The Years of Lyndon Johnson

I read Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, the first volume in the now four-volume Years of Lyndon Johnson series, in 1990. The second volume, Means of Ascent, had just been published to great acclaim, and so I read the first volume (which had been published a decade before, when I was still in high school and completely uninterested in Lyndon Johnson) and then immediately ran out and bought Means of Ascent in hardcover because I couldn’t wait - literally couldn’t wait - for the paperback edition to come out. 

When I first learned about this series, I think I recall reading that Caro, already famous for The Power Broker, his huge biography of Robert Moses, had intended to write a two-volume biography of LBJ. The first volume was supposed to cover his early life and his political career through his time in the Senate. Then the second volume was to cover his time as Vice President, President, and his last few years at the LBJ Ranch. But after writing about half of the first volume and finding himself nowhere near Johnson’s first term in the House, he realized that he might - just might - need a third volume. He published that third volume, Master of the Senate, in 2002 and as you might guess from the title, it covers Johnson’s Senate years but not his years as JFK’s Vice President nor his own presidency. 

Passage of Power, volume 4, was published in 2012. It covers the years 1958 to 1964, so it doesn’t even touch Johnson’s real presidency, only his interregnum year as JFK’s successor. A fifth volume is expected to cover Johnson’s one-term elected presidency and his few years in retirement until his death in 1973. On the one hand, the hugely eventful and consequential Johnson presidency from 1965 to 1969, not to mention Caro’s track record, would suggest that it might not be unlikely that Caro would break those last few years into two more books, bringing the series up to six. And I would be all in for this. On the other hand, he is already in his 80s and probably needs to wrap this up before he literally runs out of time. According to Caro’s Wikipedia page, he has about 600 pages of volume five in the can. Not sure if that’s enough to cover the 1965 civil rights legislation, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the assassinations, and the protests. Pretty sure it’s not. It’s been well over 40 years, about half of Robert Caro’s life, and it seems that he’s nowhere near finished with Lyndon Johnson. And so neither am I. 

*****

Back in the 90s, I tore through Means of Ascent and Path to Power. Means of Ascent, especially, just took over my life for days. I remember reading the pages and pages of exposition on the misery and poverty of the Texas Hill Country before electrification made life bearable for the Hill Country’s poor farmers and workers and housewives. As a young Congressman, Lyndon Johnson fought to bring New Deal rural electrification programs to the Hill Country, and was a hero to the Texas poor and working class for the rest of his life. Path to Power opens with the lead up to Johnson’s famous 1965 Voting Rights Act speech, two minutes that ended with the former Southern segregationist looking straight into the TV camera and echoing the words of the civil rights movement : “We Shall Overcome.” There is just no way for readers to understand the full significance of these moments in Lyndon Johnson’s political career and his place in the middle of the American century without knowing the full back story, and Caro doesn’t take shortcuts. He doesn’t spare a detail no matter how many pages - or how many volumes - it takes. 

I have no idea why, but I never got around to reading Master of the Senate, though I do have a hardcover copy that I bought at a library book sale. And until last week, I didn’t even know that volume four had been published, though that happened over a decade ago. 

That's the difference between my life when I first read Robert Caro and my life during the last 20 years. Not only did I have lots of time to read but I also had lots of time to read about books and think about what to read next. Understand, of course, that hindsight is 20/20. At the time, I didn't feel like I had lots of extra time. I was a young person with a job and friends, and I thought I was busy busy busy, from morning to night. But now I know that I had all the time in the world. 

Reading Robert Caro again now feels like a long summer day of reading when I was young, when I looked up from a page after an hour or three, a little disoriented, lost to the world in the middle of the 20th century in Washington DC and the Texas Hill Country. Lyndon Johnson was the American century itself, huge and consequential and so complicated that it literally takes volumes to describe. 

*****

Yesterday, I heard an NPR story about Robert Gottlieb, Robert Caro’s longtime editor, who died this year. Caro apparently continues to work on volume 5 of the series. I wish him good health and long life for his own sake of course, but like many other Robert Caro fans, I also want to see him finish this project, or at least to finish and publish one last volume. I’m going to go back and read Master of the Senate, even though I’ll be reading it out of sequence; and I might go back and re-read Means of Ascent and Path to Power again, too. I can’t imagine that anyone could understand Lyndon Johnson, and his place in 20th century American history in less than hundreds of thousands of words. I can’t imagine that it’s possible to make sense of him in anything less than four or five or six enormous volumes. And I can’t imagine that anyone else will ever write a biography even remotely like the Years of Lyndon Johnson series.