Lyndon B. Johnson, Dad and Me

In the end, it was no surprise that I turned to books in the aftermath of my father’s death; as much as anything else, a love of reading, and a confidence in the calming power of the written word, was one of the many things that he gave me. What was more unexpected was the identity of the book that offered the greatest solace.

Each of these rendered loss in terms that were helpful, and of course my reading of each was supercharged with a sort of hyper- sensitivity, and I think I left a little of my hurt in the pages of each of them. On the train to the funeral, I read Geoff Dyer’s Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, about that iconic war film Where Eagles Dare, and laughed out loud much of the way there, which is not something I would have thought possible. But in some ways the book – or rather books – that did most to lift me out of the gloom came in the most unexpected form: Robert Caro’s four-volume (thus far) biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Caro’s biography is undoubtedly one of the monuments of American political writing in the modern age. Consisting to date of The Path to Power

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In the end, it was no surprise that I turned to books in the aftermath of my father’s death; as much as anything else, a love of reading, and a confidence in the calming power of the written word, was one of the many things that he gave me. What was more unexpected was the identity of the book that offered the greatest solace.

My first ports of call were natural enough places to turn, and all of them did help. Dad was reading Jan Morris’s tiny book on the vast Japanese battleship Yamato the day before he died, and so that was where I started. In later weeks I picked up James Agee’s A Death in the Family, Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and William Wharton’s extraordinary Dad, an author whom I love, but a book which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pick up again without a great deal of pain. Each of these rendered loss in terms that were helpful, and of course my reading of each was supercharged with a sort of hyper- sensitivity, and I think I left a little of my hurt in the pages of each of them. On the train to the funeral, I read Geoff Dyer’s Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, about that iconic war film Where Eagles Dare, and laughed out loud much of the way there, which is not something I would have thought possible. But in some ways the book – or rather books – that did most to lift me out of the gloom came in the most unexpected form: Robert Caro’s four-volume (thus far) biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Caro’s biography is undoubtedly one of the monuments of American political writing in the modern age. Consisting to date of The Path to Power (1982), Means of Ascent (1990), Master of the Senate (2002) and The Passage of Power (2012), the study traces the brutal political rise of Lyndon Baines Johnson from impoverished origins in the Texas hill country outside Austin to Washington DC, the House and the Senate, and on to his eventual position as running mate and Vice-President of John F. Kennedy. The staggered publication of the work testifies to the staggering scale of its ambition: each decade-long slab of research draws Johnson further along his path to the presi- dency, and the reader further into the peculiar world of the candidate himself. At the end of four books, and somewhere close to 3,500 pages, the story has only got as far as the 1964 election, the point at which Johnson truly made the presidency his own. The next volume, we are promised, will take the reader through those febrile years until 1968 – the stamping of Johnsonian authority on Kennedy’s crumbled Camelot, the passing of the most important Civil Rights legislation in American history, and of course the President’s role in the deepening quagmire that was Vietnam. Caro’s work has been praised in all sorts of ways since its first publication, and each new volume amplifies this chorus. The Path to Power was celebrated as one of the most important political biographies of its time, Master of the Senate won Caro his second Pulitzer prize (his first was for the biography of the New York master-planner Robert Moses), and the cycle is routinely celebrated as an inspiration by people as diverse as Michael Howard and Barack Obama. As far as I know, though, The Years of Lyndon Johnson has yet to receive its due as a tonic for the bereaved. Perhaps that should change. I should state from the outset that Lyndon Johnson had absolutely nothing in common with my father. In Caro’s telling, Johnson was a deceitful, duplicitous bully who rose to power on the strength of fervent ambition. At every level of his ascent – from college politics to local administration, from the House to the Senate, and ultimately to the White House, Johnson secured his authority by combining a minute familiarity with administrative procedure, a terrifying competence and a genuine indifference to the feelings of those beneath him in the grand pecking order. He earned the fear and loyalty of countless underlings, many of whom he trampled over without much thought. He introduced new levels of outside campaign finances to American politics, and new levels of corruption too, making himself staggeringly rich in the process.

None of this was true of Dad. While he was proud of reaching a relatively high level in his university department, and could occasionally go into too much detail when talking about board games, it would be a stretch to call him ruthless, even when playing Monopoly. He never made any enemies who might have resented or plotted against him, and one of his most typical pieces of advice was ‘you cannot be too kind’. And he never escalated the American military presence in Vietnam. Mind you, Dad never passed a major piece of Civil Rights legislation either, which does even up the score a bit. One of the most striking features of Caro’s project is its deft navigation of the ethical swamps of Johnson’s life, and the way in which it initiates the reader into this world. His LBJ is compellingly nasty, and at times repellent, but also impressive in his ambition and his accomplishment. Johnson was brought up in a difficult world, and the Southwest Texas State Teachers College was the summit of his education, so it is hard not to feel on his side as the well-heeled Kennedys and their Harvard advisers sneer at him, or to cheer at the heroism with which he rose to an unprecedented challenge after the assassination in Dallas. Even readers who come to Caro knowing nothing of the intricacies of Senatorial procedure in the middle years of the twentieth century (and I was certainly one of them), should be prepared to be dazzled at Johnson’s transformation of a moribund debating chamber, rendered sclerotic by the filibustering power of the southern Democrats and the ossification of established interests, into a genuinely functioning organ of government. Caro’s is a por- trait of a man in the round, grotesque in many of his aspects, but nevertheless a captivating protagonist.

The books themselves are also vivid works of history. And one of the reasons why they take so long to trace his childhood, boyhood, youth and slow rise to the Senate, is the long contextual digressions that they take along the way. The chapter ‘The Sad Irons’ in The Path to Power describes the (sometimes literally) back-breaking domestic work of women in rural Texas before widespread electrification: the gallons of water drawn (and carried) by hand, the blistering work of washing, starching and ironing, or the preparation and preservation of food against the constant threat of starvation in a world that was on the edge. Caro thus provides the reader with a sense of the world that Johnson himself came from and also illustrates the transformative effect that the advent of affordable rural electrification had on this environment – a project for which Johnson was largely responsible. The account of the Senatorial election of 1948 occupies much of Means of Ascent and is similarly a portrait of politics on the cusp of what we might regard as the modern political age: Johnson cam- paigned by helicopter, besmirched his opponent and stuffed ballot-boxes. And I would never have thought that the sub-commit- tees and back-room deals of the mid-century Senate could possibly be interesting, until I read the third volume in the sequence. It might be a stretch to frame Master of the Senate alongside The West Wing, but the results are no less gripping.

None of this explains, of course, why I found The Years of Lyndon Johnson to be so comforting in a time of grief, and in truth it was only midway through Caro’s sequence that I started to make sense of this myself. One thing lots of people say at funerals, of course, is how multiple people are buried there. There was the man I knew and loved, to be sure – a father, friend and adviser. But also the same person from different perspectives: a loving husband of half a cen- tury, grandfather, brother, colleague, teacher, friend. I was aware of many of these personas, of course, and had seen Dad play those roles while he was alive, but others were less expected, and were all the more pleasing for that. Former colleagues at the university spoke warmly of my father’s teaching and his writing, his willingness to spend time with others and his readiness with a joke. All of this more or less fitted my image of my father, but it was still a surprise to hear of these many unexpected perspectives on an individual who was otherwise so familiar. Again, Johnson was nothing like Dad, but reading Caro’s study did encourage reflection on the multiplicity of all of us, and on the complexity of the human experience. The Years of Lyndon Johnson forms a living testimony to a life well- lived, but it is the biographer, and not his subject, for whom this will provide the most lasting monument, at least in the eyes of this grate- ful reader. At the time of writing, Robert Caro is apparently working on the fifth volume, almost half a century after embarking upon the first research for The Path to Power. The detail and density of his research, the hours spent in the Johnson archive, in libraries across the United States, or criss-crossing the Texas hill country, are apparent in every page of the work, and are overshadowed only by the vibrancy of his prose. This is writing to be savoured, each page a delight. And the accumulation of more than 3,000 of these pages, each the product of weeks of work, creates an impression that is almost sublime in its intensity. The books tell the story of a driven man, who changed the American world through sheer force of will, but there are two lives bound up in them, and both are extraordinary.

Ultimately, of course, I think four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson were a salve for grief in part because they are so long. I finally finished The Passage of Power about four months after I had started the first volume (my reading was tempered with draughts of Margery Allingham and P. G. Wodehouse; even the most assiduous reader needs to offset intense political biography from time to time). By then another season had come and gone without Dad, and we were around the anniversary of his death. It was time passing, of course, that made the biggest difference, blunting the sharp pain of grief: the Caro books are great, but they aren’t a panacea. Still, in their twinned portraits of lives well lived, they do offer a marvellous and engrossing place to hide for a few months.

About the contributor

Andy Merrills lives in Leicester and is eagerly awaiting Volume 5 of the Caro biography. He teaches ancient history and is currently writing a book about a forgotten Latin epic.