Master of the Senate

Welcome to a new twist in an ongoing Slate experiment. For a few years now, we've been doing our book reviews as epistolary correspondences between two critics—usually big shots in whatever field the book is about. Now Slate is switching to a cast of 12 reviewers, chosen not for their expertise in any one area but because they're curious, sensible, and witty general readers whose criteria for evaluating a book are probably a lot like yours. Each week, you'll hear two of the folks below discussing a new book or group of books. The other Clubbers may interrupt them with comments and questions. And we hope you will, too, by submitting postings to "The Fray," Slate's reader feedback forum.

Participants include:

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

Debra J. Dickerson is the author An American Story. Her next book, The End of Blackness, will be published in October 2003.

James Fallows, the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel.

Jodi Kantor, the New York editor of Slate.

Sarah Lyall, a correspondent in the London bureau of the New York Times.

Nell Minow, the editor of the Corporate Library, which covers corporate governance and performance, and writer of Movie Mom, reviews of films and videos.

Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation and author of the forthcoming Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture.

A.O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times.

Judith Shulevitz, the "Close Reader" columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Erik Tarloff, the author of Face-Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book. (Click here to buy Face-Time and here to buy The Man Who Wrote the Book.)

Ted Widmer, the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City and the co-author of Campaigns: A Century of Presidential Races, a former White House speechwriter, and director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Marjorie Williams, the author of a weekly opinion column for the Washington Post and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Who are these people?

This week, Christopher Caldwell and David Greenberg plow through the third—but not final—volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson.

This week's reading.

Buy the book.

Dear David,

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I think I can anticipate what you think is problematic about Caro's treatment of the 1957 Civil Rights Act: He's trying to make it carry more thematic freight than is justified, right? For one, Caro wants the episode to illustrate Johnson's skill. When the bill is being debated, particularly in the chapter "Yeas and Nays," Caro makes it seem as if Johnson is fighting against nearly impossible odds. And yet, earlier in the book, in his biographical passage on Richard Russell, he highlights Russell's brilliance and cunning by portraying the Southern senators' pro-segregation stance as doomed unless the senators played their hand absolutely perfectly. When Johnson presents his bill, suddenly the Southern bloc—now in tandem with the conservative Republicans behind California's William Knowland—looks invincible again.

For another, Caro wants the battle over the 1957 bill to illustrate Johnson's compassion: It's evidence of his compassion that he is willing to engage in such desperate horse-trading and to alienate his old base.

And yet, throughout, I'm struck by how woefully weak the case for Johnson's "compassion" is. Johnson once yelled at his substitute limousine driver, "Let me tell you one thing, nigger. As long as you are black, and you're gonna be black till the day you die, no one's gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you'll make it. Just pretend you're a goddamn piece of furniture." Wow. This strikes me as a pretty silver-lining-less piece of outright abuse, the worst kind of Jim Crow recreational racism—made worse by the pseudo-pedagogical "listen-to-your-betters" condescension. Caro doesn't read it that way. He says that Johnson "used these epithets, and the pain they caused, in a different way, to teach the employee the lesson Johnson felt everyone had to learn, a lesson Johnson felt would lead to an improvement in the employee's life: that it was necessary to accept reality, to face harsh facts and push beyond them …"

It's good that Caro has recovered this incident, but he has misread it. I find him wholly gullible on the matter of LBJ's sympathy for have-nots. This is the volume where Johnson the "liberal icon" (a cliché, but a useful one here) begins to nudge aside Johnson the realpolitiker, so we're constantly running across passages like this: "And [Johnson, as a young teacher,] saw into his pupils' hearts. 'I saw hunger in their eyes and pain in their bodies,' Lyndon Johnson would say years later. 'Those little brown bodies had so little and needed so much.' " This is schlock. Johnson's straitened upbringing in the Hill Country gave him a vocabulary with which to describe the downtrodden of all races. But the evidence that it gave him a jot of sympathy for them is weak or nonexistent.

Now, having brought this up, I should immediately add that it doesn't bother me. That's because Caro—whom you're right to view as almost as power-drunk as his subject—never loses sight of the fact that, for Johnson, everything always came second to power. To change the subject for a sec, that's why I also agree with you that LBJ is ultimately unworthy of a biography of this depth. Power is one of the most important things in human life, but it is also the least subtle and the most boring. Power-mania renders Johnson's "appetites" and his "compassion" and his "single-mindedness" mere superficialities. I don't think I've ever read a biography of a more two-dimensional person; over the long haul, he emerges as infantile, petty, and tedious.

What happened to make Johnson change from a dug-in seg speaking weepily about "we of the South" to a champion of civil rights? Well, for one, Brown v. Board of Education. For another, the lynching of Emmett Till and a series of other last-ditch outrages rendered Northern opinion rock-solid against segregation. In short, what changed was the political climate, at just the moment Johnson began to think about the presidential nomination in 1960. The New Deal strategist Tommy Corcoran (whose readings of day-to-day events are consistently the most astute things in this book) describes Johnson's bizarre, eleventh-hour effort to throw his name into consideration for the presidential nomination in 1956, after his shilly-shallying had already sent his natural Southern allies over to Adlai Stevenson. Johnson took an important lesson from the obdurate refusal of Walter Reuther and all the Northern Democratic delegations to play ball with him. Says Corcoran: "He really thought these guys were going to come around. Hell, as long as he wasn't with them on civil rights, they were never going to support him!" So, when Johnson trolled the Southern Caucus for votes for the 1957 bill, saying, "We have to give the Negroes something," what he meant was, "You have to give me something"—to run on three years from now. And this is something about which Caro is always admirably clear.

Let me finish by answering the question with which you start your letter: How will Caro fit the remaining 13 years of Johnson's life (actually 16, since this volume wraps itself up rather perfunctorily after 1957) into the remainder of the series? As a practical matter, there cannot be three more volumes. Caro is approaching 70 and writing at a 10-year-per-volume pace. But there's also a problem with two volumes: Johnson's presidency is stuck dead-center of three uneventful years as veep and five uneventful ones as a Texas rancher. So, you'd have to split them in the middle of his presidency—say, in 1965—after the enactment of the civil-rights and social legislation, but before the escalation in Vietnam. My prediction, then, is another door-stopper, maybe even a longer volume than this one, which would come out around 2015. Maybe Slate will let us review it.

Best,
C.

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Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. His book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West will be published in the United States in July. David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

Photograph of Lyndon Johnson on Slate's home page by Oscar White/Corbis.

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