Making the Best of a Bad Bargain

For many years, though passionately interested in labor history and in contemporaneous Americana, I had no interest at all in the two categories of historiography that most pack the bookstores:  Presidential history and military history.   The latter category has still not made my reading list; en revanche,  I now am privileged to work in an area that helps save the lives of our soldiers, which is much better than reading books.   But biographies of Presidents are now among the works I read with most appreciation and attention;  and it came about in a significantly indirect way.

It was about twenty-five years ago.  Robert Caro, who has up to this very day  continued to dedicate his life, selflessly, to the depiction and even re-animation of a very self-ful man, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was giving a talk on the Princeton campus, from which I lived bicycling-distance away.  I’d never read a line of his, but his name was in the news, so I dropped by, from simple idle curiosity.

The university had not played this talk up, particularly -- none of the solemn ceremonial auditorium affairs, such as they put on for the likes of Harold Pinter and Martin Rees (of which you may read satirical accounts in my upcoming book Princeton Follies) -- it took place in a nondescript smallish classroom;  the only touch of celebrity was that Toni Morrison did drop by.  (She and Caro embraced each other;  apparently all famous people automatically know each other, even if they are in totally different fields.)   And his talk, as it turned out, was completely in keeping with the venue:  none of the parading of big names, the strutting and rattling of sabres, which is what attracts most readers to the Presidential and military historical genres:  but simply a description of what life was like in rural Texas, during the 1930’s, before electricity came in.

Now, this was Americana -- or let us indeed dub it americana, with a modest minuscule -- and it held the audience spellbound.   It was one of the most gripping talks I’ve ever attended, and -- unlike the common experience of all of us, even with gripping talks -- I actually remember, a couple of decades later, most of what he said.  However, I won’t take your time by telling you any of it -- let him tell it himself, go buy his books.  For the point was not the picturesqueness of the privation (worthy of Hugo and Zola), but the difference it made when a then-obscure politician named Lyndon Baines Johnson dedicated his considerable energies to bringing rural electrification to Texas, and the difference it made.

Since then, the indefatigable Mr Caro has written many volumes, each of several hundred pages, about this man and his times;  panting along behind him, I have so far managed to read only as far as his time in the Senate.   Righly told, such a saga enfolds the full sweep of arma virumque, with the Presidency only as the eventual crown.

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NPR just broadcast a noteworthy interview with Mr Caro, asking him, as a Presidential historian, to assess the administration of President Obama, now upon his reelection. 

The interviewer began in the typical, tired, leading-the-witness fashion, asking whether the historian had any concerns about Obama’s “ability to wield power” (reminiscent of the wink-nudge use against him of the word “naïve” during the first campaign).  And rather than simply say “No” (in which case we’re in he-said/she-said, back where we began), the canny Mr Caro took a surprising route.

He noted, first, that President Obama had already very effectively wielded power, in passing the healthcare bill where, for decades, others had failed.  Now, he added, “it is a bad bill” -- but then veered away from the stale debate on this, and recalls Lyndon Johnson’s painstaking success in the Senate in 1957, in managing to push through a Civil Rights bill, for the first time in many a moon.  Then Caro added -- surprisingly, it’s not the sort of thing people want to say out loud, -- (I paraphrase from memory) “That too was a bad bill, and Johnson knew it.  But he had finally broken the dam.  The bill itself could be twiddled with later.”  And that is precisely the case with Obamacare.

Still trying to patronize the President, the interviewer added the catty question, whether maybe Obama has “something to learn” from LBJ.  Caro came right back (again, I paraphrase):

“You know, we’ve just been talking about domestic issues; but there is also the international.  President Obama has managed to wind down two wars;  whereas Johnson got us into one -- Vietnam.  I don’t think Obama has anything to learn from LBJ.”