27-01-2014, 09:05 AM
The biographer Robert Caro has also been a guest [of Obama at the White House, along with other historians the president has to dinner]. Caro's ongoing volumes about Lyndon Johnson portray a President who used everything from the promise of appointment to bald-faced political threats to win passage of the legislative agenda that had languished under John Kennedy, including Medicare, a tax cut, and a civil-rights bill. Publicly, Johnson said of Kennedy, "I had to take the dead man's program and turn it into a martyr's cause." Privately, he disdained Kennedy's inability to get his program through Congress, cracking, according to Caro, that Kennedy's men knew less about politics on the Hill "than an old maid does about fucking." Senator Richard Russell, Jr., of Georgia, admitted that he and his Dixiecrat colleagues in the Senate could resist Kennedy "but not Lyndon": "That man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it."
. . .
Caro finds the L.B.J.-B.H.O. comparison ludicrous. "Johnson was unique," he said. "We have never had anyone like him, as a legislative genius. I'm working on his Presidency now. Wait till you see what he does to get Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act through. But is Obama a poor practitioner of power? I have a different opinion. No matter what the problems with the rollout of Obamacare, it's a major advance in the history of social justice to provide access to health care for thirty-one million people."
At the most recent dinner he attended at the White House, Caro had the distinct impression that Obama was cool to him, annoyed, perhaps, at the notion appearing in the press that his latest Johnson volume was an implicit rebuke to him. "As we were leaving, I said to Obama, You know, my book wasn't an unspoken attack on you, it's a book about Lyndon Johnson,' " Caro recalled. L.B.J. was, after all, also the President who made the catastrophic decision to deepen America's involvement in the quagmire of Vietnam. "Obama seems interested in winding down our foreign wars," Caro said approvingly.
-- David Remnick profile of Obama in The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/...ntPage=all
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Caro finds the L.B.J.-B.H.O. comparison ludicrous. "Johnson was unique," he said. "We have never had anyone like him, as a legislative genius. I'm working on his Presidency now. Wait till you see what he does to get Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act through. But is Obama a poor practitioner of power? I have a different opinion. No matter what the problems with the rollout of Obamacare, it's a major advance in the history of social justice to provide access to health care for thirty-one million people."
At the most recent dinner he attended at the White House, Caro had the distinct impression that Obama was cool to him, annoyed, perhaps, at the notion appearing in the press that his latest Johnson volume was an implicit rebuke to him. "As we were leaving, I said to Obama, You know, my book wasn't an unspoken attack on you, it's a book about Lyndon Johnson,' " Caro recalled. L.B.J. was, after all, also the President who made the catastrophic decision to deepen America's involvement in the quagmire of Vietnam. "Obama seems interested in winding down our foreign wars," Caro said approvingly.
-- David Remnick profile of Obama in The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/...ntPage=all