BOOK REVIEW: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol 3)

by Robert A. Caro

Jonathan Cape, 30

There is a wonderful science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card entitled Speaker for the Dead. Its theme is that, in some future culture, when anyone dies, instead of the priest muttering inanities at our funeral, we designate an eponymous Speaker to research our lives in intimate detail and report on who we were and what we achieved. It is a social obligation that cannot be refused. Nor must the Speaker embellish or hide the facts.

Robert A. Caro is the Speaker for the Dead for Lyndon Baines Johnson. It has taken him fully 12 years to produce this third volume of his masterpiece - the life and times of America’s 36th President. Caro’s 1,040 pages of text were worth waiting for.

The danger in such a vast undertaking is that the narrative is lost in a thicket of irrelevant facts. But Caro deploys his monumental grasp of every detail of Johnson’s life and times like a seasoned criminal trial lawyer. We are led relentlessly towards the verdict that Caro wants us to make. Despite the scholarly sourcing of every piece of evidence, this is not an academic work in tone. Caro’s style is epic, almost operatic.

The first two volumes, published in 1982 and 1990 respectively, tell of Johnson’s rise from poverty in rural Texas, and his early career as a congressman in the House of Representatives. The third volume covers Johnson’s three terms in the US Senate, between 1949 and 1960.

With the risk-taking that betokens literary genius, Caro sidesteps beginning the book with Johnson (who does not arrive till page 111). Instead he gives us a vivid history of the Senate and its noble if lacklustre ways - the stage that the novice Senator from Texas must learn to dominate on his road to the presidency. Here in the Senate lobby, power is currency and the racist Southern cabal have cornered the market. They use their grip on the Senate’s procedures to block any legislation not to their liking.

Johnson knowingly makes himself the surrogate son of the Southern caucus’s most influential member, Richard Russell of Georgia. Russell’s patronage enables Johnson to become the Democrats’ leader in the Senate while still in his first term. He then turns what had been a minor job - traditionally power lay in having a committee chairmanship - into taking total command of the Senate’s business.

The essence of this volume is how LBJ engineers the passage of the first civil rights act in 82 years, in 1957. It’s a tale of skulduggery, underhand dealing and old-fashioned bribery. The Southern senators block any civil rights legislation by filibustering - talking incessantly and thus killing all other business. They can always count on enough other senators - even those who favour civil rights for blacks - not being willing to remove the right to filibuster lest it undermine their own senatorial freedom.

The wily Johnson does a deal. The Southern senators will vote for a federal dam in the north west, while the left-wing senators from that region will vote to block any civil rights legislation which is too much for the South. Result, for the first time in generations, the Southern senators do not filibuster and the civil rights bill is debated and voted on. But it is watered down using Northern liberal support. Johnson gets what he wanted - the loss of the Senate’s virginity on civil rights. Now it is only a matter of time before more legislation is passed (which it is during the Johnson White House).

Caro explores the dark Faustian bargain Johnson made with power. He will do anything - steal, cheat, bribe, flatter - to gain influence. But in a curious way, he is so corrupt he is beyond corruption. For Johnson, no matter how racist or misogynist, never forgot his downtrodden background or the strange compassion it gave him for the white trash, poor blacks and Mexicans of backwoods Texas. Few politicians know how to use power for good once they climb to the top of the greasy pole. Johnson did. That is his saving grace.

Earlier this year I was in Washington DC and dipped into the American History section of the Smithsonian Institute. There you will find an interactive display where visitors can vote for the President of their choice among all the past presidents of the White House. LBJ appeared nowhere in the voting, despite his passing of the first effective equal rights legislation since Lincoln. He lies forgotten in the popular memory, buried with the ghost of Vietnam. But Caro’s magnum opus, 28 years in the making, will raise the dead.

Let us hope volume four does not take another 12: Caro is 65 and recently had a bad accident body surfing.

LBJ’s way

CARO’S epic biography started off with The Path to Power (1982), which charted LBJ’s path from Texas poverty to public office. The second volume, Means of Ascent (1990), depicted his ruthless pursuit of a senate seat, ending in a corrupt election. With Caro’s customary immersion in detail, the new volume takes the story on from 1949 to 1960.