Means of Ascent, by Robert Caro
Gold, Victor
BOOK REVIEWS Shrewdly, knowing I worked for Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign, the editor asked if I'd review the latest Caro volume on the life of Lyndon Johnson. Not so shrewdly,...
...For this review I get (1) a copy of litical biographies for adults, or— the book...
...and (3) what latter-of investigation into proving what day psychologists are given to calling everybody from Austin to Boston has conflicted signals (a prelude to dysknown about Johnson's victory for pepsia) in my attitudinal disposition forty years—more the hot-eyed po- toward Lyndon Johnson...
...Two volumes down, Did I say too dumb to be writing po- two to go, and he's smirking all the way litical biographies...
...This is how Caro explains it: That campaign raises, in fact, one of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson: the relationship between means and ends...
...Who could have imagined that anyone who went down in flames with Barry Goldwater in 1964 would read a book on Lyndon Johnson and end up sympathizing with the man...
...Robert Caro, to be sure, is a biographer in a hurry to have at Lyndon Johnson...
...Again, if the topic of choice is to be "the lowering of the presidency," I might date it as sometime between the 1948 whistle-stop appearance in which Harry Truman compared his opponent to Hitler and Mussolini (on his own, mind you, without the aid of George Bush's "negative campaign" handlers), and the moment when John F. Kennedy, having raised expectations as to what he would do as President, settled for elevated rhetoric after the Bay of Pigs and the building of the Berlin Wall...
...When, how, did this happen...
...As the biographer who dismembered the reputation of Robert Moses, Caro is a favored literary ward of the New York reading public, which means that long before an outland reviewer even gets his copy of a Caro book a verdict will already have been rendered by the critic of the Times, with the book established on the bestseller list...
...which makes it difficult—or would, for a less driven biographer—to explain why one-fourth of the Johnson story should be devoted to a single election campaign, even one so storied as LBJ's 87-vote "landslide" victory in the Democratic Senate primary of 1948...
...Was he truly shocked to learn that the vote in Duval County, Texas, was rigged for Lyndon Johnson in 1948...
...Obvious to whom...
...hands on his book...
...The verdict was in, before I laid rian...
...My Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...There is nothing so futile as a reviewer's railing against the quality of a book whose author is counting his money...
...None of which, by any means, is to find Lyndon Johnson's presidential legacy anything to write an admiring biography about...
...I doubt it, and what's more, I don't think he gives this inconsistency a moment's thought...
...24.95 Victor Gold THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 37 is either too dumb to be writing po- ing...
...There is a disingenuous quality in Caro's approach to journalism and biography, whether in conning Johnson's friends into confiding in him ("I really want to be fair, and you knew the man better than anyone . . . "), or conning the reader into accepting his ersatz metaphors and double-standard political morality...
...Means of Ascent is the second of four projected Caro volumes on Johnson's life, and a large, Texas-sized life it was...
...I, however, am a diffident judge of history, given to grays, whereas Robert Caro is gifted with blinding perceptions of black and white that even Garry Wills must envy...
...But more important, as it developed, the further I got into Means of Ascent, the more I realized, with growing horror, that Caro, in his frenzy to do for Lyndon Johnson's place in history what he did for Robert Moses's, was stripping me, page by page, of a long-cherished conviction that Johnson was an unmitigated expletive...
...but what are we to make of Robert Caro's relentless campaign to transmogrify Johnson's life into a monstrous metaphor for all he (and his generation) finds execrable in American politics...
...own guess—assuming I accepted Caro's bleak premise—would be sometime between the day Woodrow Wilson lied about keeping us out of World War I, and the day the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post decided that if, by God, they couldn't approve of a President nobody was going to approve of him...
...apparently Caro, unable to decide which synonym best fit Johnson's bill, said to hell with it and opted for both...
...also a writer who, once his target has been chosen, isn't given to quarter...
...T o the point, not since Trotsky's 1 Stalin has there been a more bilious biography of a world leader...
...Would you believe, for example, that Johnson's conduct of his office—particularly of "the ugly war that consumed him"—was so despicable that the American people's trust in the presidency was "tarnished" not for a decade nor even a quarter-century, but "forever...
...Those noble ends, however, would not have been possible were it not for the means, far from noble, which brought Lyndon Johnson to power . . . Oh, really...
...Look who's talk- to the counting house...
...Pinpointing the precise moment of the shredding of the American presidency, Caro writes: "Until the day of Kennedy's death—until, in other words, the day Johnson took office—the fabric was whole...
...Not so shrewdly, I said yes, anticipating the prospect of ignoring the book and going after the subject...
...Trotsky had his reasons...
...Having read The Path to Power, Caro's first volume on Johnson, I should have been forewarned...
...Does Caro really believe that Johnson's 1948 opponent, the small-bore statehouse shuffler Coke Stevenson, was a sagebrush Pericles, "the living personification of frontier individualism . . . the very embodiment of the myth of the cowboy...
...2) a small stipend, in the considering that he devoted years low three figures...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990...
...On reading breathtaking passages like that, an observer who recalls John F. Kennedy's "landslide" Illinois victory in the 1960 presidential campaign is tempted to ask whether Caro applies the same elevated standard of means and ends across the political board...
...Then, quoting his friend, the estimable historian Tom Wicker, Caro (with a happy crocodile's "note of sadness") concludes that "the tragic irony of Lyndon Johnson is that the lowering of the presidency, not the Great Society of which he dreamed, is his most obvious legacy...
...Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson's life—civil rights in particular, perhaps, but others, too—were noble...
...And Robert lemicist than the appraising histo- Caro...
...only to say that when the subject of a biography is pole-axed in the Introduction, before the reader even gets into Chapter One, unless the subject happens to be Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini, I begin to have qualms about the biographer's obvious impatience to have at it...
...If so, the author of Means of Ascent THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: MEANS OF ASCENT Robert A. Caro/Alfred A. Knopf/506 pp...
...Hyperbole is his stylistic metier, as in choice phrases like "utter ruthlessness" and "seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal" (emphasis mine...
...Or that he "shredded'a shift in metaphorical gears here, from rust to Texas chain saws—the "crucial fabric of credence and faith between the people of the United States" and their President...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
