More on LBJ

More from The Passage of Power, Robert A Caro’s fourth volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

LBJ is another example of the Phaeton Theory, that paternal loss in later childhood contributes to unusual ambition. I have applied it to Tony Blair (aged 11 when his father had a stroke), John Major (aged 12 when his father went bankrupt), James Callaghan, David Lloyd George and Henry Asquith (aged nine, 10 and seven respectively when their fathers died).

LBJ was 14 when his father’s ranch failed in 1922 and the family was forced to rely on handouts from neighbours and credit from shopkeepers. His father was to die in 1937 “as a penniless bus inspector; the only thing he had to leave his children was a gold watch and a legacy of the townsfolk’s sneers”.

He was an earthy realist, a style of politician quite different from the idealism and fine rhetoric of a John F Kennedy. “It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things,” LBJ “often declared”, according to Caro.

In particular, LBJ did not get on with Bobby Kennedy. “Did you ever see two dogs come into a room and all of a sudden there’s a low growl, and the hair rises up on the back of their necks?” George Reedy, who was LBJ’s White House press secretary, asked Caro. “It was like that … Somehow he and Bobby took one look at each other and that was it.” (I once saw, or heard, something like that when I was talking to Alan Milburn in about 2006 and George Osborne, walking past unobserved by me, had come into Milburn’s field of vision.)

Some of the incidental detail is telling. The kind of small town in which LBJ grew up is summoned by a remark about his father, who went to church to please his wife and who drank now and then, although, “as Johnson City knew, ’sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster’”.

In describing the pointlessness of the Vice-Presidency, Caro recalls a 1930s Gershwin musical, Of Thee I Sing, in which none of a party’s leaders “can recall the name of the party’s vice presidential candidate”; and “after the election the only way he can get into the White House is by joining a guided tour”.

Caro also has an eye for the phrases of other historians. He quotes Theodore Draper on the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba: “One of those rare events in history – a perfect failure.”

The LBJ story is interesting for what it says about lies in politics. Not just LBJ’s lies and the voting malpractice that got him elected to the Senate, but the Kennedy campaign’s lies. When LBJ’s surrogates raised the subject of JFK’s health in their brief competition for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, Bobby said that his brother “does not have nor has he ever had the ailment described classically as Addison’s Disease”, which is what had been alleged. This involved some sophistry about the form of the disease suffered by JFK, and Ted Sorenson, JFK’s speechwriter, went further: “He is not on cortisone,” he told a reporter, flatly, “evidently feeling himself justified by the fact that Kennedy was taking not cortisone but a cortisone derivative”, says Caro.

Caro is matter-of-fact about LBJ’s corruption as President, too, telling how he secured a written promise of support from the owner of the Houston Chronicle, which had endorsed Richard Nixon in 1960. LBJ obtained the letter in return for federal permission for its owner, John T Jones Jnr, who was also president of a Houston bank, to merge it with another Texas bank.

And yet, for Caro, it seems that LBJ was redeemed by the civil rights bills that he wrote into law as President, having stood as a senator with the South against civil rights. Caro quotes what LBJ said to Richard Goodwin, his adviser: “In the Senate I did the best I could. But I had to be careful. … But I always vowed that if I ever had the power I’d make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it. And I’m going to use it.”

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• stonedwolf

  You’re covering a vast time-span and finding some examples. You could equally apply this theory to any astrology sign – you’ll find plenty of examples of powerful people of any one particular star sign.

  What you must do – won’t do but must do – is show the statistical probability of late-youth patriarchal disaster generally, then show the ratio among the powerful.

  Otherwise you can re-route this to the “Articles To Which The Answer Is No” column.

• Toocleverbyhalf

  Yes indeed, what’s the “effect size” for example?

  PS I think LBJ was rather a fine president, as if anyone cares…

• stonedwolf

  He was certainly a more effective, and more liberal, President than Kennedy.

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Morrow/100001131639170 Robert Morrow

  Lyndon Johnson played a critical role in the JFK assassination. If you
  want to get quickly “up to speed” on the JFK assassination, here is what to
  read:

  1) LBJ: Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination
  by Phillip Nelson

  2) JFK and the Unspeakable:Why He Died and Why
  it Matters by James Douglass

  3) Brothers: the Hidden History of the Kennedy
  Years by David Talbot

  4) The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour
  Hersh

  5) Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty by
  Russ Baker

  6) Power
  Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson by Jablow Hershman

  7) Google
  the essay “LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK” by Robert Morrow

  Google
  “National Security State and the Assassination of JFK by Andrew Gavin
  Marshall.”

  9) Google
  “Chip Tatum Pegasus.” Intimidation of Ross Perot 1992

  10) Google
  “Vincent Salandria False Mystery Speech.” Read everything Vincent Salandria
  ever wrote.

  11) Google
  “Unanswered Questions as Obama Annoints HW Bush” by Russ Baker

  12) Google
  “Did the Bushes Help to Kill JFK” by Wim Dankbaar

  13) Google
  “The Holy Grail of the JFK story” by Jefferson Morley

  14) Google
  “The CIA and the Media” by Carl Bernstein

  15) Google
  “CIA Instruction to Media Assets 4/1/67″

  16) Google
  “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence” Harry Truman on 12/22/63

  17) Google
  “Dwight Eisenhower Farewell Address” on 1/17/61

  18) Google
  “Jerry Policoff NY Times.” Read everything Jerry Policoff ever wrote
  about the CIA media cover up of the JFK assassination.