Rowland Evans and Robert Novak: Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power
Goodman, Paul
There is a positivist school of political science that devotes itself to the analysis of power. It is value-free about things like justice or commonwealth; and it pays as little mind as...
...What is valuable about this book is that it again reminds us that history is not wholly the effect of material and cultural forces, nor even of institu tions, but is importantly moved by men and their manipulation of one another...
...the big misdeeds and non-deeds of the Cold War and the abuse of technology are not mentioned...
...On the other hand, parallel to the events in this book, and strongly influenced by them, have been the debauching, hoodwinking, hamstringing, and trivializing of the American people by the efforts for power and the exercise of power of this cast of characters...
...This is so astounding that I wonder whether the authors are devious on this point...
...When the choice is for real, even austere methodologists like Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell come out with positions congenial to institutions like Freedom House...
...There are, of course, many jolly paragraphs on the hero's personal manners, but these are rigorously devalued as untechnical...
...There is a positivist school of political science that devotes itself to the analysis of power...
...Astonishingly his relations with armament industries, inevitable to a man whose specialty throughout most of his public career was in the Armed Forces committees and in aerospace, are not mentioned at all...
...LBJ and his advisers are praised when they concentrate on the Public Person...
...Nevertheless, until the last chapters of their book, they preserve their method quite pure...
...This is a study of political power and a political biography...
...and best of all, if they can use some personal trait to enhance the Image...
...What is lacking in the book is that no men—either the movers or the victims—ever appear in its pages...
...But such panic on existential issues is endemic among positivists...
...The brute fact is that parallel to the events in this book there has been the allotment of the big social wealth, the money in scores of billions, never mentioned in this history...
...So a pair of popular reporters can be forgiven, and the earnest reader can close their book at page 500, which is already a lot of relatively objective pages...
...It is value-free about things like justice or commonwealth...
...It is dismay that this is what the (apparent) history of my country has come to...
...I do not think their own purpose is methodological but rather that, as journalists, they find that techniques of power—jockeying for position, horse trading, mending fences, occasional knifing in the back (it is astonishing how many metaphors we have) —provide good daily columns...
...But this effect, the lapse of American democracy is not the concern of Evans and Novak...
...As they say, "We have attempted to show how the Public Person achieved and dispensed power...
...neither LBJ, as here portrayed, nor his adversaries in the arena that is here portrayed, are humanly meaningful enough for the waste of their lives to be deplorable...
...There is some mention of LBJ's "populist background," and rarer mention of his tie-ins with Texas millionaires and his making his own million, but such things are not allowed to become important to the analysis...
...What, then, is the effect on a reader of this long description of a man getting ahead and throwing his weight around...
...In Lyndon Johnson, Evans and Novak have surprisingly given us a kind of monument of the positivist method...
...But one's dismay does not deepen to rage and grief because the context is too trivial...
...The tone of such writing is technical, superficially like Machiavelli in The Prince—but of course in Machiavelli, who was a lover of pristine Rome and the commune of Florence, this tone is a cry of passion for his suffering country, whereas in our technologists it is cool and hip, as if they were not patriots of anything...
...And the matters that are fearful and grievous, the destructiveness of my country's course and the degeneration of my fellow citizens, are not here on the scene...
...I would use the words "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," except that their connotation is too tragic...
...and it pays as little mind as possible to causes like class interests or historical conditions...
...This strand of history has been uninfluenced by the events in this book, though it has strongly influenced them in ways not told by Evans and Novak...
...Needless to say, in dealing with contemporary events, the Dominican intervention and the war in Vietnam, the authors panic and their analysis of technique gets swamped in their rhetoric of war—value-laden words suddenly appear, as that Senator Gruening is said to "pontificate...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
