Impatient Idealist

How to be Lyndon Baines Johnson:

1. Treat any older more powerful person as a surrogate parent. Flatter extensively and adaptably. If it turns out a surrogate dad hates suck-ups and is raring for a good argument, give him that instead.

2. Find small informal organisations no one cares about, such as a student political body or congressional secretaries' society. Rig elections to win control of these; then, once you have the power to, use them for a wide range of goals such as meeting and flattering additional powerful surrogate parents.

3. Work your staff hard. Try to praise them enough that they don't have nervous breakdowns,
but it's not essential.

3.1. Don't employ anyone who objects to this.

4. Check and recheck every piece of work yourself. If someone doesn't respond to your telegram, write them another making sure your first got through.

5. If there isn't any work to do then make some. (But self-care is important: if you get appendicitis due to the resulting stress, you are permitted to stop working for several days, perhaps as much as a week.)

6. Avoid principle.

7. Be motivated by a ceaseless inner flame.

8. Have a good politician as your actual father and spend your childhood watching how he does it. Copy the useful bits but not the bits that lead him into penury, i.e. his failure to avoid principle. Never quite forgive him for this last.

9. Don't ever have an affair with the lover of one of your most important allies - but hey, everyone has to break one rule, right?

10. Avoid going on the record with your politics. Let everyone you're talking to think you agree with them, ideally by getting around in front of the conversation and saying the things they're about to say.

11. Find rich people who need entrée to Washington; for example, a construction company in desperate financial difficulties whose gigantic semi-legal hydroelectric dam you can smooth the way for. Up-and-coming millionaires from the new Texas oil field are also a good option. Drink their money in deep, tasty draughts. This is guaranteed never to cause any complications later in your country's history.

12. Decide as early as possible that you are going to be President, and never make a decision that could keep you from that goal.



Other notes: Caro only seems to write books about abusive bosses. The relationship between Johnson and his assistant Latimer was painful to read about. At the point where Latimer is saying, “Well, he'd do anything for you and you'd do anything for him,” having lived a life that makes it very clear only the second of these things is true, I thought, "Huh, Pearl and Rose Quartz from Steven Universe had a comparatively functional relationship, all things considered."

Oh, and speaking of, Johnson also puts the hard sell on his prospective wife to marry him after a ridiculously short acquaintance, partly by lying about his own interests. Charming man.

Where did Johnson get his ceaseless inner flame? At least partly, an upbringing in a very poor place by parents who very much believed they deserved more. The book spends a lot of time in the Texas Hill Country, a classic case of 'This place looked like a fertile paradise but only and specifically because no one had been fool enough to do intensive crop-based agriculture to it.' Incredibly poor scrappy farms, worsening by the year, as the fertility of the soil did an up-and-down dance that let people believe the trend might turn upward, even as it continued steadily down. A whole chapter is about what a farm wife's day looked like without electricity. It did not look good. (One of the really concrete good things Johnson does in this book is use his influence as a congressman to get electrification of the Hill Country going.)

This book spans the period from Johnson's grandparents' births to Johnson's first race for a Senate seat. In some ways, the whole front half of it is set up to explain every factor that makes his extremely implausible run for a seat in Congress possible. The later senatorial race is ridiculously corrupt, in at least three different ways, and Johnson loses it for the kind of reason that history, C.J. Cherryh, and Patrick O'Brian are willing to put in their plots, but few other writers seem to be: protagonist suddenly collided with by the second unrelated novel that has been happening offpage.

Does this book need to be book one of a projected five, each the size of a small dog? Ask me again if I get through the rest of them. I certainly don't think I'd have faulted a Lyndon Johnson biographer who spent merely a hundred pages on the historical context of Johnson's family.

Immediately after The Power Broker I had thought 'I need a break from Caro,' so I started listening to Seeing Like a State by James Scott. Caro had spoiled me for it, I could not get on board its rapid jumping through time and space, nor its degree of abstraction, nor its density of detail. I returned to Caro feeling rather as though I had just been seduced by the great man theory of history.