Word: lyndon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE PATH TO POWER by Robert A. Caro; Knopf; 882 pages...
Even before it was published, this book, like so much else about Lyndon Johnson, was making people angry. Robert A. Caro, whose awesomely detailed, 1,246-page biography of Builder-Bureaucrat Robert Moses, The Power Broker, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, has been toiling for seven years on a three-part study of the 36th President. Excerpts from the first volume, which takes Johnson from his hardscrabble beginnings up to his World War II service, began appearing a year ago in the Atlantic Monthly. In one such episode, Caro disclosed that Johnson had for years accepted "envelopes stuffed with...
...unexamined.*There are seven scholarly pages on the rainfall and soil composition of the Texas hill country in the 19th century. Not for nothing: Caro is explaining why Johnson's farming forebears were doomed to failure despite their heroic labors, a trauma that helped shape the young Lyndon. He began running away from home while still a toddler. As a cousin puts it, "He wanted attention. He wanted to be somebody." After watching his father Sam, an incorruptible six-term state legislator, go broke trying to raise crops in the merciless hill-country dirt, Lyndon opened a propaganda campaign...
...Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson was similarly manipulative. He wrote fawning notes to faculty members at the end of his exams and so flattered the college president that the man made Lyndon his assistant. He also stole his first election, a student government contest. L.B.J. was just as smarmy at the next major stop: assistant to Texas Congressman Dick Kleberg. In Washington he cheated his way to victory in another election (for leadership of a group of legislative aides) and carefully cultivated the crowned heads of Congress. Chief among them was House Minority Leader (later Speaker) Sam Rayburn...
...section on Johnson--"Here Lies Lyndon"--follows Feiffer's crowd through an America disillusioned and betrayed. Feiffer's wit perhaps peaks here, mirroring his personal fury at Johnson--the dealer who made significant progress in civil rights and poverty eradication programs, then let Americans down by escalating the Vietnam War. "Mine is rage of a lover betrayed," Feiffer writes in retrospect. "I don't often trust in public figures; Johnson seduced me." The division and incomprehension among liberals comes through clearly in the section...