Robert Morrow's updated box account of JFK books

[Douglas Caddy]

Robert Morrow today sent me the following invaluable information:

 

 

Alfred Steinberg's 1968 book on Lyndon Johnson also has the best explanation of how we got into the Vietnam War that I have ever read too. After reading Steinberg on LBJ - published in 1968, I can say it is better than anything Robert Caro ever wrote on Lyndon Johnson.

 

My Box account contains many extremely rare and valuable "out of print" books in PDF form on the JFK assassination. Some of them, such as the Billie Sol Estes book, you cannot find used for even $500.

 

My Box account web link is below.

 

Website to Download Rare and very Valuable JFK Assassination Books:

https://app.box.com/s/8b408e6999f8799dfd0a

 

Review by Willam B. Catton of Steinberg’s book:

 QUOTE

 

          If Lyndon Johnson’s enemies ever grow forgetful, Alfred Steinberg’s massive indictment – as large as the state of Texas, as wordy as its protagonist, and more self-assured then either – should prove helpful as a sort of Compleat Guide to the Sins of LBJ. The brisk narrative ranges exhaustively from Johnson’s Texas ancestors to his recent withdrawal from the 1968 campaign, with myriad glimpeses, filtered through dozens of far-from-disinterested memories of LBJ in action.

          Although the author’s tone is that of the honest reporter simply “telling it like it is,” the book is a sustained diatribe; the instrument employed for this “close up” was not the camera but the hatchet. Steinberg’s Johnson has been identified before: the brutal warmonger; the coarse, foul-tongued manipulator who lied, cozened, schemed, and pressured his way to the top with no commitments or beliefs beyond an insatiable lust for wealth and power; the opportunist who professed liberalism has always been fraudulent. His largely undeserved reputation as a political mastermind and legislative magician was built, like every other favorable image he has sought to create, upon the distortions of a fanatically cultivated press-agentry.

          “Sam Johnson’s boy,” Steinberg concludes, too inherently narrow and shallow to grow in office or succeed as a national leader, “could not become more than the President from Texas …. He failed to emerge as a President of the United States” (p. 839).

          The essential character traits accompanying all of this are those of a domineering bully, boor, and cynical hypocrite, with degrees of pettiness, vindictiveness, violent temper, and egomania that suggest derangement. Associates, inevitably, are either fellow corruptionists, lackeys or dupes. (The most pathetic figure in the book, consigned to both latter categories, is Hubert Humphrey.)

 UNQUOTE

 

Robert Sherrill on Robert Caro’s attitude toward LBJ in his 1982 The Path to Power: hatred.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1982/11/21/brash-young-man-in-a-hurry/e9ec7537-246b-4ccb-868e-19423cb42cec/

 QUOTE

 And the main passion is hatred. Or, if not hatred, then contempt. Caro loathes Johnson. He despises him. If The Path to Power is a success, it will be because Caro has conveyed that feeling so infectiously. And in that success there will be a historic irony. When Caro talks of Johnson's "hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will"; when he says that "it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself -- or to anyone else -- could stand before it"; when he sounds repelled by Johnson's "utter ruthlessness" in destroying enemies and his "seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal"; when he notes that a hallmark of Johnson's career was "a lack of any consistent ideology or principle, in fact of any moral foundation whatsover -- a willingness to march with any ally who would help his personal advancement," one gets an overwhelming feeling of d,ejMa vu. We are hearing exactly the same accusations that were made a generation ago by left-wing Democrats in Texas, bitter from being crushed throughout the 1950s and 1960s by Johnson's forces, the same accusations made by right-wing Texans such as J. Evetts Haly in 1964 (A Texan Looks at Lyndon), infuriated by Johnson's pious destruction of Barry Goldwater.

UNQUOTE