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Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: on Robert Caro

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Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: on Robert Caro 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.
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