When it comes to DNA analysis, Robert A. Caro was way ahead of the field in 1982 when he identified a specific human genome for ruthlessness and dubbed it “the Bunton strain.”
A line of legendarily cold and selfish Texans, the Bunton family left a mark on their lineal descendent Lyndon Baines Johnson. Along with the unforgivingly harsh environment of the Lone Star State’s Hill Country, the Bunton strain formed LBJ in Caro’s telling to become one of the nastiest SOBs ever to win his nation’s highest office.
In his introduction to this first volume of his acclaimed (and still unfinished) series on the 36th President of the United States, Caro describes a man who was calculatingly vicious at accumulating power:
The more one thus follows his life, the more apparent it becomes that alongside the thread of achievement running through it runs another thread, as dark as the other is bright, and as fraught with consequences for history: a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will.
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| LBJ's parents, Sam and Rebekah. Sam's mother was a Bunton; he inherited her dark, fierce Bunton stare, Caro notes, and none of her cold, flinty practicality. LBJ was a different story. Image from https://learnodo-newtonic.com/lbj-facts/parents-of-lyndon-b-johnson-sam-ealy-johnson-jr-and-rebekah-baines |
The Path To Power sounds that theme over and over, but it covers so much ground and dives into so much detail that I found its constant negative focus scurrilously helpful. Often I flew through its long chapters eager to know what happened next.
The more attention Caro lathers on Johnson’s rise to power, the clearer it becomes how LBJ the person was anathema to him. Fortunately, this wasn’t so clear before the publication of Path Of Power in 1982, meaning that many of Johnson’s closest friends and associates (including LBJ’s widow Lady Bird) gave Caro full cooperation.
No doubt Lady Bird especially was hopeful the esteemed author of the Robert Moses bio The Power Broker would give her man’s complicated but progressive-aligned legacy a chance to peek out from under the shadows of Johnson’s management of the Vietnam War. But I have to wonder: Did Lady Bird ever read The Power Broker? It’s not the sort of book one wants published about a late and beloved spouse.
Caro’s Johnson verges at times on caricature, but it’s a brilliant and hypnotic portrait all the same, crammed with multiple perspectives and novelistic details. At times, Caro allows some grudging admiration for a man who toughed out every day of his life in such an uncompromising fashion.
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| Johnson City, Texas, where LBJ came of age, was a poor town. Just how poor? According to Caro, its lone doctor was heard to complain: “Half the town is walking around and I haven’t been paid for [delivering] them yet.” Image from http://www.stateoffranklin.net/johnsons/photos3.htm |
I was struck by how like Shakespeare’s Richard III LBJ is portrayed, not only that he’s so amoral but presented so that we half-root for him to get away with his tricks. And what tricks! He masks himself as a New Deal liberal to get Franklin Roosevelt’s ear and sucks up to various legislators by pretending to agree with them – until it was more convenient to cut them loose or force them to agree with him. LBJ is dubbed “a professional son” for his obsequious manner with elders, with a few words left hanging there no doubt.
“He would tell everyone what he thought they wanted to hear,” Wingate Lucas, a contemporary congressman from Fort Worth, tells Caro. “As a result, you couldn’t believe anything he said.”
What made LBJ tick? Caro goes back to Johnson’s youth. Father Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. was a state legislator of uncommon honesty whom Lyndon trailed after as the old man walked through the corridors of state power. Alas, Sam wound up broke and out of office, leaving his boy with little in life but a hard lesson:
In Austin, he had seen the legislators who accepted the beefsteak, the bourbon and the blondes, who lived at the Driskill while his father lived at the boardinghouse. His father had refused to be like them, and he had seen what happened to his father.
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| LBJ at age six, with his sister. A childhood friend told Caro: “Lyndon was a good boy, but he was overpowering if he didn’t get his own way.” Image from https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/index.html?dod-date=827. |
Though Lyndon betrayed his complete selfishness before he wore long pants, his manner grew slyer as he took his first steps into adulthood.
At the Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos, undergraduate Johnson formed a secret club with the sole purpose of amassing power on Johnson’s behalf, willfully hurting classmates who somehow stood in his way even if they did him no personal harm. “I broke their back good,” he would recall decades later.
As a legislative director in the U. S. Capitol, “Chief” Johnson didn’t just order people around, but humiliated them; swearing at them violently and often, dictating orders while he sat on the toilet and forced them to look on, never letting them take time off to eat a sandwich.
Caro writes: Dignity was not permitted in a Johnson employee. Pride was not permitted.
No ideology bound him, no loyalty for God or man. He courted women for their wealth and social standing, picked associates by virtue of their acquiescence, and focused all his energy on personal glory. Even when that glory served a positive larger purpose, like when he took on the job as principal of a high school in a poor Latino community in Cotulla, Texas and shaped them into youngsters with a stronger sense of pride and hope, his narcissism and bullying remained in view.
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| Lyndon Johnson as a young high school teacher. Students L. E. Jones, on the far left, and Gene Latimer, on the right, became key Johnson aides and frequent abuse magnets. Image from https://lbjlibrary.tumblr.com/post/14459058608/1931-coach-lyndon-johnson-with-his-sam-houston. |
Do I buy Caro’s thesis? To a point. Johnson was clearly a cold, uncaring person in many aspects of his life. He cheated on his wife, he used people, and he took crooked money as a matter of course. For him, a lack of moral principles seems to have been a feature, not a bug.
Yet I do think Caro is guilty of overselling the depravity of early Johnson. One reason I think this is because of Caro’s later books on Johnson – not the next one, Means Of Ascent, but the two afterward, in which Johnson is remade as a progressive hero with some residue villainy, rather than the out-and-out nasty seen in Path To Power.
Here, Caro paints Johnson as a false liberal, kowtowing to Texas oilmen and builders who in turn fund his power base. All the time, he casts himself before the electorate as a populist lion sticking up for the little guy and President Roosevelt’s New Deal:
No Fundamentalist preacher, thundering of fire and brimstone in one of the famed Hill Country revival meetings, had called the people of the Hill Country to the banner of Jesus Christ more fervently than Lyndon Johnson called them to the banner of Franklin Roosevelt.
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| President Franklin Roosevelt meets young Congressman Johnson in 1937. Between them is Texas Gov. James Allred, whom Caro notes was airbrushed out of this photo when Johnson used it for his 1941 Senate run. Image from https://historycolored.com/photos/5094/president-franklin-d-roosevelt-meets-a-young-lyndon-b-johnson-1937/. |
In fact, Johnson’s support of the New Deal did bring good things to Texas, most notably electricity, a need Caro spells out in a chapter on electrification which is one of the many brilliant stand-alone essays about American life in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s just that for Johnson, the New Deal was a means to an end, of getting power by doing favors.
Johnson’s longtime assistant L. E. Jones spells this out for Caro:
“For someone who needs gratitude, the New Deal is the natural philosophy, because it lets you do things for people, and therefore gives you the greatest opportunity to get gratitude.”
The most egregiously ugly thing Johnson does in Caro’s telling is backstab his friend and patron Sam Rayburn, a leader of the Texas delegation of the U. S. House of Representatives who eventually became its Speaker. Yet the sin as I read it is a bit of a nothingburger, where Johnson apparently allowed President Roosevelt to think badly about Rayburn over a matter that soon blew over. Caro portrays it as a show of false character, and a nasty ploy Johnson helped engineer.
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| Johnson with Speaker Rayburn, later in life. While all but unapproachable to most of his fellow legislators, Rayburn allowed LBJ an unusual closeness. Image from https://twitter.com/britannica/status/1064235559336505344. |
Caro spends a lot of time on this flap, which centered on Rayburn’s loyalty to Vice President Jack Garner, whom Roosevelt was jettisoning. Garner was a reactionary, and Johnson, polishing his progressive bona fides, went along with Roosevelt despite his father-son relationship with Rayburn which helped Johnson as a fledgling Congressman.
“Rayburn had this very strong feeling for Lyndon,” another Texas congressman tells Caro. “And that feeling protected Lyndon. Nobody in the delegation wanted to get Rayburn mad.”
This apparently had a lot to do with Rayburn’s fondness for Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. as well as for Lady Bird, whom Caro paints as an innocent but effective tool in her husband’s arsenal. LBJ would order Lady Bird around at parties, telling her to bring him cake or change her clothes, yet like so many others she stuck with him through it all, no doubt because he was dashing and handsome in his youth but also because she wasn’t too willful. Caro claims Johnson chose his associates for that very trait.
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| Flanked by his wife and mother, LBJ runs for the U. S. Senate in 1941. Caro describes him in this first, failed bid for a Senate seat as "A powerful figure, but not a pleasant one." Image from https://twitter.com/lbjohnsonnps/status/747143896614977536. |
Path Of Power wraps up with Johnson firmly ensconced in Congress, holding the most liberal district in Texas (it included Austin) but hankering for more. For such a forceful fellow, he bided his time with surprising silence:
Entire
years went by without Lyndon Johnson addressing the House even once. In fact,
until 1948, when the necessities of his campaign for the United States Senate
changed his methods, he had, during eleven years in Congress, delivered a total
of ten speeches – less than one a year.
That 1948 Senate campaign wraps up Path Of Power on a surprisingly incomplete note for what is an exhaustive but never exhausting book. Caro’s style is more effective for its lack of objectivity, and the thrusting way he commands details and paints word portraits of sundry unique characters and a nation in tumult. It’s like reading Dickens without the sentimentality, but as Caro notes, there is a real national legacy to be uncovered in Johnson’s journey, singular not in its brutality so much as its demonstration of the power of one life when lived to the hilt.
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