Robert Caro on Obama, LBJ, and JFK

[Joseph McBride]

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

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

The Norton Paperback Post 1960 presidential historians tell us repeatedly that LBJ was the Master of the Senate, knew how to work the legislative branch like no other etc.

They forget the "Congressional" in Ike's original Farewell Address phrase "Military Industrial Congressional Complex".

This enables them to bypass the most important political difference between JFK and LBJ. Sure there were SOME ingredients of backroom in JFK as there would be from any urban Democrat, or heck any US politician. But JFK was using Television to go foreground ... i.e. talking directly to the electorate regardless of regional hierarchical powerbrokers like Congressmen and newspaper owners. The latter were corporate mediating institutions that could prevent coast to coast messaging by the president to the entire country. JFK could do this like no other, not merely because he was so charismatic, but because the new medium of television politics had not been delineated as far as permissibility and rules yet.

For example in his Western Tour of September 1963 JFK was getting standing ovations in Montana and a 15 minute one by the Mormons in Salt Lake City. Think about what that meant in terms of US elites tradition of using Catholic v protestant to divide the working class. On the Conservation Tour JFK turned a 80-20% Senate opposition to the test ban treaty to an 80% majority for its passage, while US magazines openly fretted about the impact of the end of the Cold War on corporate bottom lines.

It was this ability of presidents to speak sideways over the Rockies and back again East, that was assassinated on 11/22. What greater symbolism of the return to the Old Media Regime than Harriman's slumming on the night of 11/22 when he decided to drop in on his New York newspaper in order to personally sync it with Allen Dulles' lone nut syntax. (see Destiny Betrayed, 2nd edition)

Now was TV still important? Of course, but now it knew that those manicurists could cut more than fingernails.

Our corporate, court historians imply that LBJ was more democratic because of his ability to work with Congress. When we remember Ike's original phrase, and also keep in mind that Tabernacle Choir soon to be be erased from history like September's mournful gnats once we realize which medium's message was lost.

IMO the Obama comparison is completely ahistorical which is why it is thrown into the New Yorker article. It is impossible to compare Presidents 50 years after the office of the presidency has become wall paper for the national security state. And the impossibility of that comparison is the most dangerous freight of the JFK Assassination because of what that discontinuity implies about our educational system, our media and the Corporate Capitalism that are the only underpinning of these institutions of pure control.

[Albert Doyle]

Just another hollow misrepresentation of JFK to show him as a rich son dilettante who was out of place in Washington when the true fact is Kennedy's deep understanding of politics and his attempt to address it in a meaningful way is what got him killed. You see what the job of Caro, Chomsky, Dallek, Sabato and others is. These are the henchmen of the status quo whose design it is to put a good spin on the killer state that murdered Kennedy. It's like not being invited to your own funeral while your murderers guard the door.

[Jim DiEugenio]

This is such crap.

In his last volume, the so called legislative genius of LBJ amounted to balancing the budget to get Kennedy's tax program through so that the chair of the committee could tell everyone that he got Johnson to do something.

Uh Bob, are you saying Walter Heller could not have done that for JFK?

And BTW, according to Thurston Clarke, whose book is looking better and better, Look Magazine did an in depth survey in 1964 to see if Kennedy's program would have passed anyway. It would have. Can't wait to see how Caro deals with that one.

As I wrote in my review of Sabato, in 1963, Kennedy's great speech on civil rights, Birmingham, Wallace being removed from the gate of Alabama on national TV, and the March on Washington, all of these supplied incredible momentum. I mean by this time, RFK was actually challenging Sam Ervin in public hearings to go to Mississippi with him so he could show the senator just why the law was needed.

Guess what? Sam declined.

Caro is going to try and save Johnson in the last volume in order to deflect the murderous weight of Vietnam. And boy I can't wait to see what Caro does on that issue.

[Joseph McBride]

I hoped against hope long ago that Caro might rise to this
occasion. In a lecture delivered as part of a series at the New York Public Library, cosponsored
by the Book-of-the-Month Club (and printed in EXTRAORDINARY
LIVES: THE ART AND CRAFT OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY, ed. William
Zinsser, 1986), Caro referred to Johnson's "blood feud with the Kennedys,
which is a drama of Shakespearean vividness" (p. 223). I perhaps naively hoped Caro literally
meant what he said by the strong language "blood feud" and would follow
the implications of that insight. But despite his brilliant earlier work (including
his great biography of Robert Moses and three superb and revealing earlier volumes on Johnson), Caro copped out on the assassination. It's not hard to figure out why.

He even buys the lie Johnson told that Rufus Youngblood vaulted
over the seat to protect him when the shots were fired. Senator Ralph Yarborough (who was
riding in the back seat of that convertible with the Johnsons) told
me the true story in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE and
called Johnson's account "a cock-and-bull tale." And yet though Caro
should have known better, he goes on and on about this fairy tale
for phony dramatic effect. As if the event needed hyping -- unless
the historian figuratively wanted to throw his own body over Johnson.

Such factual details, as important as they are, pale
before Caro's wholesale buying-into the account of
the President's Commission on the Assassination
of President Kennedy, as the "Warren Commission"
was actually called.