SUNDAY DECEMBER 5,1982
Reviewed by Richard Eder
Robert A. Caro has given Johnsonian treatment to
Lyndon Baines Johnson. His book is outsized and overwhelming. It takes Johnson
by the lapels, and levels a penetrating stare, a massive forefinger and an
unsettling forcefulness within six inches of his face. It is almost always
fascinating and some- times it is too much. Not mainly because of its volume,
which is enormous, as because of its intensity. Under the book's searchlit and occasionally colored regard,
Johnson swims in and out of focus, emerging now as monster and now -more rarely
-as wonder. Caro presents him so close we can feel him, so close we are all but
trampled by him, and sometimes so close that he blurs. This is an earthquake
examining an earthquake.
Some years ago, Caro wrote a
remarkable study of New York's planner and park commissioner, Robert Moses. It
was a portrait of a dreamer and a tyrant. In his study of Johnson, the author
seems to be heading toward similarly oxymoronic extremes; in this case, those
of achievement and corruption. I say “seems to” because “The Path to Power,” with 768 pages of text and 114 pages of
notes, index and acknowledgement, only takes us to 1944 or so. There are two
more volumes to come, which means that at this rate Caro's work will eventually
acquire Gibbon -like dimensions.
Gibbon-like thoroughness, and Gibbon-like passion.
There are hints in this first volume, in
fact, that the complete work aims at a “Decline and Fall” portrait of an
America that reached a summit of wealth and power and began to fail for lack of
vision. If this is so, Caro is using Johnson as a focus and symbol for a
historical turning point that goes beyond the individual. It would justify
devoting more than 2,000 pages to the subject.
How well he succeeds will be seen in its time.
For the moment it is clear that Caro is a phenomenon. He is a reporter of
diligence and imagination; and he is an artful writer, with a remarkable power
to evoke and characterize politicians, landscapes, relationships; with the
ability to convey all manner of experiences, from an expensive conversation on
a terrace to what it is like to milk cows in the dark.
Along with the most detailed portrait of Johnson
we have ever had or are likely to have -Caro assesses the precise force with
which the young Johnson was spanked, citing swimming-hole contemporaries who
reported seeing no welts- the author gives us a vivid and beautifully
articulated portrait of the various worlds in which Johnson moved as he grew up
and of the people he dealt with.
Caro describes the harsh Texas hill
country where Johnson's pioneer forebears settled. The pioneers had moved too
far, though. The hills, undisturbed for centuries, had what looked like a rich
grass-cover, but the topsoil was minimal and the first crop washed it out.
Farmers saw their lands turn from green to white as the clay undercrop came
through. It was punishing countryside; Johnson's father went broke trying to
plant cotton there and when the family moved into town-Johnson City-things were
so dead that the sole restaurant put out a "Closed for Lunch" sign.
Johnson's parents were both romantics. His
mother was literary and a teacher by temperament, but couldn't make the
impoverished household run. His father was a populist state legislator for a
while, idealistic and incorruptible. "He was the best man I ever
knew," Wright Patman, another idealist, said It never got him any money,
though-his principles kept him away from the available troughs-and finally he
went bankrupt and had to quit.
Young Johnson inherited his father's looks
and some of his political style, Cam writes, but only a twisted version of his
idealism. The older Johnson's failure was absorbed by his son as a
demonstration of the uses of cynicism and unscrupulousness, even where the ends
were laudable.
The author mostly stresses the cynic, the
manipulator, the hypocrite. A Southern Uriah Heep is the phrase used by an
unnamed informant (this is exceptional; documentation and sources are almost
unfailingly detailed) in commenting upon Johnson's affair with the wife of
Charles Marsh, a Texas publisher and one of his most generous benefactors. But
he contrasts this with Johnson's unparalleled energy and tenacity as a
schoolteacher, as a New Dealer putting unemployed young people to work, as a
Congressman fighting to bring electrification to the hills.
The contrast is heightened by the author's
style, as vividness sometimes shades into purple. He presents in highly
polarized terms both the builder's zeal and the politician's deviousness. It
provides excitement -and this massive book is almost continuously exciting-but
sometimes the very abundance of dramatic, even melodramatic, detail results in
a portrait paradoxically difficult to make out.
The detail is extraordinary. There is the
child insisting on riding in front-the prestige position-on his sister's
donkey. There is the student politician at Southwest Texas State Teacher's
College, assiduously winning the favor of the college president, using this
favor to influence the apportionment of student jobs-crucial in hard times-and
pyramiding this embryonic patronage, along with high-pressure tactics,
vote-stealing and some mild blackmail, into a political machine.
There was the same pyramiding when Johnson
went to Washington as secretary to Rep. Richard Kleberg. He took advantage of
the job, and his employer's easygoing indolence, to construct a network of
favors and obligations. He caught the eye of Sam Rayburn, then an influential
committee chairman, used the friendship to get an appointment to run the New
Deal's National Youth Administration in Texas, used his energy and success in making
the program work to build up both his reputation and a network
of loyal assistants, and used the reputation and the network to win an
underdog's race for Congress.
The pyramiding went on. The book's
centerpiece is Caro's account, solid, detailed and presented with a clear sense
of relationships and processes, of John- son's use of Texas oil and
construction money to build up political power, and his use of this power to
gain more money, and more help, from his rich friends. Johnson helped Brown and
Root become one of the world's major construction companies; and its money
helped him in turn. He tapped the resources of the fiercely reactionary oil
independents to support Democratic candidates for Congress across the
country-Johnson, who managed to sound liberal or conservative according to his
audience, was the agent of paradox as well as oil-and in turn helped create
Washington's permanently benign climate for oilmen.
Caro seems to have talked with just about anybody who ever had anything to do with Johnson. Most were willing to talk, and many talked with great frankness and sometimes resentment. More often, perhaps, it was a mixture of resentment and admiration.
He has splendid and moving portraits of such
figures as Rayburn, who loved Johnson unguardedly at first and later-after the
latter had committed a sizable piece of betrayal-more guardedly; of Lady Bird
Johnson; of Herman Root, the construction man, and of dozens of others: His
reconstruction of the rigors of rural life without electricity is a masterpiece
of imaginative detail. Among other things, it makes Johnson's achievement in
forcing Washington to provide electricity for the hill country seem like the
exploit of a hero. And the heroism makes the villainy seem even more abysmal.
Caro too is a pyramider. He has written a
book that is remarkable and that, at the same time, is not altogether free of
questions about focus, perspective and perhaps even fairness. The next two
volumes will answer the questions, no doubt. Meanwhile this one is a tour de
force at the very least; eventually, it may come to be the base of a monument.