Caro's epic biography of LBJ: as gripping as any novel

The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro

Robert A. Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson is historical biography on an almost unimaginable scale. This first volume (768 pages plus more than 100 pages of notes) feels like a non-fiction equivalent of War and Peace - equivalent in richness and literary excellence as well as length – and is as enjoyable to read as any novel.

And there are another three volumes - or four if the 88-year-old Caro can finish the final one - to complete Johnson’s life. The second, Means of Ascent, is the book William Hague said he would choose to take to a desert island: it “conveyed more brilliantly than any other publication what it really feels like to be a politician”. That is too good an endorsement to ignore: I will continue devoting hours to Caro.

Volume one alone, The Path to Power, provides an extraordinary education in a huge range of subjects: the history and geography of Texas; the poverty of its Depression era farming communities; Roosevelt and the New Deal; congressional elections; oil money as a political force; corruption in state and federal politics. Understanding all of these is necessary, Caro demonstrates, to understanding the career of Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson was the son of an honest and respected local politician from a remote part of Texas, but a man whose finances and reputation collapsed in later life, to the boy’s eternal humiliation. We learn about tensions – and hunger - in the Johnson family and the harsh, primitive life of the community. With no electricity, farming was little changed from the nineteenth century.

Caro’s brilliance is in the seamless interplay of the telling detail and the wider picture. The reader is never confused about the relevance of the particular to the overall narrative. We see the young Johnson, an ambitious young political assistant in his twenties, ducking into shop fronts on the streets of Austin, Texas, to comb his hair obsessively as he sees a politician approaching, so that he can emerge with an apparently surprised and casual greeting, always trying to impress his seniors. He had a talent, Caro shows, for bringing out paternal feelings in older men. And we hear about Johnson’s love life – always courting the daughters of the wealthiest families. We see his frustration at not being the centre of attention in a social gathering: he had a habit of falling asleep at a party if he was ignored. And we learn about his extraordinary appetite for work and his ability to pick subordinates who would never question the crazy demands he made on them.

The Path to Power is no hagiography. Johnson’s willingness to pay for votes, in cash if necessary, was not unusual in Texas at the time (the late 1930s). His first campaign for the senate involved rallies in which crowds stayed through what Caro describes as Johnson’s arrogant and unappealing speeches in order to win cash prizes that were promised at the end. The local officials who counted votes were the recipients of envelopes of money from candidates’ campaigns. (Trump’s desperate plea for officials to “find” votes to tip the balance of a Presidential election is part of a grand tradition.) Johnson only avoided being hauled before a Department of Justice investigation into his campaign finances by the interventional of President Roosevelt, whom Johnston has spent years cultivating.

The Democratic party held sway in Texas and the whole of the South in those days. But the tension between politicians’ desire for government projects (dams to generate power or the electrification of rural areas) and their conservative instincts to limit the power of Washington – and the national debt – led to conflict within the party. Roosevelt’s Vice-President, a Texan, John Garner (“Cactus Jack”) was fiercely conservative. Whilst he agreed initially that New Deal spending was necessary to pull America out of the Depression, eventually he split with Roosevelt and even planned to run against him. Johnson was caught in the middle (although a very small fish at the time). His skill, Caro shows, was in making both sides in this vicious fight believe he was with them. One of the most striking features of Johnson the politician was that he rarely articulated views about policy which might ‘come back to haunt him’, hardly ever speaking in Congress, for instance.

Caro’s storytelling – and Johnson’s incredible story – make for a gripping tale. Unless you already know about Johnson’s career, you will want to keep reading, to find out whether he wins or loses the next election and how he manages to use his powers of persuasion as a junior Congressman on the President of the United States. The final episode of the first volume, in which Johnson battles for a place in the Senate against a popular and populist governor of Texas who was no politician, having made his name as a folksy radio personality, is a classic illustration of the power of money on politics. It was oil money versus money from the beer and spirits industry. Nobody comes out of it looking good, which makes for a satisfying conclusion after Caro has shown so thoroughly that neither side deserved to win.