the beginning—not in his bers to see what the odds were, historically, biography of Moses, but in his 1957 under- of vice presidents taking over from dead graduate thesis on Hemingway: “Is there, presidents. Just over one out of five, came somewhere, a facet of Hemingway that has the answer. With LBJ’s special knowledge remained untouched in all the talk about of Kennedy’s health problems, he decided him?… Is there in the complete picture of to take those odds. Hemingway, besides the two familiar props After showing Johnson floundering in of gin-and-bananas on the one hand and a the vice presidency—an office that an ear- typewriter on the other, a force looming up lier occupant from Texas had said wasn’t over both of them, motivating the one and worth “a bucket of warm piss”—Caro makes shaping what comes out of the other? Is it clear how decisively he sprang into ac- there a continuing theme running through tion after Kennedy’s assassination. We are all of his work? There is.”) treated to another piece of political theater In Master of the Senate, LBJ’s ambition as Johnson choreographs his own inau- to occupy the Oval Office takes two forms: guration in Dallas aboard Air Force One, first, in his becoming an expert techni- not only arranging the famous photo with cian on legislative procedure, to the point a blood-spattered Jackie front and center, that Johnson knew exactly when to drive but also insisting that Judge Sarah Hughes a piece of legislation forward and when to of Texas swear him in. Locating Hughes stall, making him the gatekeeper through added considerable delay to the transi- which every bill had to pass; and second, in tion, but Johnson had a reason for making his commanding such precise intelligence everybody wait: two years earlier, he had about the proclivities and whereabouts of tried getting Hughes an appointment to every other senator that he rarely misfired. the federal bench but had been blocked by One of the more memorable moments in Robert Kennedy and the president’s aide, Master has Johnson rushing to the Sen- Kenneth O’Donnell. That they agreed to ate cloakroom to call air traffic control at appoint her after House Speaker Sam Ray- National Airport in order to get the plane burn intervened only highlighted the vice carrying a crucial vote—Hubert Hum- president’s impotence. Now he wanted to phrey—on the ground. But the greater send a pointed message to these men that accomplishment that LBJ managed in the he was not to be messed with again. December 10, 2012 The Nation. 33

n his first two years in office, LBJ led one such vigor only because it also happened to or you can continue to fight upstream, and of the most impressive cattle drives of be good for Lyndon Johnson. be overwhelmed or be miserable.” Yet it was legislation in American history. “Lyndon At dozens of junctures in The Years of less the giving of guidance than the getting Johnson is getting everything through Lyndon Johnson, LBJ switches his political out in front that defined LBJ. One could Congress except the abolition of the allegiance at the most opportune moment argue that Lincoln, too, was endowed with IRepublican Party—and he hasn’t tried that possible. He was a Roosevelt New Dealer a gift for timing when it came to something yet,” wrote James Reston in The New York when it was popular to be one in Texas and like the Emancipation Proclamation, which Times. It was largely a matter of timing, ac- not a minute longer. He was anti-McCarthy solved a host of strategic and political prob- cording to Caro. The Kennedy administra- by inclination, but only moved against Mc- lems for him in one stroke. But in the case tion had failed to grasp that by attempting Carthy well after it was politically safe to do of Johnson, one can’t escape the sense that, to push through a tax cut and civil rights so. As LBJ put it to an intractable Texas con- had the growing public support for the civil legislation at the same time, it had enabled gressman in 1957: “The problem with you is rights movement suffered a reversal—in the Southern bloc to hold up legislative that you don’t understand that the world is response to, say, an upswing of violence in traffic indefinitely. But Johnson knew too trying to turn to the left. You can either get the South—he would have made a hasty well how the Southerners operated—he out in front and try to give some guidance, retreat and put civil rights back on the shelf was one of them, after all—and he brought bills forth in an order that would make it impossible for the Dixiecrats to avoid civil SOCIAL SCIENCE THAT MATTERS rights by ducking for cover behind another bill. He slashed the government budget to placate the debt fanatic Harry Byrd, who then cleared the way for LBJ to cut taxes. By speeding through the morass of the budget, LBJ was able to concentrate everything on bringing a full vote on civil rights to the floor. “You know,” said Rich- ard Russell, chief member of the Southern NEW BOOKS FALL 2012 DOCUMENTING DESEGREGATION bloc and a former LBJ mentor, “we could Racial and Gender Segregation in Private- have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, THE AMERICAN NON-DILEMMA Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act but not Lyndon Johnson.” It is perhaps one Racial Inequality Without Racism keviN sTaiNBack aND DoNalD Tomaskovic-Devey NaNcy DiTomaso A comprehensive account of what has happened to of the more severe failings of the Kennedy An examination of the persistence of racial equal opportunity in America and what needs to be administration that it didn’t mobilize LBJ’s inequality and how it plays out economically and done to achieve a truly integrated workforce. legislative skills when it had them at hand, politically today. $45.00 paper September 2012 $42.50 paper December 2012 but the overriding imperative—especially FOR LOVE AND MONEY for Robert Kennedy—was that the vice THE BIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF Care Provision in the United States president and his talents be contained. SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITIES NaNcy folBre, eDiTor It’s hard not to share Johnson’s joy for a An interdisciplinary team of experts explores the BarBara Wolfe, William N. evaNs, practical and theoretical dilemmas of care provision few chapters in this book, as when he echoes aND Teresa e. seemaN and examines the looming problems for the care sector the call of the civil rights movement—“We Incorporates insights from the social and biological in the United States. sciences to quantify the biology of disadvantage $35.00 paper September 2012 shall overcome”—in a joint session of Con- and assess how poverty impacts health. gress, or personally desegregates a club popu- $42.50 paper December 2012 ENVY UP, SCORN DOWN lar with faculty at the University of Texas with How Status Divides Us a black secretary on his arm. When told by an THE CHANGING FACE OF WORLD CITIES susaN T. fiske adviser that he can’t move too quickly on civil Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe Examines the psychological underpinnings of and the United States rights, he erupts with a winning line: “Well, interpersonal and intergroup comparisons, exploring maurice crul aND JohN molleNkopf, eDiTors why we compare ourselves to those both above what the hell’s the Presidency for?” Caro A comprehensive set of surveys provides new and below us and the social consequences of such gives ample evidence to show that a genuine evidence about the international immigrant comparisons in day-to-day life. experience and offers lessons for devising more $22.50 paper October 2012 passion for equal rights swelled in LBJ. “We effective public policies. have talked long enough in this country about $49.95 paper September 2012 UNVEILING INEQUALITY equal rights,” he said to the joint session. “We A World-Historical Perspective have talked for one hundred years or more. It COPING WITH CRISIS roBerTo paTricio korzeNieWicz is time now to write the next chapter, and to Government Reactions to the Great Recession aND TimoThy paTrick moraN NaNcy Bermeo aND JoNas poNTussoN, eDiTors A comprehensive new framework for analyzing write it in the books of law.” But all the while, A rigorous analysis of policymakers’ responses to the economic inequality and social mobility on a an important point about democratic politics Great Recession throughout the developed world. global scale and from a historical perspective. comes into focus, which is that Johnson’s $42.50 paper September 2012 $24.95 paper October 2012 political gift was not in carrying the banner for the cause of civil rights in the corridors of power, but in knowing the right time to do so. At bookstores now, The civil rights cause was good for America, Russell Sage Foundation 112 East 64th Street or call 1-800-524-6401; but one gets the unmistakable impression New York, NY 10065 visit us on the web at www.russellsage.org reading Caro that it was prosecuted with 34 The Nation. December 10, 2012 indefinitely. It’s for this reason that the antiphonal-style power arrangement with claim to be suffering a deep nostalgia for movement itself was always much more of a black congregations, as Taylor Branch has forceful presidents like Johnson—it is hard prime mover than any president. so deftly described in his three-volume his- to imagine LBJ getting bogged down in the Caro seems only to half acknowledge tory of the movement (an ideal, even neces- debt-ceiling crisis the way Obama did—it this. Master of the Senate included some vivid sary complement to Caro’s work). is worth considering that, though they may chapters on the civil rights movement, but All of this should put to rest any sense, be less inspiring, pragmatists are less of a their perfunctory, montagelike feel left the still held by some, that American politicians gamble than opportunists. sense that it took place apart from the main are agenda-setters, and that in elections we This is because the kind of political action, which was always on Capitol Hill. the people choose among competing “nar- maneuvering, and requisite sense of the do- Yet without a movement to bring about a ratives.” Effective politicians like Johnson mestic political terrain, that spurred John- major shift in public consciousness, LBJ are ideologically empty vessels, professional son to press his full weight behind civil would have had nothing to respond to—and litmus-test takers and inveterate oppor- rights legislation also made quitting Viet- nothing on whose behalf to exercise his tunists. There is a critical difference here nam seem impossible to him. In both cases, legislative talents. As with the reforms that between opportunists and pragmatists that LBJ strove to accommodate the popular followed the Great Depression, the Civil Caro helps us see. The pragmatist (Truman, mood and dominant institutional logic he Rights Act of 1964 was not triggered by sta- George H.W. Bush, Obama) harbors a set found in place. He could push a civil rights tistical indices on inequality, or a president’s of convictions, however vaguely felt, that bill through Congress because it was an visionary leadership, but by rampant strikes, he cautiously guards and tries to further. institution whose mechanics he understood looting, rent boycotts and riots of varying The opportunist (LBJ, Nixon, Clinton) better than anyone in Washington; but degrees of violence. Even the most power- is willing to trade those values in and out he was not as practiced at outfoxing the ful leaders within the civil rights movement according to day-to-day shifts in the demo- implac able agenda of the national security recognized that they were partaking in an cratic weather. For all those Democrats who bureaucracy. And this despite some effort: LBJ rebuffed twelve separate attempts by his advisers to authorize the bombing of North Vietnam, and relented only when Robert McNamara withheld critical infor- Hidden Bird mation about the Tonkin Gulf incident.

Song birds enter the morning ietnam will dominate the next installment of The Years of Lyndon the pre-dawn before the fires, Johnson. Still, LBJ’s intuitions when it you know, when the night floats away comes to foreign policy are tellingly like vapor on a lake, foreshadowed in The Passage of Power. VFor this subject, Caro shifts into his critical or like kisses in the woods. register, which he uses when he wants to cut Songs that even creation Johnson down to size. When it came to his might not remember. dealings with the world beyond congres- sional districts and the Senate chambers, Continuous, threaded, as if the full extent of Johnson’s provincialism and ham-fistedness was apparent early on. a cherry pit were stuck The most revealing instance is the Cuban in the throat missile crisis of 1962. When the situation to produce the trumpet of the branches. was explained to him, he recommended “an unannounced strike”—bombing Cuba So varies, yet never, changing from the air without warning—which very through all the days, since well could have set off a catastrophic So- reptiles fell to earth. viet response. A naval blockade, Johnson said, would be “locking the barn after the horse was gone,” and any gradual pressure I give up the reason for the sound on the Soviets would be “telegraphing our I give up the creature of sound punch.” In this case, it was Bobby Kennedy and the creator of the creatures whose more nuanced and cautious plan and of us and of dawn and prevailed—and who, in one of the rare mo- ments in this biography, comes off as the air and of vacuum cool-headed figure. and human inhumanity. It would be one thing if Johnson’s judg- I give up the song. ment on Cuba was an isolated incident— Caro is careful to remind us how removed I give up the place LBJ was from the daily deliberations and intelligence reports—but an even more JOSEPH CERAVOLO damning instance of LBJ’s foreign policy Which kind of (e)reader are you?

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Not a subscriber? Go to: www.thenation.com/subscribe 36 The Nation. December 10, 2012 instinct has already been featured in Master telephone calls. The point of Caro’s epic bit opaque—but to make us recognize that of the Senate. In that volume, Caro docu- is not to make us see through Lyndon the greatest promulgators of our ideals are mented how Johnson became a national Johnson—it’s a sign of its success that, like at the same time uniquely suited to be their figure and first got his face on the cover any person one knows well, he remains a most corrosive agents. of Newsweek: by steering a Defense Pre- paredness Subcommittee that claimed the military wasn’t stockpiling enough weapons and materiel at its bases across the country, I’m Nobody, Who Are You? with the unmistakable suggestion that the Truman administration was soft on commu - by ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ nism. The reports were heavily doctored, but Caro’s point—though never explicitly ut can’t a rapper insist, like NW formulated—is that foreign policy was al- other artists, on a fictional re- By Zadie Smith. ways subordinate to political infighting for ality, in which he is somehow Penguin Press. 401 pp. $26.95. LBJ, as it often is for able politicians. still on the corner, despite oc- However much Caro may appear to cupying the penthouse suite?… collection Changing My Mind (2009). The lurch between Manichean extremes in his “BCan’t he still rep his block?” So Zadie Smith title is a disclaimer for whatever contra- assessment of LBJ’s exercise of presidential wondered of Jay-Z on an afternoon not long dictions and inconsistencies might arise power, he ultimately suggests that the same ago. The two were lunching for a profile between the autobiographical reflections, impulses that led Johnson to be taken as the by Smith published in The New York Times reportage, film criticism and book reviews savior of civil rights are the ones that left Magazine in September, a few weeks before gathered in its pages, but it’s a credo as well, him with the badge of shame for Vietnam. the opening of the Barclays Center, the new both literary and personal. Smith may be But while this is true, it is not the entire entertainment and sports mecca in down- contemporary English fiction’s most ardent explanation. Yes, Johnson did not grasp town Brooklyn for which Jay has served as champion of the right to change one’s mind the dynamics of power in the international the homegrown poster boy. and, above all, one’s self, an idea that’s been sphere—but who in the government did? The premise of the novelist’s questions at the center of her work since the pub- After all, it was the least powerful faction was the criticism that the rapper-mogul lication of her first novel, White Teeth, in in the Vietnam War—the antagonists of might be “too distant now from what once 2000, when she was 24. There is a moment Ngô Dinh Diêm’s repressive regime in the made him real”—the poverty, the drugs, in that book when the young Londoner South—that forced the North to intervene the hustle, the street, all the themes he’s Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal on its behalf, an escalation as much against kept riffing on well past his first million and is discovered by his Bangladeshi parents to the will of Ho Chi Minh as LBJ. 100 million. It’s a charge familiar to Jay-Z’s be going by the name Mark Smith at school. Three thousand pages into The Years of fans, and Smith’s response in the article to Uproar ensues, but still the question hov- Lyndon Johnson, our hero has been presi- her own line of questioning will be equally ers: Well, why not? Magid, longing to be dent for less than a year. Among the most familiar to hers: “Who cares if they’re part of a different, more middle-class, more impressive accomplishments of that period keeping it real?” she retorted on behalf of British family, unintentionally grasps what is his historic pace in the first hundred Jay-Z and his recent collaborator, Kanye his parents, clutching their old-world ways, days—one that seems particularly hard to West. The question neatly summarizes the don’t: that he can be—and on some level imagine from our present vantage point. climax of the second section of “Speaking already is—a Smith who covets holidays in Johnson was both the embodiment and in Tongues,” her wonderful 2008 essay on France as well as an Iqbal who never gets the upholder of a powerful liberal con- Barack Obama, in which she demolished the farther than “day-trips to Blackpool to visit sensus that has all but vanished from this accusation that any success blacks achieve in aunties.” He’s only 9, and could already plot country. The cracks began to appear in wider Anglo society amounts to a betrayal a small map from the blocks he has to rep. his administration and proliferated soon of their roots. White Teeth is a comic novel brimming after it, when the epigones of Goldwater with a rare fondness for the foibles of the To me, the instruction “keep it real” became a viable force, the critique of the human condition, and where a different is a sort of prison cell, two feet by Great Society became a new orthodoxy, the writer might have insisted on casting Magid’s five. The fact is, it’s too narrow. I just McGovern idealists entered an electoral split state as a grim symbol of alienation— can’t live comfortably in there. “Keep abattoir, and the credibility gap became the generational, racial, postcolonial, that Tri- it real” replaced the blessed and solid norm. Nostalgia for this period of liberal ple Crown of modern angst—Smith ob- genetic fact of Blackness with a flimsy triumph still runs deep in the Democratic serves it with a wink. She sees humor in imperative. It made Blackness a qual- Party, as its leaders, including the current all this identity confusion, and hope, too. ity each individual black person was one, try to recover it. It may have been the “You will hardly know who I am or what I constantly in danger of losing. particular circumstances of the postwar era mean,” Walt Whitman warns readers liable that made such a liberal alignment possible “How absurd that all seems now,” Smith to be baffled by his giddy mutations in Song in the first place, but Caro’s antiquarian concluded, and the fact, put so simply, of Myself, then alchemizes the threat of his history helps us revisit them in detail: both seemed indisputable. strangeness into a communal blessing: “But how much depended on the ambition of “Speaking in Tongues” appears in the I shall be good health to you nevertheless.” elected leaders being fed high ideals at the Along with the rest of White Teeth’s motley right time, and how much that idealism Alexandra Schwartz is on the editorial staff of crew, Magid Iqbal hails from Willesden, was held together by chicken wire and The New York Review of Books. the multicultural London neighborhood