If you clicked in the headline, you know who Robert Caro is: the journalist and biographer who first wrote The Power Broker in 1974, about New York’s powerful and mostly hidden bureaucrat Robert Moses, and then decided to write a biography of Lyndon Johnson. The Path to Power was the first volume, published in 1982. I’m guessing Mr. Caro planned to devote a full decade to the biography—but his most recent installment, 2012’s volume 4 The Passage of Power, just got us to the beginning of Johnson’s presidency.
In my reading, I see Caro shift from a good-government scold who finds LBJ just plain distasteful in the first book, to someone sitting back in near-awe as he sees Johnson embrace civil rights as President. It was always there, his kinship with the downtrodden. But that’s true of so many of us, and LBJ did so much more with his kinship.
(Back in the 1960s I heard of the French expression, Monstre Sacre. I may well have heard it misused. It was described as a term for historical figures who were much bigger than life: Churchill, Stalin, DeGaulle. Johnson is the only one I would place in that group, since.)
Caro still has the 1964 election, Vietnam, and a lot more to go. He wants to spend time in Vietnam to get that part of the story right; COVID has delayed that. He says he’ll do it in one more volume. I’ll need to build a more heavy-duty bookshelf for that book.
Here is my suggestion, Mr. Caro. Take a break from Volume 5. Write now about your own conclusions and feeling regarding Lyndon Johnson. He seems to have completely reshaped American politics—not just “losing the South for Democrats for a generation,” but redefining the parties well into the future. I would love to hear where you have ended up, so far, in weighing this man.