I've been trying to read that book for a long time, and in the end getting the audio version of it is what did the trick. I first discovered the audio versions of Caro's books when I purchased "The Passage of Power: The Years of LBJ vol.4" (about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath) as an audiobook, read by the spellbinding Grover Gardner, having had the volume 1 in paperback for a while then, along with Caro's tome on Robert Moses, and yet having been unable to read either past the first few chapters, because their page counts reach about 1000 and the task looked too formidable and my schedule too crammed with other things for me to have any chance to ever finish those books. But back in those years I lived in Pennsylvania and driving down to DC fairly often - a three-hour drive each way - and the Passage of Power audiobooks provided the perfect companion to a drive through the fields of Pennsylvania and Maryland, as well as, later, "Being Nixon: A Man Divided" by Evan Thomas, a book I'll get back to when I write my review of his biography of Sandra Day O'Connor.
So I finally "read" the LBJ volume 1 book and my conclusion is that Robert Caro is a national treasure, although LBJ is such a deeply flawed individual that every time I was tempted to feel sorry for him, for instance when "Pappy" O'Daniel apparently stole the 1941 election from him on Election Day, he later did something to make me stop feeling sorry for him very fast, such as the way he went about to use FDR and put an end to the tax investigation into the great LBJ donors Brown & Root. The hardscrabble upbringing and outsized ambition make LBJ a fascinating character, but it is a good thing we all know his ambition was felled down because of Vietnam, although I wish it had been felled down earlier.
What interested me the most in this LBJ profile, or what I know of it (which right now is limited to the first and fourth volume of Caro's biography, although now that I live in Texas I have bought more books about LBJ, especially the Doris Kearns Goodwin one and the Califano memoir), is the ups and downs LBJ had to face in his career to get to where he wanted. These days would-be self-styled influencers try to gain followers by claiming one just has to think success and it will materialize easily if one imagines it vividly enough, but no one wanted success more than Lyndon Johnson and he still faced a couple of heartbreaking defeats, high-stakes elections including the 1948 one that he could not lose if he hoped for any sort of political future, and of course the years he spent powerless in the shadow of JFK. He does provides a certain lesson in resilience, although his accompanying cunningness was nothing to emulate. But he is a good example for students that sometimes you can want something completely and absolutely and still not get it for a while, and face setbacks, and have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off.
LBJ was overall a very unlikable man, and I hold against him the way he later treated Sam Rayburn, a man who viewed LBJ as his own son and was instrumental to his political ascent. (He betrayed Rayburn in 1940 by working behind the scenes to keep the Texas delegation for FDR, although of course when it became politically convenient LBJ ditched FDR too.) It is hard to extract any high-level lesson from LBJ's life. Some people would argue that LBJ got to have a lot more impact on the country than Rayburn ever did, but he took such pains in creating his legend (a legend not pierced through until Caro started working on his biography) that he can't have been indifferent to people learning the truth about him. I wonder what Caro's fifth volume about LBJ will say. It will cover the end of his presidency and the few years he survived his loss of power. Will Caro show us a man with remorse? or only regrets that he couldn't hold on to power longer?
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