This is a very good biography, with an amazing amount of research and detail integrated into the story of Lyndon Johnson up to his second run for the Senate in 1948. I particularly appreciated the description of the difficult, draining life for farmers in the Texas Hill Country. Of particular strength, for me, was the lengthy description of the hardships women (including Johnson's intellectual mother) faced in raising families and keeping the home without any running water or electricity. Beyond the lack of electric light, gas stoves, washing machines and dryers--conveniences that we all take so for granted now--even ironing clothes was arduous, not to mention lugging the gallons of water from the well to the house in order to take a weekly shower or wash clothing and dishes. Everyone living in America today should read those chapters because it is a great reminder that as overwhelmed as we can be by housework today, rural families in the years before Franklin Roosevelt had it much, much worse.
What impressed me most about this biography was Caro's ability to organize so much information, so much research and details about so many people into clear sentences, paragraphs and chapters. It is almost overwhelming to read it all and impossible to imagine it wasn't overwhelming to contemplate organizing it all into clear, readable prose. But Caro did, and there are even many times when his sentences go beyond "competent and informative" to sparkling and even brilliant prose.
He makes a compelling case for a Lyndon Johnson who is far from the fatherly figure he tried to achieve in his Oval Office addresses as the president who started--and stubbornly presided over--the Vietnam War. The child of a charismatic, idealistic father who descended from social status as a Texas legislator to a dirt-poor,failed cotton farmer, Caro's Johnson is convincing as an insecure boy who used every bit of intelligence, magnetism and personality in the service of his one goal: "to be somebody", in particular, to achieve the highest recognition from the public as President of the United States.
On this path to the White House, Caro introduces us to the Lyndon Johnson who had tremendous talent for making people like him (I would never have guessed, for example what a natural teacher he was--and a motivator among teachers as well, even when he was only in his teens. Caro left no doubt for me that he could have excelled in the classroom and easily reached the top administrative positions in education, if he had wished to have that career.)
But instead his single-minded ambition required political power--his own and others'--and it also required lots and lots of other people's money. Caro shows the hard work Johnson brought to any task he took on--campaigning for Texas congressmen and showing "political genius" in the process while only in his teens, becoming one of the most effective legislative assistants in congress, developing all of his political skills as a congressman and finally reaching the pinnacle of his career as a wheeling and dealing senator, doling out punishments and rewards--the latter, whether in committee appointments or cold, hard cash, since eventually he had access to millions thanks to his favors done for oil and construction interests from Halliburton (Brown & Root) to the oil men who knew that, Democrat or not, Johnson was their man in Congress. They paid him back generously for his favors.
This volume does not go as far as his successful run for the senate. Those 7 years are covered in "The Means of Assent" followed by "Master of the Senate", and "The Passage to Power", about his years as vice president. Caro's fifth volume (and it is hard to imagine there won't be a sixth needed to cover this period, 1963-1973) is still being written. The arc from Johnson's life in the Texas hills as a poor boy to the reviled multi-millionaire president who presided over the Vietnam War that killed over 58,000 Americans and over 2 million Vietnamese is an fascinating, if often dispiriting, story of megalomania and greed. To his credit, Caro does not skimp on the positive attributes Johnson had, but they fail to balance out the tragedy for the nation in the way that he used them.
I admire this book and certainly learned a lot from it, particularly about the workings of Washington poiticians from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. But when the admiration began to fade amid the wealth of minute political detail, I felt a little disappointed, almost cheated. Caro is so fixated on the political life of Lyndon Johnson--so much on the personalities in Washington at the time--that the "big picture" of life in the United States during the years of the 1920s through the 40's is often missing. He touched on Coolidge and Hoover's attitude toward the poor, but I would have liked to know more about the economic forces behind the Stock Market Crash in 1929 and more about the effects of the Depression. He mentions the opposition to labor unions in Congress--and the support for them by other politicians--but the labor movement itself gets little attention. Similarly, this is the period when World War began in Europe and also, two years later, when it began for the United States. Again, I wished for more of a "big picture" more global events, more social history, more economic forces. There is too much for me at any rate) of the battle between Roosevelt and John Garner (his VP). It goes on and on and on and that's true of so many things here, including Johnson's relationship with oil man and publisher Charles Marsh (and his affair with Marsh's mistress), his relationship with the Brown brothers (very important, but you know these are not the only wealthy patrons he has--where are the oil men who Johnson told Bobby Baker he was "working for" when he reached the Senate?)
The machinations of Johnson in purchasing a struggling radio station then and using his position to get special favor from the FCC is important because it shows a pattern of turning political power to personal financial advantage. But Caro sometimes belabors the point to an exhausting degree. If I want to know in detailed chapters about something from the 1940s, I would rather it is about the economics of the New Deal and how it was changing America, or how the U.S. was changing in response to the rise of fascism in Europe, instead of about the bitter feud between FDR and Garner, and how it involved Texan Sam Rayburn . I think these nearly 1000 pages could have included more of the "big picture", and instead painted much political minutiae with broader strokes in many cases (and also kept the focus more on Johnson--often Caro goes for pages with no mention at all of Johnson) AND could have cut many of the unremarkable details along the way to do it, and still been 200 pages shorter. Not to say it isn't a valuable biography of Johnson, but I wanted to make it clear why such a monumental work isn't getting the highest rating possible, despite being so well researched and well written.
Also, for those who want to learn more about what Lyndon Johnson was like from two men who worked for him, I recommend press secretary George Reedy's highly readable, "\\\
Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir
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Top reviews from other countries
Mat
EDITED - Superb book - but avoid the Pimlico paperback.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 11, 2019The Furrowed Brow
As good as everyone says but ......
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 15, 2019William Jordan
a great biography of Lyndon Johnson's first 31 years
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 16, 2013M. T. MCGHEE
Absolutely compelling!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 2, 2013JOHN MONTGOMERY
A brilliant insight into American politics
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 24, 2013
