Contradictions Within Robert Caro’s Works: Exposing a Legacy Built on Mythology?

[Phil Nelson]

Robert Caro's first book proved that he was a great writer, that he had been drilled in the fine arts of prose, riddled with force and aggression, where that mattered.  And it mattered a lot in this piece, then marketed as the "first of a trilogy" -- later revised to four volumes.  The last book he published on LBJ was introduced ten years ago, and it was simultaneously announced that a fifth, and final volume would then be written, which still hasn't been published.  Robert Caro, God willing, will turn 87 this October. 

That first book established his creds across the gamut, not merely the usual "suspects" -- journalists, historians, all of academia -- but brought forth many other people simply interested in reading good literature.  It was hugely successful, because the reader quickly noticed that he did not back off from going where many other biographers would not venture. 

The second book was a magnificently constructed "nuts and bolts" look at Johnson's time in Congress, leading up to his brazenly stolen 1948 primary election against Coke Stevenson.  But it is also where his manners changed a bit after Lady Bird banned him from the publicly financed and administered, federal government owned, "LBJ Library and Museum."  Someone later apparently explained to her that she really didn't have the authority to do that.  It appears that Lady Bird learned a lot from Lyndon Baines Johnson (and of course, there were plenty of things he learned from her).

The third book is where the back wheeling became noticeable, the critical commentary cut by half, while the laudatory aspects of Lyndon's brilliant leadership became more pronounced.  

By the fourth book, last book he had completely capitulated to even the most outrageously untrue assertions about LBJ's conduct, in the most critically-important passages in his subject's lifetime, not merely during his tainted administration.  

He has been working on the fifth book for ten full years (since 2012, the publication of book #4). I believe that it was In one of the final chapters of that book, where he explains the need for still another book, where he also noted that "the tone will change" (though I can't find it now, I remember reading that -- it might have been in one of his many interviews). 

But in the meantime, as the world awaits that day, he found time to write, and, in 2020 published another (non-LBJ) book titled "Working,"  Why such an odd title?  Is he admitting that he finished the new manuscript for the 5th and last book . . . apparently years ago?   For one to conclude that that book will never be published a long as he is alive might be the most logical and realistic answer to the question:  Is he (and his publisher) holding it back for publication until after his death?  In the meantime, that question can be expected to grow like topsy.  In fact, I have heard that expressed by more than one person lately. 

This blog, an examination of the numerous errors, contradictions, and misrepresentations of provable witness testimony related to the most critical moments of JFK's assassination, may be considered a high risk for those who are content with the status quo:  "The CIA [or fill in the blank with Military Intell, Israel, Castro, et. al. -- other than the single most obvious, LBJ], did it."  The facts presented here (together with a rare instance or two where I openly engage in minor "speculation") are the basis of that point. 

See HERE for blog. 

[Douglas Caddy]

 I represented Billie Sol Estes in 1984 in his attempt to get immunity from the Justice Department to tell what he knew about LBJ. It will be interesting to see how Caro treats the saga of Estes in his fifth volume on LBJ.

Edited June 2, 2022 by Douglas Caddy

[Norman T. Field]

I fully expect that Mr. Caro's final LBJ book will be published after he passes to ensure he has access to the LBJ library for the remainder of his life. 

[Pat Speer]

At one point I did a deep dive into LBJ's behavior in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and found that both Steve Gillon (in The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After) and Caro (in The Passage of Power) had largely white-washed LBJ's behavior on the plane and afterwards. It kinda sickened me. I was not then nor am I now an LBJ-hater. But no matter what you think of the man it is 100% clear he lied his butt off about what happened, and tried to make it look like RFK had told him he should be sworn in in Dallas, and that his taking what had been JFK's plane was for national security purposes. These were lies. All Gillon and Caro would have to have done was compare LBJ's accounts of what happened on the plane and compare them to the accounts of O'Donnell, Fehmer, Lady Bird, Valenti, etc, to see LBJ was lying about most everything. It was like the truth was too much for them...as if they didn't know what to say about a President who would so brazenly lie about the beginnings of his presidency.

I used to put historians on a pedestal. That changed some time ago. They selectively use facts to tell stories. No critical thinking required.

 

[James DiEugenio]

Caro has taken on average about ten years to write each volume.  

Its pretty simple as to why he needed to take a bit of a break.  He announced that he was going to add another volume to the series.

Caro was originally going to follow the David Halberstam line on Vietnam.

If you recall, the first volume came out in 1982.  But since then, Oliver Stone's JFK was released, the ARRB  declassified a lot of paper on VIetnam, and  Stone's two documentaries featuring Jamie Galbraith and John Newman on the subject came out.

Caro got blasted for trying to make a Texas white hatted hero out of Coke Stevenson versus the black hatted Johnson.  In fact the review of Means of Ascent by Sid Blumenthal in The New Republic has become a classic in the LBJ literature and on Caro.  It was so harsh in its exposure of both Stevenson and Caro's techniques to make him a White Knight that Caro took the extraordinary step of replying to it--and his reply was pretty weak and twisted.  Up to then, Caro had been pretty well protected by his backers, Knopf, and The New Yorker.  But he got burned pretty badly in that exchange.  Blumenthal really did his homework.

So now he has decided that it will take two books, not one, to deal with Vietnam and the rest of LBJ's presidency.  IMO, no amount of work or ingenuity will explicate what LBJ did in anything less than an extremely derogatory  manner.  But in his last book, we can see what Caro is up to.  Its the same strategy that Updegrove used in his current book: to make JFK into an empty suit.  As Caro called him, "the rich man's son".  

But the point really is, what do you do with those tapes the ARRB declassified? How about the records of the May 1963 Sec/Def conference, perhaps the most important documents the ARRB released? What do you do with the memoirs of Bundy and McNamara and Taylor, who all say Kennedy was not going into Vietnam?  Do you just ignore them or discount them?  I predict he will do both.  Caro is an MSM guy.

 

Edited June 1, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

Correction: Caro's first book was his great biography

of Robert Moses, THE POWER BROKER. I was deeply

disappointed in the most recent Johnson volume,

which distorts history in many ways and buys

into myths such as the lie about Secret Service

agent Rufus Youngblood supposedly vaulting over

the front seat of the convertible to shield LBJ during

the shooting. I interviewed Senator Ralph Yarborough,

who was riding in the back seat with LBJ and Lady Bird

and said it never happened. Yarborough gave me numerous

other insights into LBJ and the shooting, which I discuss

in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Caro at one point, in a

1985 lecture at the New York Public Library,

had raised hopes by promising he would deal with

what he called "Johnson's blood feud

with the Kennedys, which is a drama of Shakespearean

vividness," but then he backed off from the implications

of what he promised. That's how you get

the big bucks and the awards.

Edited May 31, 2022 by Joseph McBride

[James DiEugenio]

JM: 

but then he backed off from the implications

of what he promised. That's how you get

the big bucks and the awards.

You can say that again Joe.  😀

Edited June 1, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

An example of how Caro whiffed in Means of Ascent.  And how Blumenthal stung him.

In his climactic scene in "Means of Ascent," Mr. Caro wrote: "Coke Stevenson and Frank Hamer walked side by side, two tall, broad-shouldered, erect, silent men -- two living legends of Texas, in fact -- two men out of another, vanishing age, another, vanishing code, marching down a street in a dusty Texas town to find out for themselves, and prove to the world, how Lyndon Johnson had gotten the two hundred crucial votes." Mr. Caro goes on to describe how Hamer intimidated pistoleros blocking the way into the bank where the election records were kept, forcing them to part for Stevenson. About this passage, Rowe observed: "It left my mouth ajar when I read of the 'dusty' scene -- after all, I followed the party into the bank and was the only reporter there ... There were two banks, Texas State Bank and Alice National Bank. Furthermore the streets for many blocks around both banks have been paved for as long as I can remember. There wasn't any dust around or near the bank when we went in. What is more, I never heard Frank Hamer say a word, nor did I see the pistoleros at or near the bank entrance as described by Caro." Rowe added: "I share with at least several hundred thousand Texans astonishment over the picture of Stevenson painted by Caro."

(For what it is worth, my father was a veteran of Texas politics who as a young lawyer gathered with others to listen to Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who killed Bonnie and Clyde, tell stories at the Driskill Hotel in Austin. In 1991 my father was baffled when I told him that the first volume of Caro’s biography idealized Coke Stevenson: “Coke Stevenson? He was just a tool of the oil companies.”)

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[James DiEugenio]

In the above, the indented paragraph is from Blumenthal and his brutal dissection of Caro's book.

The very last parenthetical two sentences are from a reviewer quoting Blumenthal.

But the Blumenthal review was so coruscating--as I recall he labeled the book "a romance"-- that the NY Times actually let Caro reply to it in their pages.  He did not come off very well.

Edited June 1, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

This has become a serious problem with writing biographies: The need felt by some authors to embrace a narrative arc before they start writing.

As we will see at K and K, this is the problem with Summer's book on MM.  About which both Don McGovern and myself will soon address.

OTOH, Joe McBride's biography of Spielberg avoided that trap.  He managed to remain objective, and at the same time analytical,  about his subject all the way through. As I have said before, I have not read them all, but his is the best biography of Spielberg I have read.

 

 

Edited June 1, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

Thanks for your good words about my Spielberg book, Jim.

As always, my biographies are unauthorized. On Caro, I greatly

admire his first volume on Johnson, which charts

his unscrupulous rise to power at the same time

as showing how he brought electricity to modernize the Hill Country. His second volume does

astonishingly good research on the 1948 election theft, even

getting the man who stuffed the ballot box to tell him how he did it,

but, as you say, resorts to whitewashing Coke Stevenson to

turn the saga into a simplistic morality tale. The third volume

is excellent on how Johnson consolidated his power and ruled

the Senate. But the fourth volume falls down on the job, even

though it has some leads Caro developed but failed to follow

to their logical conclusions (about Bobby Baker and Don

Reynolds and Life magazine). The last I heard, Caro was

up to 1967 in what he intends to be the final volume. Given what he wrote about JFK and LBJ in volume

four, and the usual willful ignoring of the facts about the

transition to power by mainstream historians, I don't expect that volume to be fully

enlightening or truthful about Vietnam, though Caro may handle parts of

the tragedy of Johnson's unraveling with some of the power of which he is capable. When

Caro is telling the truth and digging deeply, he can be superb. His 

Moses book remains probably the greatest nonfiction book

I have ever read, with the possible exception of Boswell's

Life of Johnson. But the ambitious Johnson series falters

because of the usual mainstream media roadblocks about

facing the facts of 1963-64.

Edited June 1, 2022 by Joseph McBride

[Joe Bauer]

Do either of you have any opinion of Caro's treatment of Billie Sol Estes and his business involvements with LBJ?

Has Caro's ever given any public comment regards his ignoring, downplaying and even dismissing of Estes and Estes's most shocking charges against LBJ?

A question I have pondered and wondered what Caro's answer to it would be is this:

Was LBJ ever psychologically capable of ordering or sanctioning actual murders?

Murders of individuals who could have seriously derailed or even ruined his political career and maybe even personal life?

Did LBJ's well known ruthlessness exceed the bounds Caro ascribed to him?

 

Edited June 4, 2022 by Joe Bauer

[David Lifton]

On 5/31/2022 at 4:18 PM, Joseph McBride said:

Correction: Caro's first book was his great biography

of Robert Moses, THE POWER BROKER. I was deeply

disappointed in the most recent Johnson volume,

which distorts history in many ways and buys

into myths such as the lie about Secret Service

agent Rufus Youngblood supposedly vaulting over

the front seat of the convertible to shield LBJ during

the shooting. I interviewed Senator Ralph Yarborough,

who was riding in the back seat with LBJ and Lady Bird

and said it never happened. Yarborough gave me numerous

other insights into LBJ and the shooting, which I discuss

in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Caro at one point, in a

1985 lecture at the New York Public Library,

had raised hopes by promising he would deal with

what he called "Johnson's blood feud

with the Kennedys, which is a drama of Shakespearean

vividness," but then he backed off from the implications

of what he promised. That's how you get

the big bucks and the awards.

DSL Response:  Re: "I interviewed Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding in the back seat with LBJ and Lady Bird;

and [he] said it never happened."    FWIW:  I, too, spoke with Yarborough; and he told me the same thing.  It never happened. And he (Yarborough) said that with great emphasis.  LBJ was a pathological xxxx; he  could --and did --reshape reality, like play-dough, according to his whim.  And don't forget the postscript to this incident: A few days after Dallas, LBJ ordered up a ceremony and pinned a Treasury Department medal on Agent Youngblood, for his "heroics" (my quotes) in Dallas, saving his life, etc. (6/2/22 - 2 PM PDT)

Edited June 2, 2022 by David Lifton

[David Lifton]

No text.

[Pat Speer]

FWIW, I analyzed all the statements regarding Youngblood and Johnson, and it's fairly clear Youngblood did turn in his seat, tell Johnson to get down, and try to cover Johnson. Where Johnson and Youngblood stretched the truth was in asserting Youngblood climbed into the backseat and sat on Johnson. That almost certainly did not happen.