The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power

R obert Caro has been tracking his great white whale for thirty years now. As with any undertaking of this scale, an aura of legend attaches to the labor. First there is the Ahab-like devotion with which he has pursued the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson. In 1977, not long after publishing his epic biography of Robert Moses, New York City’s master builder, Caro decamped to Texas Hill Country for three years to take in the air of LBJ’s childhood. He spent a night outdoors in a sleeping bag to better fathom the desolation of the territory. Along with his wife, Ina, he has combed through every possible archive and ballot box; his appetite for firsthand impressions from LBJ’s entourage is matched only by his allergy to post-1960 scholarship. All of this facthunting and what you might call Method research has made Caro—who started his career as a reporter for Newsday—something of a hero for American journalists: he is the guildsman who made good and raised their craft to a level that academics can only envy. But he is far from universally admired by historians. Garry Wills and Sean Wilentz have dismissed him as a myth maker who rhapsodizes the life of Johnson into a morality play. In their view, Caro is hopelessly committed to seeing the thirty-sixth president through the prism of good and evil: LBJ the civil rights crusader versus LBJ the scourge of Vietnam. Caro’s anatomy of political power is too crude, they argue; he thinks LBJ’s secret was Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls