Word: caro
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...Caro returns to surer ground, though, in the scholarly detective work that uncovered the relationship between Johnson and his main political bankroller, the Texas construction company Brown & Root, Inc. Through obscure, recently released Federal documents, correspondence among Federal officials and Brown & Root representatives, and extensive conversations with company founding partner George Brown. Caro details for the first time the way Johnson's first Congressional campaign, in a 1937 special election, benefitted from the company's desire to receive a $10-million Federal contract to build a dam in the district the future President sought to represent. The author traces painstakingly...
...other points Caro gets lost in his impressive research and bogs down in detail. He dwells on young Lyndon's dislike of school and disobedience of his parents to the point of tedium, seemingly overwhelmed by the rush of information from newly interviewed Johnson friends and classmates. Similarly, he loses a sense of proportion when he uses the same dramatic, overheated the tone to reveal both Johnson's finagling of a college election and multi-million-dollar Brown & Root schemes...
...prattling Sunday school teacher, creating a book with little sympathy for its subject. His assertion, for example, that Johnson's will to dominate arose out of his contempt for his parents, who "stuck by their ideals" and failed, does a disservice to the complex man he seeks to analyze. Caro insists that Johnson's conversion of a secret college social club into a political power on the Southwest texas campus revealed in the man a deviousness, a just for secrecy, and "a will of steel" plotting to "not only snatch existing power, but create . . . new power, of dimensions no students...
...details suggest that Johnson's collegiate conduct, while occasionally petty and manipulative, was no more reprehensible than that of many other student politicians then and now. It is difficult to believe, as Caro does, that Johnson's life was entirely a record of "viciousness and cruelty, . . . all-encompassing personal ambition. . . and aggressiveness." Indeed, Caro seeks to cast a pall even over the noblest incident in Johnson's youth, his student-teaching in the Cotulla barrio, interpreting the future President's success in the job as evidence of his need to create situations in which he was in complete control...
...CARO'S DISPLEASURE with Johnson's wheeling and dealing is indicative of a deeper ambivalence, an attitude that characterizes almost all public discussion of the 36th President. Caro, like many Americans, balks at the idea that desirable policy can be effected through morally questionable means. Yet one lesson modern politics offers is that good causes--like rural electrification or civil rights for Blacks--frequently are not converted into government action until their proponents adopt the methods of compromise and mutual advantage that their opponents have used all along. Lyndon Johnson may have connived with George and Herman Brown...