Caro's latest LBJ installment: "Passage of Power"

Business remains brisk and posting has been light for weeks now, so here's a review at the WaPo from the recently published Lyndon biography by Robert Caro.

The book opens in the rump years of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, with our hero — or should that be antihero? — contemplating a presidential run. It chugs through the grand detour of John F. Kennedy’s reign, with LBJ sulking on the sidelines. And it ends in the first weeks of Johnson’s presidency, which has been thrust upon him by JFK’s assassination.

Although these are, for Johnson, years of relative inaction, Caro infuses his pages with suspense, pathos, bitter rivalry and historic import — with Robert F. Kennedy in particular emerging as a nearly co-equal, second lead in the psychodrama, always looming offstage and threatening frequently to steal the spotlight from his arch rival.

In Caro’s account, LBJ comes across by turns as insecure, canny, bighearted, self-defeating, petty, brilliant, cruel and, of course, domineering. In the opening pages, he longingly eyes the presidency but, psychologically paralyzed, can’t bring himself to declare his candidacy or enter even a few primaries. Instead, he rages at the upstart Kennedy, who shows unforeseen proficiency in the old game of locking down governors and state Democratic Party leaders for the convention and in the new game of winning over the masses via television.

When Kennedy claims the party’s mantle in Los Angeles and searches for a running mate, a different Johnson suddenly appears: calculating, cagey, capable of subsuming his contempt for Kennedy to a steely desire to place himself next in line for the presidency. LBJ has staff members look up how many presidents had died in office and then does the cruel math, admitting in many conversations — and Caro recounts several of them — that such a route is his best hope of becoming president himself.

About a decade or longer ago I went with some online friends -- we were meeting offline -- to the LBJ library, which I always have considered a tour de force of the man's life. I was not an admirer of Johnson so much as I was in awe of him, much like Caro (and everybody else for that matter).  In our group of about ten was a guy who had fought in Vietnam, come home and protested the war, been gassed, arrested, etc. I did not know this prior to our tour; in fact I found out about a year or so later. As we left the library I asked him how he liked it and he said he didn't. I apologized (I had organized the trip) and he shrugged and said, 'no problem", so I forgot about the incident.
Sometimes my superhuman ability to empathize with others fails me. Anyway...

When Kennedy is shot in the Dallas motorcade, Johnson is transformed again — in an instant, according to Caro. Facedown on the floor of his car, a Secret Service member’s foot planted in his back, Johnson is magically possessed by self-assured calm. Rising to the immense challenges before him, he guides the country with a strong hand through the dark days of November using Kennedy’s martyrdom to realize his slain predecessor’s unfulfilled agenda, although not without exacerbating already-miserable relations with Robert Kennedy.

Like Popeye after a can of spinach, the once-impotent Johnson finds his legislative powers revived. The previous summer, as Kennedy was preparing to introduce at long last a civil rights bill, Johnson had advised Ted Sorensen, JFK’s close aide, to wait until he passed other key legislation first, because Southern senators would hold it hostage. “I’d move my children [the other bills] on through the line and get them down in the storm cellar and get it locked and key[ed],” he urged, but to no avail.

In December, however, Johnson, now president, undertakes a series of brilliant legislative maneuvers, which Caro deliciously recounts, to pick the locks of the congressional committees that had been caging up Kennedy’s controversial civil rights and tax bills and set them free.

If only Lyndon's ghost had provided some inspiration to Barack Obama with respect to the Affordable Health Care Act. Can't blame LBJ in the grave for someone else's lack of leadership, though.

Read the rest here. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to reading the book itself.

The Weekly Slow-Jam Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is slow-jamming this week's roundup.  

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees Republicans holding on to private power at the expense of children.

More Congressional candidate interviews from Off the Kuff, who has conversations with Marc Veasey, Ramiro Garza, and Anthony Troiani.  

BossKitty at TruthHugger takes a vacation from the sanitized, filtered, Hollywood marketing of political candidates and looks at the world, specifically the dramatic trial in Norway for a mass murderer has unified civilized Europeans who sang ... To Annoy The Monster.

The myth of the disgruntled Texas Republican: WCNews at Eye On Williamson says they're like a GOP Chupacabra; we always hear about them, but never actually see one. Deeply unhappy Republicans? Don't be so sure.

Greg Abbott and Susan Combs have both, in the past year, made the serious mistake of exposing millions of Texans to identity fraud by failing to safeguard their social security numbers. Both seek a promotion to higher office in 2014. Is there ANY amount of incompetence and malfeasance a Texas Republican can be guilty of and NOT get elected? PDiddie at Brains and Eggs doesn't have confidence that the answer is 'yes'.

BlueBloggin wants Americans to understand there is always more to sensational stories in the headlines: UpDated: What is Adrenarche and Why Are America's Services Sexually Immature.

 Libby Shaw nails it again over at TexasKaos. She explains why she is hoping 2012 is a "buyer's revenge" election, a judgement on the kiss-ups, brain dead zombies and other assorted creatures that got elected in 2010. See it here: Gov. Oops Grovels for Norquist While Houston Business Leader Kowtows to Perry.

Neil at Texas Liberal wrote about Dick Clark and Johnny Rotten.

That old black magic

As practiced by Republicans on Democrats in Harris County. Some background likely is in order unless you are an HCDP insider.

An occasionally harsh muckraker myself, I admit that I often admire John Coby's wit, and certainly his self-deprecating admission of being full of it.

He let his outrage get the better of him here, however. Elaine Hubbard-Palmer used an excerpt from that post in an e-mail circulated through the D-MARS listserv, as well as Carl Whitmarsh's, with the headline "you people have five positions already", emphasizing some of the most undesirable responses to her candidacy against incumbent Judge Steven Kirkland (a close family friend, in the interests of full disclosure). Perhaps, Dear Reader, you have also read the story written by the Chronicle's Patti Kilday Hart I excerpted in this post which detailed the curious circumstances surrounding the recruitment efforts by Republicans of a primary opponent to Kirkland.

This contentiousness, and the instigators behind it, is mirrored in the contested primary for Harris County Chair between Lane Lewis (like Kirkland, a gay man) and Keryl Douglas (like Hubbard-Palmer, an African American woman). Forget the kerfuffle over the e-mail's digital autopsy; when you're a Democrat and a Kubosh shows up at your press conference to stand beside you in support, you know something is amiss.

In my recent Democratic Party experience, as well as my humble O, this is a recurring problem: oily Republican operatives mucking around in Democratic primaries -- as they are in the CD-07 primary between James Cargas and Lissa Squiers, as they did when Chris Bell ran for the Texas Senate 17th seat (remember Stephanie Simmons?), as they have done often in elections past.

Let's first establish that Judge Kirkland is a fine judge worthy of re-election. Let's also note that Ms. Hubbard-Palmer is certainly entitled to challenge him -- or anyone else -- in this or any other contest. It's the barely cloaked agendas of the puppeteers off stage that must be examined.

Driving wedges -- racial, sexual, what have you -- among Democrats is a successful strategy as long as Democrats allow Republicans to make it one. To be clear: differences of ideology are discussions that are vigorous, worthwhile, and worth having; the direction of the party, so to speak. Liberal and progressive Democrats and conservative ones -- so-called Blue Dogs, but they were also called Boll Weevils in another time -- are continually striving for control of the national agenda. Competition of ideologies are likewise part of the history of the TDP. As I am sure I have mentioned here a time or two before, one of the reasons John F. Kennedy came to Texas in November of 1963 was to mend a rift between Texas liberals (led by Sen. Ralph Yarborough) and Texas conservatives (led by Gov. John Connally).

So for Democratic fortunes, it's not that there are differences of opinion so much as what is at the heart of those differences. The truth is that Democrats just don't have the luxury of dividing into warring factions and still get themselves elected like Republicans can in Texas.

If Democrats refuse to acknowledge (or if they just don't care) that they are once again being -- indeed, have long been -- manipulated in this fashion, then that's certainly their prerogative. While there have been several prominent leaders, Rodney Ellis and Garnet Coleman among them, who have publicly decried these most recent efforts to divide, the sad history is that whoever prevails in primaries like these winds up being damaged goods in November. And that takes place in a county where it is difficult enough as it is for Democrats to get elected and re-elected.

The GOP seems on every level -- national, state, and local -- to be exploiting the worst of human instincts for political gain, from their non-stop racist diatribes against President Obama to the unrelenting assault on women's reproductive choices to this "let's start a fight between the blacks and the gays" business we are seeing in Harris County this cycle. I'm hoping Democrats can rise above the hate being fomented by outside agitators and nominate the most qualified individuals who best represent the values of the Democratic Party. And, most importantly, unite behind those nominees for the general election. Because if they can't, 2012 might wind up just as grim as 2010 was.

And that would be unspeakably bad for the county, bad for the state of Texas, and bad for the nation.

I simply have diminishing confidence with every passing day that this outcome is possible, however. So if I'm going to lose anyway, I'm going to lose with my progressive principles intact, which is why I'm actively supporting candidates of the Texas Green Party in 2012.

Because they don't allow themselves to be compromised by either money or bigotry.

Update: Neil has also posted about the Kirkland/Hubbard-Palmer unpleasantry.