The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson: The Means of Ascent

Author: Robert Caro
First Published: 1990
Genre: biography
Review Date: 24.05.25

In the feverish, frantic atmosphere of the present, it can be difficult to tell right from wrong. The historian’s view on the other hand is crisp and clear. Robert Caro’s second instalment of The Years is another analogue of The Master of Go. The premise – why we need almost 500 pages on a single senate election – is that a moment of transition produces a clarity absent during the humdrum operation of things. It is during the coup d’état that we see the men behind the curtain, not during daily business.

What exactly does Caro want to show us? The precise moment in which Texas democracy outgrew the human-sized world of the pre-War era. Like the Master of Go, the forces of old and new are personified: the former, in Coke Stevenson, “Mr Texas”, a person so impossibly upstanding it is hard to believe he is real, and, the latter, in Lyndon B. Johnson, a man who you suspect could outplay any political operator in history.

The Old: Coke Stevenson

Coke Stevenson is a good man in such an uncompromising way that it makes the modern person ashamed. He cannot be bought, intimidated, cajoled, or seduced. He is entirely self-sufficient and had been since a young man, owning his own land, growing his own food if necessary, refusing to partake in modern technology he cannot fix himself (the telegraph; the aeroplane).

With his independence he devotes himself to improving his ranch and serving the local poor as a lawyer (entirely self-taught, by the light a campfire, whilst carrying freight as a 16 year old from dawn to dusk). He is a man of integrity, a champion and worshipper of justice, a kind father, a lover, a man who enjoys life. Active in politics only because he is forced by his friends and the locals of Texas, eager always to return to his wife, children, and farm.

In Coke, Caro projects – and finds, because “the image is so close to the man” – a lost dream. He is beloved of the state, referred to as “Mr Texas.” When he campaigns, he does so in person, one town at a time, meeting residents and having casual conversations with them. His sheer force of personality – and self-evident goodness – are enough that he can actually win elections doing this. In fact, he wins every election he enters. Except one.

He represents the old Texas in Caro’s epic: a world in which a good man could count on votes because of the quality of his character and the testament of his deeds. Where word of mouth, altered a little every so often by the occasional local newspaper, remains strong and reliable enough to identify and select the Coke Stevensons of the world.

The New: Lyndon Baines Johnson (‘LBJ’)

Enter Lyndon B. Johnson. From The Path to Power, it is by now clear LBJ is abnormal in many respects:

LBJ is unnaturally driven – almost killing himself either in helicopter crashes or through illness from overwork; possesses an instantaneous vote-winning charisma; remains a skilled reader of men, fluid in his character, morals, and methods in pursuit of his goals. And linked up, in a thousand ways, to power: at his disposal, unlimited funds, the best possible legal advice, and all the powers-that-be, from the local county bosses to the Democratic Party insiders.

He believes in nothing, or, rather, can believe in anything. This makes him impossibly dangerous. I cannot imagine a political context in which LBJ would fail to rise to a position of power. He is the kind of person who would quite easily win a Korean or Japanese death game.

LBJ is a man of the future. His is a story of how money, like water, always finds a way past an obstacle. Once business realised substantial benefits could accrue from buying politicians – as Brown & Root ascertained with their immense Federal contracts – pressure accumulated. But how, exactly, does one buy an election? What would the conduit be for their immense, apparently limitless funds?

Enter Johnson’s new techniques:

With Brown & Root’s money, Johnson floods the airways with his radio shows, his newspapers, his paid cronies who, unbeknownst to the true locals, spread rumours at the grassroots level. Whilst Coke Stevenson tours one town at a time in his Model-T, Johnson is travelling to hundreds via helicopter, spreading lies about Stevenson with his henchmen in radio and print, and literally buying votes in the Southern districts.

The effect of this contrast?

The problem with using these techniques is that they short-circuit rational debate itself. True, thanks to his Civil Liberties, Stevenson is free to criticise Johnson’s massive funding, his enormous entourage, his mysterious backers (“the interests”), and does. But it didn’t matter, because:

In a liberal, democratic society, the solution to public problems is via public debate. The deeper problem is that the new technology allows money to be more directly converted into persuasion, thus distorting the very space in which a solution is supposed to be developed. The fire is burning down the fire station. This is the first degeneration of American political life Coke Stevenson comes face to face with.

Somehow, Coke is able to overcome these obstacles: his character is sufficiently mythical, sufficiently powerful – and the opinion of the masses (a ‘bedrock’) is sufficiently immune to propaganda – that he wins the popular vote. Johnson steals the election anyway, with a combination of old-fashioned ballot-stuffing and very modern bureaucratic violence (courtesy of elite-lawyer Abe Fortas).

And thus, Stevenson meets the other perversion of the modern era: the abuse of bureaucracy, whether legal or administrative, in favour of those in Power. Johnson finds that money can not only buy minds and votes, but it can buy the specialised experts needed to manipulate the levers of power. In a theme repeated by Andy Wightman (“The Poor Had No Lawyers”) and Katherina Pistor (“Coding Capital”) as society gets more complex it needs skilled technocrats, and these technocrats work for Capital.

The “Winner”

LBJ wins – obviously – but Caro poetically implies that Coke Stevenson was the true winner, for he meets his true love and lives in a state of paradise in his Ranch. Conversely, LBJ continues his somewhat miserable, neurotic life of power-grubbing, with a wife he treats like dirt and friends he regards as tools, before dying young of a heart attack.

I am not satisfied with this ending. Stevenson is essentially the protagonist of a Capra film, with the minor differences that he actually exists and, unlike Mr Smith, Stevenson loses to the ‘Johnson Machine’:

The enduring question, left unanswered by Caro, is whether capital inevitably perverts democracy, and its institutional operators, when it accrues in a sufficient volume. Is America inevitably a plutocracy, or did it take a wrong turn somewhere (the JFK assassination; LBJ’s “credibility gap”; Citizens United?). There are many non-plutocratic democracies – the stable Nordics or sensible Swiss model – but are small they tend to rely on an extreme social cohesion which can restrain capitalism.

What we need is a world in which capital can be blocked at every level: in the technocrats (who must owe their allegiance to the people, not their clients); in the press (who must be prevented from being seduced or bought out); and, above all, in the lone, dynamic individual, whose energy is both a blessing, in the form of the Good Wizard, and a Terrible Evil if left unmoored from morality of decency.

In short, if we want to prevent the distortions of capital and “power”, we have several possible options:

1. Anarchism. Reduce or even abolish the state (as there will be nothing for capital to influence, and no levers for bureaucrats to pull); limit population growth; and therefore also most technological progress. Possibly Stevenson’s preferred approach.
2. Bureaucracy. Restrain capitalism through administrative action in an independent non-democratic technocratic elite (the EU; Germany; Communist Russia; Modern China; the British Civil Service).
3. Culture. Allow capitalism to flourish, but set up barriers to what money can purchase through self-sustaining, autonomous cultural networks (18th – 19th century Britain; the Nordic consensus; lost-decade Japan; Singapore) which extend their roots down into local culture. Perhaps supplement with clever systems design, like community land holding, communally owned/funded media companies, and democratic election.
4. Transcendent Reason. Present in the ‘competency porn’ books written by rationalists (e.g., Dath Ilan), this is the political outcome of the rationalist’s dream, and the Romantic Liberal, Spiritual Solution, whereby everyone actually agrees on everything under conditions of equal knowledge and epistemic skill.

Importantly, for (3) to function (likely with some additional institutional engineering, and thus a degree of (2), we need to believe that even though a cultural network might degrade, and many have actually done so many times before under the weight of capitalism, they need not do so. Victories are temporary but defeats are never final.

On the other hand, to adopt the “cultural” view of (3) opens up a new world of conformity, insider-baseball, and localism. Can you stomach small-town dynamics on a national scale? Is it not easier to just have maximum optionality, free from any social burdens, even if it means our best and brightest also live free – free, that is, of any moral obligations towards us?