Posts Tagged ‘Robert Caro’

Library Additions: Two Books About Presidents

Sunday, August 4th, 2019

Two more Half Price Books finds, both of about Texas Presidents, one by and signed by a Texas President:

  • Bush, George W. 41: A Portrait of My Father. Crown Publishers, 2014. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine- dust jacket with a tiny bit of wrinkling at head and heel. Signed by George W. Bush. Political biography of George H. W. Bush. Bought for $7.99 at a Half Price Books in Austin. Like that signed copy of Decision Points, someone in the book receiving room was asleep at the switch…
  • Caro, Robert. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. Knopf, 2002. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine- dust jacket with a slight bump to top front corner tip. The third in Caro’s monumental LBJ series. According to Caro, Johnson is the first Majority Leader to ever actually make the senate work. Of course, that’s not really its constitutional duty… Bought for $17.49 from Half Price Books in Austin.
  • Library Additions: Three Political First Editions, Two Signed

    Tuesday, May 7th, 2019

    I usually catalog books purchased on my other blog, but here are some politics-related books I picked up recently:

  • Bush, George W. Decision Points. Crown Publishers, 2010. First edition hardback, a Near Fine copy with a faint red stain at heel, in a Fine- dust jacket with just bit of wrinkling at top and bottom edges. Signed by Bush. Autobiography of his time as President. Bought at a Half Price Books in Houston for $7.99, picked out of several unsigned copies (obviously they failed to check it for signatures when it came in; having known Bush signed in Houston, I took care to check every copy). This is the second presidential signature I own, as I also have President Trump’s signature on a novelty million dollar bill.

    (Note for book hunters: The signature at the top of the title page of George H. W. Bush’s All the Best is printed in all copies of the first edition.)

  • Caro, Robert A. Working. Knopf, 2019. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, new and unread, signed by Caro. Book of essays from this multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer. Tells stories from Caro’s research about the lengths to which he went to get the story right, such as finding out how Brown & Root made LBJ, and how Caro actually sat down to interview Ladybird Johnson about her husband’s longtime lover. Bought at Caro’s signing at Bookpeople for cover price.
  • Rosiak, Luke. Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats. Regnery Publishing, 2019. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. The story of how the Awan spy ring hacked the computers of congressional Democrats, and how Democrats and the Obama Justice Department covered up for them. Bought from Amazon for $19.24.
  • LinkSwarm for May 3, 2019

    Friday, May 3rd, 2019

    Lot’s of rage by Democrats in this week’s LinkSwarm over Attorney General William Barr over, well, something.

  • The U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in April, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the lowest since 1969.
  • Followup: Baltimore’s Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh resigns following FBI/IRS raids on home and workplace following the “Healthy Holly” bribery scandal. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Poll: Percentage of Democrats who see border ‘crisis’ jumps 17 points since January.”
  • Old and Busted: “Trump is guilty of treason!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of collusion!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of obstruction!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of something! Release the report!” (Report released.) “Ummm…Barr’s summary was slightly off on one point! Impeach!” Trump Derangement Syndrome is a helluva drug…
  • Indeed, they’re just pissed that Barr’s summary of the report was accurate, meaning the Democrats had three weeks they couldn’t lie about the report. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Checkmate. How President Trump’s legal team outfoxed Mueller.” From the newly resurrected Human Events, this is a detailed legal analysis of how a memo written by William Barr before he became Attorney General laid the groundwork for curtailed Robert Mueller using an overly-expansive definition of “obstruction.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti pleads not guilty to federal wire fraud and tax evasion charges. (Hat tip: Roger Simon.)
  • “F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016.” You know, a spy. Here’s a handy decoder for the “covering for Democrats” speak:

  • “Ukrainian embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016.”
  • More Democratic compassion:

  • Deputy shot in Caldwell County. However, unlike most cases, there are some really stupid decisions on both sides.
  • Facebook banned Milo Yannopoulos, Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan for “extremism,” and the Washington Post headline initially called them all “far right” before a ton of criticism forced them to correct the headline. Because Louis Farrakhan is so well-known for palling around with conservatives. (Facebook is a private entity and can do what it wants, but I don’t want any of those people banned. Let them speak and let people debate their ideas/lunacy/etc. or not as they feel).
  • Even CNN is starting to get a clue:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Speaking of CNN: “CNN Poll: Overwhelming Majority Want Investigation into Obama DOJ Spying on Trump.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The members of the Flint, Michigan City Council sound like real winners.
  • “Norwegian fisherman have discovered a beluga whale wearing a tight harness with a camera attachment – sparking speculation the animal belongs to the Russian Navy.” I wouldn’t be surprised, especially since we have our own dolphin program… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The new “Supermajority” organization is just another stalking horse for Planned Parenthood.
  • “Israeli ambassador calls NYT ‘cesspool of hostility.'” Correct, though that’s really two more words than necessary…
  • The latest counterculture icon to be found guilty of WrongThink by Social Justice Warriors is (rolls dice)…cartoonist Robert Crumb.
  • “Covington kid sues NBC for $275 million.” Good. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Lance Morrow reviews Robert Caro’s Working. “If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies.”
  • In the “trouble in places you may not have heard of” department, clashes broke out on the African nation of Benin (between Nigeria and Togo on the Ivory Coast) when the ruling party held a parliamentary election from which opposition parties were excluded.
  • Dispatches from Social Justice Warrior land: “Trinity College professor tweets ‘whiteness is terrorism,’ refers to Barack and Michelle Obama as ‘white kneegrows.’”
  • Japan’s Emperor Akihito abdicated, Emperor Naruhito mounting the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, marking the end of the Heisei era and inaugurating the Reiwa era.
  • Actor James Woods is still in the Twitter Gulag:

  • Woman awakens after 27 year coma. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Unhappy meals. Now if only every one came with mopping teenage Goth girl figurines…
  • “‘Mortal Kombat’ Introduces Brutal New Fatality Where Your Character Just States An Opposing Viewpoint…One character says, ‘There are only two genders,’ and his opponent instantly melts into nothing, being unable to handle the opposing viewpoint. Another character suggests that capitalism isn’t all bad, and his opponent’s head instantly falls off.”
  • Legging it.
  • LBJ Didn’t Kill JFK

    Tuesday, April 16th, 2019

    Sunday I got my taxes to the all-but-printed stage, and then drove down to Bookpeople to attend a signing for Robert Caro’s new book Working (an excerpt of which I printed back in January).

    Caro is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of four (soon to be five) monumental volumes on the life of Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson (The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, Master Of The Senate, and The Passage of Power). The portrait Caro paints of Johnson (and keep in mind that I haven’t read all of them yet) is that of a shrewd, driven, absolute son-of-a-bitch. I’m sure Mr. Caro and I would have many political disagreements (he’s obviously a fan of many of the big government initiatives Johnson championed), but no one doubts his competence and commitment to research (which is what Working is about; how he found out certain things in the lives of Johnson and Robert Moses, the subject of his equally acclaimed book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.)

    No one, that is, except Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theorists.

    Now let’s grant that there were many strange aspects to the Kennedy Assassination, that LBJ was an absolute son-of-a-bitch, and that numerous people in the 1960s thought he might have had a hand in it. I own copies of A Texan Links at Lyndon and MacBird! (a satirical play casting LBJ as Macbeth and JFK as Duncan). So it’s not exactly a new idea.

    One would think, more than half a century after the assassination, the conspiracy theorists, having failed to provide incontrovertible proof of said conspiracy, would move on. But it seems that an entirely new crop has popped up in the margins.

    One of them showed up at Caro’s signing. (I later found out the name of the local crank, but don’t feel like giving him the publicity.) During the question and answer session he nattered on and on about Madeleine Brown, Billie Sol Estes, etc. It was more a monologue than a speech.

    After sharp prompting from Bookpeople staff and the audience, he finally got out something resembling a question and briefly shut up. Caro replied he had read the Brown, said it was a poor plagiarism of another book he had read (but couldn’t remember the title), and dismissed the others. Then came the money quote:

    “In 40 years of research I never came across any credible evidence that LBJ had anything to do with JFK’s assassination.”

    Keep in mind that this is a man who has made every effort to interview all the living principles of Johnson’s life, read hundreds of boxes of papers in the LBJ library, found out the undocumented source of Johnson’s secret power in 1940 (discussed in the aforementioned post), and even interviewed Ladybird Johnson about her late husband’s longtime lover Alice Glass.

    This is not a man who skimps on research.

    If Robert Caro says there’s no evidence that Johnson had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, I don’t see how an objective observer can regard that as anything but the definitive word.

    Unfashionable though it may be to believe so, communist sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald, probably acting alone, almost certainly killed John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson had nothing to do with it.

    How Texas Oilmen Made LBJ

    Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019

    There’s a fascinating piece by LBJ biographer Robert Caro about how he pieced together how powerful Texas oilmen, through the insistence of Brown & Root and speaker Sam Rayburn, made Lyndon Baines Johnson’s career by making him the conduit for Texas oil money in the 1940 election.

    For some time after Johnson’s arrival in Congress, in May, 1937, his letters to committee chairmen and other senior congressmen had been in a tone befitting a new congressman with no power—the tone of a junior beseeching a favor from a senior, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time. But there were also letters and memos in the same boxes from senior congressmen in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred?

    Going back over my notes, I put them in chronological order, and when I did it was easy to see that there had indeed been such a time: a single month, October, 1940. Before that month, Lyndon Johnson had been invariably, in his correspondence, the junior to the senior. After that month—and, it became clearer and clearer as I put more and more documents into order, after a single date, November 5, 1940, Election Day—the tone was frequently the opposite. And it wasn’t just with powerful congressmen. After that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by mid-level congressmen, and by other congressmen as junior as he, in a supplicating tone, whereas there had been no such letters—not a single one that I could find—before that date. Obviously, the change had had something to do with the election. But what?

    Snip.

    [Thomas G.] Corcoran had said that the answer to my question was money, and if money was involved the place to start looking was Brown & Root, the Texas road-and-dam-building firm, whose principals, Herman and George Brown (Root had died years before), had been the secret but major financiers of Johnson’s early career; by 1940, Brown & Root had already begun receiving federal contracts through Johnson’s efforts. When it came to money, there were no closer associates than Herman and George. I didn’t have much hope of finding anything in writing, but their files were files in which I should nonetheless have been turning every page.

    I started doing that now. I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: “YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE CHECKS BY FRIDAY . . . HOPE THEY ARRIVED IN DUE FORM AND ON TIME.”

    It also named the people who were supposed to have sent the checks—six of Brown & Root’s business associates. And Tommy Corcoran had been wrong: Lyndon Johnson had for once put something in writing. Attached to the telegram was a copy of his response to George. “ALL OF THE FOLKS YOU TALKED TO HAVE BEEN HEARD FROM,” it said. “I AM NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR LETTERS, SO BE SURE TO TELL ALL THESE FELLOWS THAT THEIR LETTERS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED . . . YOUR FRIEND, LYNDON B. JOHNSON.” Johnson had added by hand, “The thing is exceeding my expectations. The Boss is listening to my suggestions, thanks to your encouragements.”

    So there was the proof that Johnson had received money from Brown & Root in October, 1940 (and that it had brought him into some sort of contact with “the Boss,” Johnson’s name for President Franklin Roosevelt). But how much had the six donors sent? Why hadn’t Brown & Root sent the money itself? And, more important, what had happened to the money? How did Johnson use it? What was the mechanism by which it was distributed? There was no clue in the telegram, or in Johnson’s reply. But the money had come from Texas, and George and Herman had friends who, I knew, had contributed, at the Browns’ insistence, to Johnson’s first campaigns. Most of the contributors, I had been told, were oilmen—in Texas parlance, “big oilmen.”

    I started calling for the big oilmen’s folders. And, sure enough, there was a letter, dated in October, from one of the biggest of the oilmen, Clint Murchison. Murchison dealt with senators or with the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, the leader of the Texas delegation; he hardly knew the young congressman; in his letter to Johnson, he misspelled his name “Linden.” But he was evidently following Brown & Root’s lead. “We are enclosing herewith the check of the Aloco Oil Co. . . . for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Committee,” his letter said. Another big oilman was Charles F. Roeser, of Fort Worth: the amount mentioned in the letter I found from him was again five thousand, the payee the same.

    So the recipient was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had previously been nothing more than a moribund subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. There were a lot of file folders in Boxes 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the Johnson House papers labelled “Democratic National Committee.” Those boxes contained thirty-two hundred pages. Some of the folders had less than inviting titles. “General—Unarranged,” for example, was a thick folder, bulging with papers that had been sloppily crammed into it. When I pulled it out, I remember asking myself if I really had to do “General—Unarranged.” But Alan [Hathway, Caro’s editor at Newsday] might possibly have been proud of me—and I wasn’t very deep into the folder when I was certainly grateful to him. One of the six people George Brown said had sent checks was named Corwin. In “General—Unarranged,” not in alphabetical order but just jammed in, was a note from J. O. Corwin, a Brown & Root subcontractor, saying, “I am enclosing herewith my check for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.” Five thousand dollars. Had each of the six men mentioned in Brown’s letter sent that amount?

    Snip.

    The “Unarranged” file contained letter after letter with details I knew I could use. And in other folders I came across letters in which that same amount was mentioned: for example, from E. S. Fentress, who was the partner of Johnson’s patron, Charles Marsh. I knew that one of the biggest and the most politically astute of the oilmen was Sid Richardson. I looked under the name “Richardson” in file folder after file folder in different collections, without any luck. What was the name of that nephew of his whom Richardson, unmarried and childless, allowed to transact some of his business affairs? I had heard it somewhere. What was it? Bass, Perry Bass. I found that name and the donation—“Perry R. Bass, $5,000”—in yet another box in the House papers.

    Letters from many big Texas oilmen of the nineteen-forties—who needed guarantees that Congress wouldn’t take away the oil-depletion allowance, and that other, more arcane tax breaks conferred by the federal government wouldn’t be touched—were scattered through those boxes. And all the contributions were for five thousand dollars. Of course, they must be. I suddenly remembered what I should have remembered earlier. Under federal law in 1940, the limit on an individual contribution was five thousand dollars. How could I have been so slow to get it? Well, I got it now. The Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, funnelled through the company’s business associates, had been thirty thousand dollars, a substantial amount in the politics of that era, and, in fact, more money than the committee had received from the D.N.C., its parent organization. And there were so many additional five-thousand-dollar contributions from Texas!

    But there was a next question: how had this money resulted in such a great change in Lyndon Johnson’s status in Congress? How had he transmuted those contributions into power for himself? He had had no title or formal position with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; he had tried to get one, I had learned from other files, but had been rebuffed.

    I found the answer in those LBJA files. He had had George Brown instruct each of the Brown & Root contributors, and had had the other Texas contributors instructed similarly, to enclose with their checks a letter stating, “I would like for this money to be expended in connection with the campaign of Democratic candidates for Congress as per the list attached.” Johnson had, of course, compiled the list, and, while the checks received by the lucky candidates might have been issued by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, each candidate received a telegram from Johnson, saying that the check had been sent “AS RESULT MY VISIT TO CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE FEW MINUTES AGO.”

    The secret to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s rise was powerful patrons, Texas oil money, and campaign finance bundling…in 1940.

    Read the whole thing. Including the part where Caro and his wife move to the Texas hill country for three years to get the real story about Johnson’s past.

    I began to hear the details they had not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me, and they told me anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before—stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed: about a very unusual young man, a very brilliant young man, a very ambitious, unscrupulous, and quite ruthless person, disliked and even despised, and, by people who knew him especially well, even beginning to be feared.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

    And if you’re interested in Caro’s LBJ books, here are the Amazon links:

  • The Path to Power
  • Means of Ascent
  • Master Of The Senate
  • The Passage of Power