Book Review: The Path to Power

Robert Caro's narrative of the early career of LBJ shows us the world America left behind, for good and ill

This week’s article is going to be a bit different. Instead of talking about some obscure quirk of policy or current events, we will be dissecting a book from 1982.

You remember books, right? They’re like an iPad that only runs one app, never has to be charged, and costs 1/10th as much.

The particular app to be discussed today is Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, specifically the first volume, The Path to Power.

Caro’s biography of America’s 36th president is considered the yardstick by which all other presidential biographies are measured. Pretty much every person of note in politics has read it. Or rather, they claim to have read it. It may be worth taking with a grain of salt whether anyone in the public eye has the time to read four published volumes that contain a combined 3,000 pages and almost 2,000,000 words, with a promised fifth volume supposedly coming in the near future.

Yet those 2,000,000 words are well worth reading. Caro’s style of prose lend the often dry subject of biography an almost novelistic air that is incredibly compelling and exceedingly hard to put down. Few books can manage the impressive feat of spending almost 50 pages on the financial and campaigning dynamics of the 1937 special election to Texas’s 10th House District without boring the reader to tears.

But beyond being able to craft an engrossing narrative out of the life of Lyndon Johnson and his friends, allies, confidants, and enemies, Caro’s work is an invaluable window what was lost in the move from the past to the present, what we’ve kept, and what shouldn’t have been discarded so hastily.

The Past is a Foreign Country. An awful, awful foreign country.

In digesting Caro’s richly realized portrait of the Texas Hill Country that birthed and shaped Lyndon Johnson, one thing is made eminently clear.

Life in the past sucked.

This is particularly evident in Chapter 27: The Sad Irons, which details the agonizing experience of life without electricity.

If you haven’t read the book, try partaking in the following exercise:

Think about the chores you engage in on a regular basis. Laundry, cooking, washing dishes, shopping, and so on. Now think about the tasks that seem so minor the term “chore” seems too substantial to describe them. Bathing, using the toilet, deciding to go to sleep, and waking up.

Now imagine trying to do all those things without electricity and running water.

Do you want to wash your clothes? You’re going to have to haul up to 200 gallons of water from the nearest source, heat it up, wash, scrub, rinse, and hang every article, one by one. Conservatively, this will take you four hours of nonstop work.

Feeling hungry? You’d better be a big fan of pickled foods and preserves, because you’ve got no refrigeration and fresh produce spoils in a day or two.

Are you feeling hot? Unless you have time to jump in the river¹, you’re just going to have to suck it up because there’s no air conditioning in 1930s Texas.

Are you bored? That’s going to be a constant feeling since you’ve got no radio and nowhere to go most of the time. You could read a book, but you’d better be good at reading next to a single flickering candle that barely illuminates the page of one of the small collection of books you own.

Do you need to take a dump? If you’re fancy, you might have an outhouse. Otherwise your best bet is to squat in a bush.

And what happens when you’re done? Well, your best choice for wiping is probably some old newspaper², because there’s no way you’re spending any of your meager earnings on paper that can only be used on the toilet. In lieu of that, your best bet might be some leaves or a dried corn cob.

So when someone talks about how much better life was for medieval peasants or pre-industrial farmers, just remember the following:

You will never have to wipe your ass with a corn cob.

credit: Joy Kung

Politics is About People

Moving away from the subject of the world that Lyndon Johnson was born, and its attendant lack of toilet paper, consider this question? What made Lyndon Johnson into the man remembered by history as President Lyndon Johnson?

It certainly wasn’t his place of birth. The Texas Hill Country was never a great center of commerce, politics, or history.

It wasn’t his education. Johnson was educated at a series of unaccredited Blanco County schools before getting a bachelor’s in history and a teaching certification from the Southwest Texas State Teachers College, now Texas State University. That was a good education at the time. But even back then, you’d expect a president or even a House member to at least have a master’s from a high profile university.

You might point to his family connections. Lyndon’s father, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., was a politician himself. But he never ascended past the level of Texas House member, and was forced to retire from politics by a series of unfortunate investments that left the family broke for most of Lyndon’s childhood. Contrast with Johnson’s democratic predecessors in the White House, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, who were born into powerful political families, with connections and career paths at their fingertips from birth. Those were the sort of men for whom the term “scion” was invented. Whatever you might say about Lyndon B. Johnson, he was most certainly not born with the silver spoon in his mouth.

But if Johnson wasn’t born with connections, he definitely had a talent for making them. Caro’s depiction of Lyndon Johnson is of a man who treats Dunbar’s Number not as the limit for how many relationships a human can maintain at once, but as a goal for how many new relationships one needs to establish in a week. You get the sense in The Path to Power that if you spoke to Lyndon Johnson for five minutes at a cocktail party, didn’t see him for five years, then ran into him again, he’d remember everything you talked about. The man was a master of cultivating relationships and exploiting them for political gain. Part of this was certainly his legendary skill at sucking up, being able to be everything to everyone, which was likely the source of his reputation as a man who believed in nothing but his own advancement.

Maybe Corruption isn’t so Bad After All

But as it turns out, this sort of ideological flexibility was key to Johnson’s political ascent. In Caro’s telling, Johnson’s path to political power in Washington started on the Colorado River and flowed through the Buchanan and Marshall Ford³ Dams.

The story of the building of these dams sounds like the plot of a rejected Chinatown knockoff. Without simply quoting Caro’s description in its entirety, these federally funded dam construction projects were the brainchildren of the Brown & Root construction contracting company and Alvin J. Wirtz. Yet these children had conceived out of wedlock, meaning they had been started and halfway paid for without a congressional appropriation, on land not owned by the federal government, both big no-noes that risked torpedoing the project and leaving B&R holding a very heavy and ruinously expensive bag. When the dams’ main supporter in Congress, Representative James P. Buchanan⁴, suddenly died, Brown and Wirtz were left with an empty seat, no champion in congress, a special election, and exactly one candidate with the drive, experience, and moral flexibility to get their projects through the approval and appropriations processes in time to save the company, Lyndon Baines Johnson. In response, the Dam Boys dumped unfathomably large⁵ sums of money on the Johnson campaign, which, paired with LBJ’s manic campaigning drive that nearly killed him by appendicitis, helped Johnson narrowly edge out a win and get the dams finished.

It’s hard to imagine this sort of brazen trading of political favors for campaign funds, alongside repeat acts by Johnson in the 1940 House elections and 1941 Texas special Senate election, happening in today’s political climate. Although perhaps may not be the case for much longer. But perhaps it’s worth asking whether the sort of “corruption” that Johnson engaged in was all bad. It is probably good that there are safeguards to make sure that federal money doesn’t go out to projects that are basically illegal. But at the same time, it’s hard to dispute the results of the system that helped elevate Lyndon Johnson. The dam appropriations Lyndon Johnson helped push through Congress definitely lined more than a few pockets and paid for high living for people like Alvin Wirtz, the directors of Brown & Root, and Lyndon Johnson himself. But they also helped to pay for the dams that electrified the Texas Hill Country and lifted Lyndon Johnson compatriots out of near-medieval squalor. Beyond that, this self-interested style of politics lent itself to odd alliances and compromise far better than our ideologically sorted and polarized world does. The head honchos at Brown & Root and the independent Texas oil prospectors may have been vehement opponents of the New Deal and ardent isolationists. But their relationship with LBJ and the rewards of aiding his political ascendancy were enough to convince them to cast aside their ideological priors and back Johnson’s effort to save the Democrats’ slim house majority in the 1940 elections, very likely saving the New Deal and keeping the US from abandoning Western Europe to the Nazi War Machine. When politics is more about relationships than ideas, the semi-random happenstance of who happens to know who can scramble coalitions in novel ways.

Contrast to the world we live in now, a world Robert Caro had a hand in building, where our political culture, terrified of ever being caught looking wrong, inattentive, corrupt, or discriminatory, has made “doing things” a near impossibility. It’s hard to look at a society where it took longer to install suicide-prevention nets on the Golden Gate Bridge than it did to build the Golden Gate Bridge, where lots can sit vacant for decades waiting for approval to build housing, where the wealthy can use lawsuits to kill green energy projects, where partisanship is so fierce that even bipartisan bills can be killed by politically motivated opportunists, and where simple contracts for software purchase can take months to negotiate due to outdated procurement rules, and not think that perhaps there are still lessons to be learned from style of politics of the Johnson era.

1. which you don’t because you’re the child of a penniless farmer and your every waking hour is ceaseless drudgery

2. if you even have any of those

3. now Mansfield

4. no relation to the pre-Lincoln president or the Nobel Prize winning economist

5. for the time