Lyndon Johnson

Lyndon Johnson We know Lyndon B. Johnson to have been a hard-nosed smooth-operating arm-twisting Senator from Texas who became John Kennedy's Vice President and then a one-term President. What occurred during his administration brought the civil rights movement to its triumphant conclusion and sank us inexorably into Vietnam, he was responsible for the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and for initiating the war on poverty.

Johnson's bid for a second term collapsed under him amidst the massive social turmoil that scarred the nation during 1968 and from there he slid into private life to publish his memoirs, and to finish his life on his ranch in Texas where he died in 1973. Scholarly work centering on Johnson numbers in the hundreds of published books, articles and dissertations.

Historians looking at Johnson invariably focus upon his rise to power and the stranglehold he maintained over the Senate prior to his ascension to the White House and the collapse of his effectiveness as the leader of his party just two years after reelection. Two such works, Robert Caro's the Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and Robert Dallek's Lone Star Rising, present Johnson as a relatively power-mad political genius who manipulated others with great aplomb.

In looking at how each of these two authors take on the topic of Johnson, it is significant to note that both authors have created multi-volume works on LBJ, both have spent enormously in terms of time and resources to flesh out their stories and to find insight into the man, and both approach Johnson from a motivational point-of-view (what was Johnson's motivation for functioning within political office in the manner in which he did?).

There are marked differences in style, observations, selections of facts, perspectives, and intentions within the works - the result is that these two books create different visions of Johnson while treading the very same ground as the other. Johnson became powerful within the American political scene long before he became President.

Unlike many Vice Presidents who are specifically chosen on the basis of their relative weakness when compared to the President (thus the necessity of Dan Quayle and Spiro Agnew), Johnson was selected by Kennedy for his significant and almost unstoppable power held over the Senate. Both Caro and Dallek approach Johnson's rise in this manner - that he was a master of his domain and ruled the Senate through will, force, and sheer domination of personality.

It is acknowledged by both authors that Johnson used deception in a manner that was both distasteful and dishonest. Caro's take on Johnson is slightly more gentle than Dallek, who concludes that Johnson's power was held in its manner because "he could not bend the knee to anyone; he could not be under someone else's control," (Dallek, 24). "Lyndon Johnson...has convinced everyone that he really is a political genius.. [who] loves to exercise power [where] President Eisenhower does not" (547).

Caro uses an example of Lyndon's "testing" of women as a telling point about the man's need for control. While in college, "Lyndon's idea was to get a real nice-looking girl and see if you could control her," for the purposes of getting her elected to the student council and then being able to control her vote (Caro, 182). This kind of manipulation and control carried itself to the Senate. Both authors assert that LBJ's power derived from an uncommon audacity and will.

Johnson would not give up and both authors acknowledge this fact. Caro observes that LBJ's power over others was such that even as a young member of the Texas state legislature, Johnson's ambition "was unencumbered by even the slightest excess weight of ideology, of philosophy, of principles, of beliefs...Lyndon Johnson believed in nothing, nothing but his own ambition. Everything he did - everything - was for his ambition," (Caro, 275).

Dallek also comments extensively on Johnson's ambition, "He consumes people, almost without knowing it....people who worked for Johnson became extensions of himself and his ambition," (Dallek, 192). Johnson was so blatant about his personal ambitions that people "distrusted Johnson's professions of public service...[he was seen] as subordinating the interests of his party and country to his personal ambitions," (540). Both authors also pay significant attention to the details of Johnson's greed.

At the height of his power in the Senate in 1959, Johnson occupied "twenty palace-size rooms, most of them ornately decorated and thickly carpeted," rooms off of the Senate floor, conference rooms were claimed for his exclusive use, and he made renovations to his various spaces "at a cost of between $100,000 and $200,000 of taxpayers' money," leading to his domain being called the "Taj Mahal," (Dallek, 764).

Where Dallek's examples of self-indulgent excesses on the part of Johnson focused on the offices, Caro's examples of Johnson's greed and lust for power is highlighted in a discussion of his willingness to take money from just about anyone. "He gorged on work, women, and food, overbore friend and foe alike, and ravened for both money and power," (Caro, 12). Johnson was greed embodied.

Caro's most significant story about Johnson was about the Senate race of 1948 in which Johnson was accused of committing fraud, exposes Caro's take on Johnson's "utter ruthlessness...and seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal," (Caro, Introduction). His choice to use this particular story is significant because it is an event that Dallek does not spend much time with.

Caro's depiction of the events surrounding the 1948 Senate run involved the conversion of a 700 vote count into a 900 by the addition of a loop in the 7, thus cheating his way into office. Dallek's take on the fraud issue goes a bit further than Caro's - and quite melodramatically. Dallek spends a significant amount of space in the book to this issue. Dallek's description of the vote-count fraud committed by Johnson is superior to that of Caro.

He explains all of the various elements of the deception, down to the smallest points of warnings by elections officials that to rescind their first count would be seen as an admission of guilt and "expose him to an indictment for perjury or false swearing,." Caro's work makes it beyond question that Johnson's 1948 win was an illegally stolen election (though Caro's total overcount is 202 while Dallek's is 250).

He observes that the mutual aid society that Johnson belonged to would go to no limit (even if it meant breaking the law) to take care of its own. Of the entire incident, Caro also chooses to include details of truly corrupt double-dealings that Johnson involved himself in during this period. The differences between the two authors actually gets in the way of an accurate understanding of some of the major events of Johnson's reign.

Caro's work, though thoroughly researched, is exceptionally simplified - essentially portraying Johnson's moral compass as consisting of an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. The characterizations of Johnson in Caro's work can lead the reader to think of Johnson as being of limited capacity for thoughtful or intellectual accomplishment driven only to succeed through any means possible. We see a Johnson often reduced to a single word descriptor that serves only to simplify Johnson as being two dimensional at times.

In his defense, however, Caro's clear purpose is to show Johnson as being controlled by his passions and ambitions, which would naturally reduce a person to a relatively few necessary personality traits. The additional problem facing Caro's work is that he does not have a PhD, and is otherwise academically not qualified to write such an extensive set of texts - at least an academic critic would look at the work through a less forgiving eye.

Caro's work is based almost entirely upon massive numbers of interviews he conducted with people directly involved with Johnson at varying points in his career. Caro's book could easily be criticized for being more frank, crass at times, and irreverent in relation to traditional academic publishing as to be a less-than in quality and impact. The truth, however, is that with the majority of his research being comprised of first-hand accounts, a necessity of contextual accuracy and immediacy is warranted for the purposes of telling the story.

In this, Caro succeeds. Dallek, a full professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), actually credits Caro's work for the overwhelming detail gained from interviews, but cautioned that a false sense of authority could be gained because of the interviews. The truth is that as far as academia is concerned, interviewees can always lie or simply be wrong the way that hard facts cannot. Caro, essentially, wrote a three-volume set of interviews along the lines of a print reporter.

Dallek's book, however, relies upon paper-based research. His book's structure is such that at all times one is aware of that the information is not only trustworthy, but it is accurate. Dallek's resources list at the back of the book include significant numbers of archived resources - Dallek, then, is the true historian from the academic point-of-view. Dallek used traditional methods of research and structure making his book a true "history" from a collegiate-academic point-of-view. But this does not invalidate Caro's work.

The problem, then, in looking at both of these books to be authorities is to figure out if it really matters if Caro's lack of credentials and traditional (meaning library) method of information gathering actually denote a lesser effect on the overall impact of the work. The problem, then, that Caro faces is the determination if his work actually is quote worthy of other historians quoting / referencing him. For Dallek, his unwavering adherence to strict academic research leaves the punch out of the story of Johnson.

It is one thing to have a series of supported and peer-reviewed facts lined up chapter by chapter, and it is yet another to make those facts sing in an engaging story format. Caro's book is by far the more interesting to read, but Dallek's is the more reliable in terms of historical accuracy. What, then, Caro has created is more akin to a collected and combined oral history of Lyndon Johnson and Dallek's a detailed record of his career.

The other problem with Dallek's approach, and even his in-text criticisms of Caro, is that in order to claim moral superiority of research, one must be absolutely sure of the primacy of the work and the quality of the resources found. While Dallek is thorough, he also misses the essential humanity of Johnson that Caro so effectively portrays. The truth about Caro's work, though, is that even without all the vetting that Dallek's went through prior to publishing, it is absolutely and at times overwhelmingly thorough.

Caro is clearly hostile toward Johnson and uses his encyclopedic knowledge of Johnson to portray him in a very negative light (showing his vanity and lack of respect for authorities other than his own by wearing a cowboy hat and loud flowered tie to the hearing relating to the fraud accusation. But at the core, both authors succeed in showing particular elements of truth about Johnson - that he was at once exceptionally compassionate and disturbingly vulgar.

In terms of story telling, the two authors succeed in creating compelling visions of Johnson, but in different ways. For example, Caro's attention to detail includes character descriptions such as, "In obtaining...help, Johnson employed his bluntest weapon.

This was [Tommy] Corcoran, the broad-shouldered, bouncy, brash Irishman who in 1937 stood...closer to the throne than nay of the young New Dealers, and who was already a Washington legend for his enthusiasm in using that closeness to bludgeon officials in to compliance with his wishes," (Caro, 476) is a bit over the top - Caro leans often to the semi- or full-blown melodramatic.

Dallek achieves much of the same story-telling sensibility of the use of character descriptions, but he does so more consistently and without the intention of creating a false sense of drama. Dallek references Corcoran more than eighty times in the course of this book but not once describes his physical appearance or personality. What created dramatic context for Caro was clearly not of interest to Dallek. Rather, what Dallek appears to have been seeking was a depiction of these historical figures through their actions.

Caro seeks to understand Johnson through simplification - as has been previously discussed - with the result being that quite often character descriptions are filled with facts, but not with humanity. Dallek, however, often uses too little detail when providing a character description- but he does succeed in providing a richness in less than Caro discovers. For example, on the topic of corruption and the illegal funding of Johnson's campaigns through Brown and Root and Alvin Wirtz are viewed in quite different ways by both authors.

Caro's take on Wirtz is that Johnson was seen, in 1937, as a method of rescuing Brown and Root (a construction firm) from financial ruin by being able to potentially secure the acceptance of a plan to build a dam on the Colorado river. In Caro's account, Wirtz told Johnson to run as a firm and unwavering supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was "nothing but pragmatism," while Wirtz actually "shared the views of the reactionary Roosevelt-hating businessmen of whom he was both legal representative and confidant," (411).

Dallek's take on Wirtz and Brown & Root is to recognize the significant and likely illegal role that the two had upon Johnson's career. But Dallek describes Wirtz very differently than Caro. In Dallek's description, Wirtz "loved Roosevelt and the New Deal, and when he acted on his own [meaning separately from Brown & Root] he was a champion of public power and Federal welfare programs," (146). Dallek and Caro both describe Johnson and Wirtz as being self-serving opportunists, but they also represented the new South.

Both authors acknowledge that Wirtz and Johnson were shrewd men of vision whose visions included personal advancement in equal parts with social and economic change - all for the greater good. When it comes to understanding the authors different takes on the Colorado River dam project, in Dallek's account, "Johnson supported conservation and public power through building the dam...in this he joined a group of self-serving altruists who used the dams simultaneously to acquire wealth and power and improve the lives of millions of Texans," (174).

Wirtz' justification for pushing Johnson to pressure Roosevelt to spend money on a series of dams along the Colorado river was, on paper, to create flood protection zones bur, in reality, they were also methods of lining the pockets of his partners - of whom he represented all of the companies with dam-building contracts as part of the deals that he and Johnson brokered.

Dallek goes on to show that Johnson's interest in the dam projects reached beyond the simple economic interests of Brown & Root by using the federal government as a tool to secure the development of state and local projects. As a result, Roosevelt was able to access Johnson's interests and political motivations and thus made it possible for nearly all development projects in Texas to be handed off to Johnson or his 'friends'.

In fact, Dallek goes on to say that Roosevelt directly instructed Corcoran to help Johnson in any way he could- which led to Brown & Root getting a contract to build the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi. In Caro's account of the same events, the revelation that Johnson was manipulating the President for the financial benefit of Brown & Root is representative of the absolute worst kind of revelation.

Instead of seeing political opportunism and the standard political give and take that goes with the territory, Caro saw it as further evidence that Johnson was capable of great hypocrisy in order to get things that should have been offered up to a variety of interests rather than just those attached to Johnson.

"Johnson's influence over the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contract had in itself given him a major role in construction in Texas, for so huge was that $100 million piece of work in that state...that Brown & Root put to work on it subcontractors from all over the state," (630). "Lyndon's friends" were to be given Federal contracts in Texas and, "once he could get public money for his friends, he was made." Johnson's importance rose from simple politician to the level of gangster controlling construction within Texas.

"Because he possessed that [power], men who wanted those [lucrative government] contracts...had to come to him." (631). And these men were some of the most powerful in Texas. Caro, then, puts a rather darker spin on the same set of events. Dallek's tone in the books focuses our attention upon the idea that Johnson was more than just a money-/power-hungry goon.

Roosevelt perceived Johnson to be an instrument he could use in the South to further his overall agenda - which matched up with Johnson's ideals - to rid the nation of abject poverty. "Lyndon justifiably felt that he had been part of the creation of the new deal," (Dallek, 108). In this, Dallek looks at many of the works of Johnson with a favorable eye.

Yes, he may be have been power and money hungry, but he was also effective at furthering the programs that would eventually result in a massive reduction in the number of completely disenfranchised people due to their economic condition. Caro is definitely anti-Johnson and Dallek, while not necessarily pro-Johnson, chooses not to take the absolutist ground that good deeds tainted with bad are not as good.

Interestingly, Caro leaves out much of the fact that even though Johnson stole the 1948 election, he did so at the cost of preventing a racist, reactionary Dixiecrat in the form of Coke Stevenson. Caro acknowledges Johnson's contribution in terms of legislation and the improvement of the overall economies of the South, but he does so with the caveat and constant reminder that Johnson was corrupted by his greed and thus all his deeds were tainted with that brush. Both authors discuss Johnson's interpersonal techniques.

Dallek derbies an exchange between Johnson and William Lewis relatively early in Johnson's career in which he tried to make Lewis into an "LBJ boy," and arranged for an appointment to the Justice Department. Lewis (who had been part of the Naval Affairs Committee) refused and "Lyndon never forgave him. For the next twenty-five years, whenever they saw each other in the Congress and spoke, the conversation always ended in one way.

It was Lyndon Johnson leaning over, looking at me and almost rubbing his nose against my nose...and thumping me on the chest and saying, 'Remember, Bill, you had your chance', He never got over the fact that I said no," according to Bill Lewis (Dallek, 357). While not necessarily a detail that we need, and this is not repeated or even mentioned (indeed William Lewis) is not covered at all in Caro's book. This kind of omission is very typical of Caro's book.

Dallek's pursuit of truthful and accurate history does not allow for the flinching away from the unsavory parts of Johnson's work - there is certainly no love lost and no outward favoritism. Where Dallek and Caro may diverge in details and intent, they both look at one major event in Johnson's career with a very similar lens - that of the ascension of Johnson into the Presidency. Within hours of Kennedy's death, Caro observes that the speed at which Johnson jumped to be sworn in as President.

Once in office, Caro suggests that the speed with which Johnson moved to have himself sworn in as President is indicative of the systemic greed displayed by Johnson. Caro's take on the move from Vice President.