Robert Caro
New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 2002, hb $35 (US) £35 (UK)
(But in the UK only £22 from Amazon.com)
This is the third volume in Caro’s biography of LBJ. The first two volumes are wonderful pieces of work, the best biographies I have read; and in many ways this is their equal and deserves the praise it has received. Even if we ignore the story of LBJ, this contains an account of the workings of the US Senate in the 1950s and the mechanics of legislative politics as good as anything I know of. But it is a biography and as Johnson’s biographer Caro has flunked an important part of his subject. He tells us about Johnson’s personal habits: his pride in his big dick, ‘Jumbo’, and his public displays of it (the late Alan Clark MP was also a political flasher); his habit of taking a crap with the toilet door open and making people have conversations with him while doing it (the late Robert Maxwell did this); and his sadistic, bullying attitude to his staff. All that, and more, we get. LBJ was a seriously strange person.
What we don’t get is a decent explanation of how Johnson got rich after becoming a senator. He mentions that LBJ got rich and offers a brief explanation: LBJ bought a radio station and told people to buy advertising on it if they wanted his favour. There are a handful of references, the only one of substance being this on p. 424:
‘…..by 1951 that [radio] station his wife had bought for $17,500 in 1943 was earning the Johnsons more than $3000 a week…..and in 1951 he and Lady Bird …..were already looking toward the acquisition of a Johnson television station (they would buy that in 1952) that would multiply those profits.’
In Caro’s defence you could argue the radio station was bought in 1943, outside the parameters of this book, and is discussed in some detail in the second volume. But the ‘Johnson television station’ is simply not mentioned again that I noticed and isn’t indexed, though the radio station is. There is no investigation of any kind; not a single interview, no citations. Caro does describe how LBJ became the bagman for Texas money – chiefly oil money – round the Senate but he fudges Johnson’s personal wealth. Apparently he wasn’t curious – but he was curious about almost everything else. Minor events in the Senate in which Johnson played a role are treated in extraordinary detail but about Johnson’s personal corruption we get almost nothing. And there is no reference to organised crime in Texas.
It will be interesting to see how Caro handles the vice presidential years in the next volume. For if Caro isn’t curious about Johnson’s personal wealth, how is he going to handle the Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes scandals which threatened to finish his political career and put him in prison?
The important one is Estes. He was running a classic agricultural subsidies fraud in Texas, getting public money for crops that weren’t being grown. In 1962 money it was producing $20 million a year – we are talking serious money here – with which he was paying off politicians, including Johnson, to work the scam. In 1962/3 this began leaking out and a number of people were murdered in Texas to try and keep the lid on it. In 1963 Vice President LBJ appeared to be going down the pan. The Baker/Estes scandals were threatening to put him in jail. Without the president’s support, LBJ couldn’t turn the inquiries off; and the Kennedys were happy to see the scandals brewing: they wanted LBJ off the ticket for the 1964 election. Then Kennedy was bushwhacked in LBJ’s backyard and his immediate problems disappeared.
This book appeared as I was finishing my little Pocket Essential volume on the Kennedy assassination (see page 19) in which, as well as discussing some of the major events in the investigation of the case, in one chapter I pull together some bits and pieces of evidence – the key piece dating back to 1998 – which show that the whodunit aspect of the case has been solved: LBJ had Kennedy killed to save his political career and keep himself out of jail. It wasn’t the mob, or the CIA, or the anti-Castro Cubans; it was LBJ, a bent Texas politician.