The Years of Lyndon Johnson:

...When FDR died, LBJ shed a tear, then quickly told a stunned reporter he had never been a New Dealer and explained away his earlier loyalty with, "I was a young man of adventure with more guts than brains...

...The outline of the book seemed ready-made...

...Sam Rayburn...

...According to Caro, she cooperated with his research for a while and then withdrew...

...He cut through the layers of protective crust put in place by Johnson himself...

...When we leave Lyndon Johnson at the end of The Path to Power, he has lost a special 1941 senatorial election in a steal and, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, is off to active service in the Navy...

...and several had no degree at all - Lyndon set the pattern for his political future...

...As I finished this book, on a visit to Washington, I took a long afternoon run through Georgetown, past John F. Kennedy's old home, along the Potomac, past Watergate, by the Lincoln Memorial where I had joined the 1967 anti-Vietnam march against the Pentagon, down the Mall, up the steps of the Capitol which LBJ himself had climbed, and then down to the new Vietnam War Memorial, where I read the names of the dead in mirror-black marble which reflected my own image...

...Two former students came to work for him in Kleberg's office and he devoured them - one broke away after two years, the other stayed, in between nervous breakdowns, for thirty-five years as a "totally willing slave...

...He ingratiated himself with the president to get easy student jobs, maneuvered himself into the editorship of the college paper, wrote flattering God-bless-you notes to pious teachers on his exam papers, gulped down more than his share of the food at the boarding-house table, bragged graphically about his sexual exploits, and rigged his own election to the Student Council...

...There was so little about him that inspired affection, or even pity (his self-pity made the compassion of others redundant...

...In the spirit of Francis Parkman, Caro went and lived on Johnson's soil...

...And finally, how will he explain all these Vietnam dead - if he has not explained them already?explained them already...

...the unprecedented use of big money to gain political power...

...When he died in 1973 Commonweal received a manuscript, which we declined, from a prominent West Coast activist lamenting his death on the grounds that now radicals would have no focus for their hate...

...the social welfare and civil rights legislation that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Johnson's patron, and continued in some way until January 1982...

...In some ways, the choice of Johnson for his next target seemed apt...

...He also found - and this may be this project's enduring value - that the Johnson story is the linchpin that holds together the other stories that explain the transformation of American society in the twentieth century: the economic development, through dams and oil, of the Southwest...

...19.95 Raymond A. Schroth the biographer's negative case hung on the validity of the Jane Jacobs school of urban planning which values heterogeneous neighborhoods over developed downtowns and suburbs linked by highways...

...I stress "seemed...

...In two stints as a teacher he worked his students hard and pushed them on their reading, writing, and debating - although he himself didn't read, write, or speak well...

...Vietnam and the eventual discrediting of the American presidency...

...I sensed that Caro's biography could only get grimmer, sadder...

...Indeed, if Caro finishes LBJ and moves on to another Big Man, it threatens to become a formula: the brilliant but personally despicable engineer/politician scrambles into power by dubious means and, though he proves this power could be used to promote the public welfare (Moses's Jones Beach and LBJ's Great Society), he allows the monster in his nature to take charge and wreaks human misery (the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Vietnam war) on his community...

...In his eleven years as a congressman, he neither introduced legislation himself nor fought for legislation introduced by others...

...Here they were, the poor Texas farm women who hauled water and wood and cooked and washed and bore the insufferable silence of the Hill Country until Roosevelt and Johnson brought them electricity...

...And for both, the naked pursuit and possession of power itself seemed to fill that space where other - greater and lesser - men and women have hearts...

...And what will this biographer-bloodhound sniff out from under the banquet tables at Camelot...

...but we are left wondering what more there is to say...

...and when the group's attention shifted to private conversations or someone else, Lyndon would fall asleep...

...Caro warns us that the story of his war service is a ' 'complicated'' one...

...As a child he ran away from home again and again, cried about spankings that didn't hurt, wouldn't let playmates use his baseball if they didn't let him pitch, stole the family car and smashed it, picked fights and continually got whipped...

...The reputation of Robert Moses, the subject/victim of The Power Broker (1974), the man who "built" - and, in biographer Robert A. Caro's judgment, destroyed - New York, was...

...How many ways and for how long can a biographer, who brings to his task the investigative skills of a master detective, the righteous persistence of Victor Hugo's Javert in Les Miserables, and the evangelistic astonishment of Lincoln Steffens, tell us the man he's writing about is no good and still hold our attention...

...and finally FDR who, while grateful for the fact that Johnson continually ran for office as 100-percent pro-Roosevelt, also considered him a very remarkable and promising young man...

...and I thought of other Johnson anecdotes I'd heard - his compulsive narration to a priest of how he'd gone to a monastery to pray the Vietnam bombers safely home, his intimidating an unwilling but eager-to-please Hubert Humphrey into shooting a deer pointblank on the LBJ ranch - and wondered what Caro would do with them...

...Yet, he had a mysterious influence on young men...

...But Lyndon Johnson was one of the most hated political leaders in recent memory...

...Both Moses and Johnson, measured by ego-bulk and the social and human consequences of their decisions, were colossi...

...that it is hard to understand how Caro could begin his interviews, as he says, expecting to like what he would find...

...and FDR, the master puppeteer, using those who think they are using him, and, as he was in The Power Broker, an offstage personification of the use of power, in a literary counterpoint to the main theme...

...As an aide to playboy Congressman Richard Kleberg and as a young Congressman himself his behavior patterns were still those of an emotionally starved soul screaming for attention and already those of a tyrant king unconscious of or indifferent to the sensitivities of other individuals...

...He had to dominate any social group by telling his Texas yarns...

...Clearly, the relationships that really mattered to Lyndon Johnson were with older, more powerful men: Herman Brown, the Texas contractor who got him into Congress at twenty-eight in 1937 to guarantee the Marshall Ford Dam project into which Brown and Root had already sunk $ 1,500,000, and whose quick cash in the 1940 congressional elections, parceled out by LBJ, put legislators in Johnson's debt...

...he got his old neighbors, college chums, congressional aids and political partners to talk...

...the lonely Sam Rayhurn, to whom Johnson played' 'professional son,'' with the ritual smooch on the bald dome, until Johnson could make points by siding with Roosevelt in the wild 1940 rift between the John Nance Garner-Rayburn Texas party and FDR...

...The literary tragedy is that the central character of this drama is, like his successor as president, not of tragic but rather of pathetic proportions...

...Meanwhile, in 1934, he had married the shy and very rich Claudia Alta Taylor who didn't like being called Lady Bird but who, perhaps as some measure of how free she has never been, has never been known to the American people as anyone else...

...LBJ's father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., the idealistic, failed country legislator...

...I suspect the thrill of the next two volumes will come, as it did here, from the secondary players...

...At Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos - where in 1927 only one of 56 faculty had a Ph.D...

...She hovers in the wings of this story, as fragile as a bird, ordered about like a galley slave and shunted back to Texas so Lyndon could dally with Alice Glass, the glamorous Virginia redhead mistress of his Texas publisher patron, Charles Marsh...

...barely in its grave when Giant-Killer Caro turned his eyes to the Texas hill country and the Lyndon B. Johnson Memorial Library in Austin and to a literary project that could possibly consume the next twenty years of his life...

...the man who couldn't be bought but, Caro implies, could be fooled...

...Yet, Caro shows that Johnson, who rode into power as a New Dealer, ridiculed the New Deal in the company of Texans who opposed it, indeed made an art of concealing his true convictions, if he had any...

...For in the Moses saga there was always the counter-theme of redemption, enough evidence of the engineer's benevolent vision - reinforced by a long run along the Jones Beach surf on a June afternoon - to let the reader admire him, especially when THE TEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON THE PATH TO POWER Robert A. Caro Alfred A. Knopf, 882 pp...

...He found what virtually every biographer finds: that the child is father of the man, that young Lyndon was a deceiver, toady, bully, coward, and fraud...

...Best/ worst anecdote: to win a girl's vote, Lyndon would assign a handsome young man to pursue and flatter her until the election, then drop her...

...both were insatiably ambitious, manipulative scalawags who used older men to get ahead and crushed or cast aside foes and weaker colleagues...