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For people who don't have the patience to read the books, here are two articles discussing LBJ and his legacy/persuasive tactics.

https://hbr.org/2006/04/lessons-in-power-lyndon-johnson-revealed

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/presidents/lyndon-b-johnson-the-uncivil-rights-reformer-1451816.html

If you can only read one of the books, I think Master of the Senate is the best of the set so far, although they are all excellent.

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This was definitely the most entertaining review so far, the book sounds incredibly interesting - there's always an apppeal to larger than life figures. (I also want to watch the TV series about LBJ, PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE!)

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Excellent review. Very entertaining and informing

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"On the back cover of his first LBJ book, Caro looks like this:

On his most recent book, Caro looks like this:"

I think there should be images here? Or is this just a bug on my side?

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I liked this one a lot! For one, it's the first review I wish was longer. Also LBJ is just a super fascinating person, I've been meaning to read Caro for a long time, and this is a good prod towards picking up The Power Broker or this LBJ series. I'm ranking it highly but not quite at the top, I like what was there but I think there could be more there there.

Anywho, new rankings:

1st Progress and Poverty

2nd On the Natural Faculties

3rd The Years Of Lyndon Johnson

4th The Wizard and the Prophet

5th Double Fold

6th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

7th Through The Eye Of A Needle

8th Order Without Law

9th Why Buddhism is True

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A delightful review!

There is an old Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China.” With being soft on communism the blood libel for democrats at the time, what honest options did LBJ really have in Vietnam?

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How did this manage to be a whole article on the insanity of LBJ without even getting to the craziest single story?

When LBJ was President, a reporter once asked him why the US was in Vietnam. His response - and yes, this actually happened - was to unzip his pants, pull out his dick, wave it at the reporter, and say "This is why!".

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When I read the first half of this review, I was thinking "what is this fascinating biography of Johnson that *isn't* the Caro one?" But then I learned that this *is* the Caro one, and it's just being reviewed in a way that is very different from everything else I've read about the book (and the Robert Moses one, which is also a classic).

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"it's another thing to elect someone who named his kids Lynda Bird Johnson and Lucy Baines Johnson in order to make the public think about the initials LBJ."

He also had a dog called Little Beagle Johnson.

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As wikipedia describes it, Black struck down Stevenson's injunction on the grounds that the federal government can't interfere with the state election. So it sounds like the mistake Stevenson made was filing a federal injunction rather than a state injunction? Or were the state judges already in LBJ's pocket?

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My reviews of vol. 3 in this series

https://dbratman.net/lbj3.html

and v. 4.

https://kalimac.blogspot.com/2013/05/books-of-too-much-detail.html

Admiring of some aspects of Caro's work, critical of others.

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(Quick note: these books are available on Audible with a great narrator, which is a boon because they're HELLA long. Official recommend.)

These books are riveting, like, way more riveting than I expected them to be. I spent several weeks while I was making my way through them complaining to everyone about what an asshole LBJ was. fwiw my husband (who only read the Robert Moses biography but also heard me talk about The Years of Lyndon Johnson a lot) thinks Caro comes into his biographies with biases and is really good at telling the story he wants to tell. I do feel somewhat suspicious that I came out of this with an extremely strong conviction that LBJ ruined America and was also a garbage human being on an interpersonal level.

But I haven't read Caro's book Working, maybe that would clear things up in terms of figuring out how much bias Caro has room to introduce. Also, I've been fed hero and villain narratives about US presidents my whole life (e.g. Bush villain, Obama hero; also FDR hero, Nixon villain, etc), and I wonder if perhaps it's just really hard to holistically assess an individual who wields such outsized power over the span of several years, and is subject to such a dizzying array of conflicting incentives.

To take an example from LBJ's presidency, escalating the Vietnam War was terrible for America (and for tons of other people, obviously), but it wasn't trivially easy to know this in advance. And even if it's the case that LBJ went into it knowing it was a bad idea, Caro makes it sound like he essentially had no choice in the matter. For another thing, it may very well be the case that LBJ was personally racist, but he did do a ton to advance civil rights. Presidents are ultimately judged based on their legacy, and that includes things they did (or didn't do) for the wrong reasons, things that everyone expected to go well that went poorly (or vice versa), and world events that happened during their presidency that were largely or entirely out of their control (like World War II? hard to think of a perfect example). It's only in retrospect that we can say that LBJ was the president who destroyed the American public's trust in the presidency as an institution, but it's not like he was the first president to be an asshole and make bad decisions.

I'm having trouble making a clean point here, because I'm confused about the subject. Perhaps what I mean to say is that I should separate the Lyndon Johnson who was privately a total asshole (making his staff cry, making secretaries stand in the bathroom to take dictation from him while he pooped, openly cheating on his wife, etc) from the Lyndon Johnson whose presidency left a lasting legacy of both good (civil rights) and bad (Vietnam). Perhaps that's the right way to look at presidents. And yet Caro's biographies intertwine the two really inextricably, and so I come a way with a gut sense of hating LBJ.

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I started off "I don't care about LBJ, why should I read this review?"

And darn it, you convinced me! I had to look up Pappy O'Daniel because I went "what kind of half-Irish name is that?"

This is a man who started a hillbilly band to sing for his employer's radio show and naturally, since his employer was a flour mill, called them The Light Crust Doughboys (they even wangled a spot playing in a Gene Autry movie). Then he went off and started his own flour business, and founded another hillbilly/Western swing band to play for his radio show which "extolled the values of Hillbilly brand flour, the Ten Commandments and the Bible" and called them Pat O'Daniel and the Hillbilly Boys, and they sang the theme song which gave him his "Pappy" nickname https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxQmj788X2o

And that launched him into politics, running as a Democrat in Texas, which seems to have been about as corrupt when it came to vote-counting as the review alleges.

And that's just *one* guy, I'm afraid to look up the others! 😀

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Nitpick to appease my slightly pedantic sense of accuracy: the reason LBJ would be eligible to run again (and was eligible in 1968, although he chose not to) is specifically that he'd served less than 6 years in office. Had JFK been assassinated and LBJ ascended ~10 months earlier, it would not have been possible for him to run for further term even after having only been elected once.

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A good review that captures Caro’s quirks! I love all of the Caro books. A commenter once suggested that the key to Caro is to view him as a performance artist rather than a historian (none of his books are traditional biographies) because he goes to genuinely insane lengths (moving to the Hill Country, walking around the Senate with Bill Bradley to understand the importance of height in personal relations between politicians, etc.) to nail down bits of apocrypha and add novelistic details to his books. I still remember reading what seems like hundreds of pages in The Passage of Power about RFK’s attempts to get LBJ off the ticket...

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My favorite Biography of all time. This series sparked my interested in American politics even though I'm not American. Recommended.

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Somebody made a mistake, this is a review of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms"

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This review convinced me to read a book I had not known of, the system works!

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The factor that isn't to be underrated in assessing these books is the time period in which Caro is writing each. When he was writing Means of Ascent, LBJ was the monster behind Vietnam in the minds of Caro's peers - so kinda ordinary politician guy Coke Stevenson got transfigured into a literal saint as a foil for the demon. These days, we're a little removed from Vietnam and people have noticed, you know, the Civil Rights Act, so things are a bit different...

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I have not one but TWO LBJ stories!

I heard the story second-hand from my father-in-law, but I did actually meet the main figure of the story (a friend of my wife's family, from Texas).

Unnamed figure used to work for the CIA (verified fact), and presumably still did at the time of the story or at least had active connections (from the timing, I think it had to be during LBJ's vice presidency). Anyways, story goes, one day our main character gets a call, and he picks up a briefcase filled with money (I forget the amount, but it was like a million or something like that, all in cash). He's handcuffed to it, and gets on a plane. When he arrives at his destination he makes the handoff right on the tarmac and flies straight back.

Not long after the handoff, it's announced that NASA will be located in Houston and that Brown & Root was awarded some prominent contracts related to the construction.

I have no way to verify any of it but this article makes me update from "crazy story my father in law told me" to "Yaknow that one was probably true."

Second story is less conspiracy-mysterious, and more just personal and emotional.

My uncle used to be in the army in the 60's, and he was a journalist for Stars & Stripes (the US Army's in-house newspaper/propaganda publication). IIRC, he was assigned to either the president or the VP's entourage. I think it was VP. Anyways, he was waiting at the airport the day of the assassination, waiting for JFK & co to move on to the next speech he was going to give that day after Dallas.

Well, the assassination happened and everything became total bedlam and secret service was all over the place, and it was hard for even folks like my uncle to figure out what was going on. Secret service went and grabbed one of LBJ's daughters and put her straight on a plane; she happened to have been a classmate with my uncle at UT, so they knew each other. As she was boarding he says she looked back at him, and as he puts it, "I'll never forget the look on her face for the rest of my life."

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My favorite Johnson anecdote is not exactly about Lyndon:

So it's 1941 or so, and Jessica Mitford, 24 year old daughter of a British nobleman, is newly come to America. She's moving in high New Deal circles, and writes to her mother back in England that she has met "Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird." So her mother writes back,

"Who is Lady Bird? I looked her up in the Peerage, but could find no trace."

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Sounds like a hit piece. I know almost nothing about that time in America or Lyndon B Johnson in particular, but it sets off a lof of red flags to me. Not in the sense that something is literally wrong, but that the book constructs an entertaining picture that is fun to read, but that doesn't reflect the essence of the person well. I read a bit on wikipedia about him in different languages, and the feeling got stronger.

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Just a small comment, some people can work with appendicitis getting bad; my uncle had such a high pain tolerance that his appendix exploded before he could tell it's painful enough for getting a doctor. (He didn't get serious health problems from that situation.)

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I've always been a little bemused by the fact that so many people who ordinarily love Democrats despise LBJ. It's not quite like the disappointment people who love Republicans have in Nixon. It does have a little of the feel of the contempt with which Trumpsters view George W. Bush. But whence?

The only thing that vaguely comes to mind is that they bitterly resent LBJ for having "inherited" Camelot and squandered it. Certainly among my parents' generation who were thrilled with the Right Stuff promise of the election of 1960 -- the torch has been passed! To a new generation! That's us! -- the actual events circa 1965-1975 were a staggering let-down.

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You have to remember how at the time LBJ was only a side character in the slowly developing competition for power between two clans, where on one side you had the old "liberal" "international" oil companies and Wall Street banks with the Rockefeller family at the center, and on the other side the new "reactionary" "independent" (mostly) Texan oil companies and the CIA with the Bush family at the center, with the presidents Johnson, Nixon (though he later betrayed them) and (of course) Bush-father siding with the "Texans".

Kennedy, among other things, wanted to end the "depletion abatement" tax deduction critical to the "independent" oil companies, so the "Texans" likely got rid of him, likely with CIA's help to cover it up. (The murderer was patronized by a Texan oilman and only had 3 degrees of separation from Bush-father.)

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"During LBJ's second decade in Congress, he revealed that he was a racist just like Senator Russell, and he helped Russell block civil rights bills. During LBJ's third decade in government, he did the most of any politician to enact civil rights, having pretended to be racist just to get power."

I don't think this is an accurate summary of Caro on LBJ and civil rights. (And can we not throw around the term "racist" as if it had an agreed-upon definition?) Caro doesn't think that LBJ "pretended to be racist" for political reasons and then later revealed his true beliefs. Rather, LBJ took anti-civil-rights positions at one time and took pro-civil-rights positions at another time for the same reason—because he thought it would be politically advantageous to him. LBJ was a consummate politician, and whatever he might secretly have thought in his soul about civil rights is impossible to determine from looking at his political positions. Caro thinks the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a great success, but it's a success LBJ kinda stumbled into.

Also, fun fact: the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in DC is named after this Russell.

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I looked up Frank Hamer on wiki, and it turns out he's the one who led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde. The B&C article describes him: "Hamer was tall, burly, and taciturn, unimpressed by authority and driven by an "inflexible adherence to right, or what he thinks is right."

This guy must have been the model for at least one Clint Eastwood character.

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Having read all the other comments I'm hesitant to express an opinion - generally when I disagree with the bulk of SSC commenters, it means I've misunderstood something.

But taking the plunge, this review didn't do much for me. The writing style was fine, no problems, and as other people have noted, it was quite short. However I had two fundamental problems with it. Firstly the beginning read like an introduction, a sort of setting the scene. This carried on for a bit, and then suddenly it was finished - there wasn't anything other than the elongated prologue!

Secondly it didn't actually feel like a review of a book, but more of a precis. The information about LBJ that was provided by the book, its slant etc was taken at pretty much face value and this was summarised as if it was gospel truth. The interest in the review seemed to hinge primarily on the fact that LBJ was interesting, not how well the book managed whatever task it had set itself. It felt like a whole layer of meaning had been ignored and we were just left with a summary of interesting 'facts' about LBJ and those surrounding him.

Having said all that, I will have another read and see if there was something squiffy about my initial reading.

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Is it just me or is the guy a pretty obvious psychopath (and halo effects are suppressing that meme)?

I think we're lucky he had a personal distaste for brute force.

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This review left me wanting to read more of the review. Kudos.

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This reviewer's choice to go for brevity is highly admirable, though it's not really fitting in this particular case because it's the opposite of Caro's approach

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Having read "Path to Power", which covers LBJ from birth through young adulthood, I wholly endorse this book review. In fact I may now finally get around to picking up the next one and the next one.

(Also Caro's book about Robert Moses remains one of the greatest nonfiction works I've ever read, a serious contender for my personal "choose five books that wash up with you onto the deserted island" list.)

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Re "cheat"

I am reliably, constantly, and recurrently informed, by people who alternate insulting me between sentences, that:

1) that doesn't happen,

2) we never did that,

3) we don't do it any more,

4) I can't tell you when or why we decided to stop doing it,

5) its never mattered anyway,

6) if you keep bringing this up, you are threatening the very foundations of our great secure nation, and are trying to incite a civil war,

7) you bigot.

I do not exaggerate this, at all.

Can someone more sympathetic to LBJ's political party *please* steelman this for me, or at least reframe it into someone more persuasive?

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founding

A Lyndon Johnson joke my father once told me: Lyndon Johnson's in the street the day after his election and he sees a little Mexican boy in the street, and he's crying. So Lyndon goes up to him and says, "Juan, why are you crying?"

And Juan says, "My father died."

And Lyndon says, "But your father died years ago."

And Juan says, "I know, but yesterday he came back and voted for you and he didn't even come to see me."

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Excellent review. I was introduced to Caro in grad school. Sections of his books on LBJ and Robert Moses were used to illustrate the accumulation, exercise and manipulation of raw power. I was fascinated by the passages and in the interceding years have read The Power Broker and all four of the LBJ books. For anyone interested in political power and the mindset of the political class, these books are a fascinating read.

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Brief review-of-the-review:

The review does a great job of getting across how interesting and entertaining the source material is. Beyond that, though, it... doesn't do much? Each of the 4 main sections drops me in the middle of some history without giving me the context I'd need to appreciate it. It feels like a pile of anecdotes and assertions that tries to grab the reader's attention rather than conveying what the book says. I kept waiting to get to the meat of the review and being disappointed. It succeeds pretty well at emulating the entertaining, I-can't-believe-this-is-history part of SSC book reviews (e.g. the posts on Herbert Hoover or Ken Kesey) but not at emulating the part where one actually learns the history.

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To be fair to LBJ, when building his library he was asked if he wanted the Vietnam section to be 'buried'. He's supposed to have said, "no, put it all out." (and the other irony is that he wanted to pull out of Vietnam but felt inadequate to his cabinet, all of whom had PhD's, who told him to stay in. Then Kissinger sabotaged the Paris talks in 67 so he could work for Nixon. The Peace Deal in 70s was the same deal, except more American soldiers had died between then and 67, than before it. What a waste). Robert Dallek has written an excellent smaller series of books on LBJ if Caro is too deep a read to start with.

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