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 Chris,

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Please don't take this the wrong way, but you must be the only person who thinks Caro doesn't portray Lyndon Johnson as petty, selfish, and ambitious enough. The usual rap against Caro is that he subsumes all other motives and considerations to power, as exercised by "larger than life" political officials like Robert Moses and LBJ. You say, in contrast, that Caro gives LBJ too much credit for having "compassion" for black Americans who were long denied their basic rights. I hope you realize you're making life hard for Caro—first he's chided for making Johnson too obsessed with his own advancement, now you're telling him he's gone soft on the unstintingly power-mad LBJ.

I'm more willing than you to allow that Johnson's sympathy with African-Americans was real—though always mixed with a dose of hard bigotry and always weighed against his own political success. But I agree that Caro doesn't make a convincing case for this. And I'll go further: I don't think Caro even believes his own argument that starting with the 1957 civil rights bill, LBJ's compassion managed if not to supersede his ambition then to "be compatible with the ambition, pointing in the same direction."

Some reviewers have asserted that in this volume, unlike its predecessors, Caro gives us an LBJ who is bighearted. I don't see it. Caro doesn't show this compassion at work. As I read the account of the 1957 bill, the whole episode seems like a triumph of LBJ's presidential ambition over his support for black equality (assuming for now, despite your objections, that that support was real).

If LBJ had truly undergone a spiritual conversion, or even some shift that made him identify with the "We" of "We shall overcome" (as he did rhetorically as president) instead of the "We" of "We of the South," he would never have gutted the 1957 bill. He would have put his tremendous talents at cajoling, conniving, bullying, and strategizing in the service of passing a bill with teeth. (It's hard to know, but Caro suggests that a Southern filibuster might not have been insuperable this time around.) The bill that passed was stripped of its critical Part 3, which would have desegregated public facilities; and its Part 4, which aimed to guarantee that blacks could register to vote, was emasculated by a jury-trial provision that ensured that no white Southerner would be punished for voting-rights infractions. (Oddly, Caro never says what was in Parts 1 and 2. No help from the index, either.)

Two problems. First, I think Caro overstates the bill's importance. Yes, it was the first civil rights bill in 80 years and carried symbolic weight. But the notion that what mattered most was "to break the Senate's virginity" (guess whose locution?) strikes me as a rationalization aimed at getting liberals on board, so that LBJ could, when seeking the presidency in 1960, claim he'd passed a historic measure while assuring his Southern base he hadn't betrayed them. Today the 1957 bill isn't considered a major part of the civil rights story, and I think that after Little Rock and Greensboro and Ole Miss and Birmingham and the other shocks of the early '60s, a stronger bill was likely to pass anyway, whether the virginity had been broken or not.

Hence, my main criticism. For Caro, the history of American race relations turns on the whim and presidential ambition of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Caro asserts that "It was Lyndon Johnson who gave them [blacks] those rights," who was their Moses, their "lawmaker." When Johnson "changed," he writes, he "changed the course of American history." Not so. That isn't how history works.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not one who believes that political actors are irrelevant to history, that all change must come from the "bottom up" or derive from social forces. I believe, to use the fashionable academic catch words, that we need to restore "agency" and "contingency" to our historical narratives.

But if there's ever a case of a social movement outpacing politicians, the civil rights movement is it. Often at his best when not discussing LBJ, Caro provides riveting synopses of the Emmett Till case and the Montgomery bus boycott—events that in fact belie Caro's own claims of LBJ's centrality. These interludes show how aggressively blacks began demanding their equal rights in the mid-'50s. You're right to say that the political climate changed and forced the White-House-seeking LBJ to get on board the civil rights bandwagon, even if as a sort of brakeman. But I'd go further and say that Caro's wrong on an assertion that underpins his interpretation: It wasn't LBJ who gave African-Americans their rights. They reached out and seized them for themselves.

I don't want to conclude today by leaving the impression that I wouldn't recommend this book. I would, enthusiastically. I never found the book, or its protagonist, to be tedious or two-dimensional, and I'm kind of surprised you did. Care to explain?

My best,
David

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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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