Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration]

0:00Hey everybody, this is a narration by Blockpost, lessons from the years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Carro. This was written May 3rd, 2023. Explore a single individual deeply enough and truths about all individuals emerge, Robert Carro. Robert Carro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson are not only the best biographies I have ever read and not only the best histories I have ever read. They're perhaps the best books I've ever read. Below are the main lessons I've got from these four volumes about power and powerful personalities. If you do everything, quote, as an NYA director, two hours made no difference.

0:45Days made no difference. Nights made no difference. As an unknown 28 -year -old running his first seemingly hopeless campaign for Congress against seven older, better known opponents, a race in which he drove himself so ruthlessly that a fellow politician, a man who worked terribly hard himself, said, I never knew a man could work that hard. At every stage in his adult life, as Congressman Secretary, Congressman, Senate Toriel candidate, he had displayed a willingness to push to their very edge and beyond the edge, the limits not only of politics, but of himself. In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eye sunk into his head, and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry.

1:40And whenever, at the end of one more and a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it. To do it perfectly, his career had been a story of manipulation, deceit and ruthlessness, but it had also been the story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing. He would sacrifice himself to that ambition, as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others. If you did everything, you'll win. To Lyndon Johnson, everything meant literally that, absolutely anything that wasn't necessary.

2:24If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made no matter how difficult making it might be. Robert Carro means of a cent. There are three kinds of extraordinary attempts. In the first, a person perfectly executes on the 20 % of things which will produce 80 % of the results. In the second, a person extends that same care and diligence to the remaining 80 % of tasks, because every marginal drop of results, no matter how diminishing, is worth the squeeze. And the third is exemplified by Lyndon Johnson, for a person not only does every single thing that might reasonably help his odds, but even the unreasonable.

3:09He accepts the assignment, which has only the remotest possibility to make the difference, and he completes it with the same intensity and attention as the tasks which will make all the difference. If you do everything, you'll win. The reason why Robert Carro is able to write so compellingly about these qualities of Lyndon Johnson, his resourcefulness and ruthlessness, his inexhaustible energy, his need to win, his inability to take no foreign answer is that the biographer shares many of the attributes of the subject. A man who has spent almost 50 years writing the biographies of a single person, who has spent those decades sifting through thousands of crates of documents in the LBJ library, or making former Goons discloses how they helped Johnson's skin elections, or moving to the Texas Hill Country to experience for himself the poverty and loneliness of Johnson's youth, who continues to push himself in this way past his 87th birthday when other men would have long retired, because his last volume, the one about the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, for means unfinished, is a man who understands Johnson's aphorism if you do everything you'll win.

4:26Did Lyndon Johnson push himself to his physical limits and then beyond to satisfy a lifelong ambition that was almost spiritual in its intensity, a man in nearing 90 doesn't just wake up with a physical energy to turn the next page, something other than the physical must be motivating him. Did Lyndon Johnson manipulate people to get what he wanted? Well, it wasn't just a charming New York accent which allowed Kara to elicit damning confessions from the people around Johnson, including Lady Bird herself, whose testimony inadvertently helps paint her beloved late husband as a Philandering Amoral Migglemaniac.

5:06I imagine him, Kara, sitting in front of his Smith -Coronotype writer, frustrated that the words no longer flow as easily as they used to, that he keeps losing his train of thought, that he fatigues much faster than he used to. I imagine him glancing at framed images of the Johnson aides he has interviewed over the decades, people with whom he had developed close friendships, and I see him remembering each of their funerals. Quote, I used to call him Horus Busby, day after day as I was writing, to ask him if he remembered some detailed art for God and task about. My single space notes of our interviews are 142 pages.

5:47Bus was one of the smartest analyzers of politics and people I ever met. We became great friends and we used to go out to dinner together. Bus had cried a crush on Ina, Kara's wife. Once he had a stroke, and when he got out of the hospital, he wrote Ina a letter. He wrote that when he was afraid he was going to die, he thought, it will be hard and robbered because nobody can tell him about the vice presidency. The letter was typed. He could still type. But when he tried to sign his name in ink, he could only make a scrolling shaky bee. Ina cried when she saw that. I may have to hear it a little bit too.

6:26Robert Curaure, working. I imagine him for gritting the years he spent studying that one Senate race from the 40s that Lyndon Johnson store stole from Koch Stevenson. While that race was important, did it detract from the sum of time he could dedicate to his magdem opus? Did it make the completion of the final volume impossible? I imagine him worrying whether in his old age he is able to do justice to this project in his legacy. I see him picking up one of his older volumes, reading a passage of beautiful prose and remembering the moment of clear insight and hypnotic flow from which it emerged.

7:08I see him asking himself how long it's been since he had one of those moments, and I see him comparing that decades old excerpt to the stilted and simple writing he's able to produce in his late 80s. And yet he can't rest. To surrender the task to which he has dedicated the overwhelming majority of his life, to enjoy with his wife the golden years of his life, to hand off his research notes to some young enterprising biographer. That would be unthinkable, for it was not just Lyndon Johnson who had to win. But there's one big difference between Johnson and Carol. The pages of history are crowded with the names of men who are willing to do everything for advancement, for money, or for fame.

7:56I understand how people could be so resourceful, ruthless even, for power. But how likely are you to find somebody who has the intensity and ambition of an Napoleon or an Alexander and who is willing to aim those talents towards writing a great biography. It's like finding out that Darth Vader is using the Death Star to carve wooden figurines. Men like Carol are rarer than men like Johnson, because the willingness to do everything is usually paired with an unyielding need for personal power, wealth, or status. And one of the consequences of this fact is that there will always be more great people who have lived fascinating and important lives than there are people capable of writing great biographies of them.

8:43I remember Bern Hobart asking who outside of politics would make for a great candidate for Carol biography. If you could ask GPT -7 to write in the style of Robert Carro, biography of some figure in tech, science, or entertainment, what is the first name you enter into that prompt? My answer? Robert Carro's books are about formidable single -mindedly devoted characters with storybook life arcs. If maybe the case then, that the only person who could write the biography of Robert Carro is the man himself. Ambition. Lyndon Johnson, as president, was perhaps the person most responsible for the advance of modern liberalism, maybe second to FDR.

9:30And yet, throughout his entire pre -presidential career, he was sponsored and mentored mainly by men who are conservative, reactionary, and even racist to their core. For the first 55 years of his life, he had convinced men of tremendous intellect and drive up their own that he was a sion of the Southern cause, but the only hope for that cause was to make Lyndon Johnson president. So much so that when Johnson was majority leader, the Southern senators, who at the time control all the important committees in Congress, allowed Johnson to pass liberal legislation day -scorn because they believed it would help him become president.

10:09And they believed, as president, Johnson would govern as a conservative, especially on the issue of race. The tragic irony in betrayal here is hard to overemphasize. These powerful conservative men, who, while being ignorant and backward in certain ways, were famously shrewd and intelligent, conceded on issue after issue and campaigned with their immense political influence for a man who ended up being the biggest liberal president since FDR. Here's a story Robert Carroll recounts for after interviewing the dying former senator from Georgia, Herman Talmich. Quote asked about his relationship with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, Talmich said, at first, for years, I liked him.

10:54He spent a lot of time cultivating me, hours and hours. They would talk about everything, Talmich said, girls hunting, and Talmich said, they would talk about civil rights, and the relationship between whites and Negroes. How did Lyndon Johnson view the relationship between whites and Negroes? Master and servant Talmich replied, well, didn't he have any sympathy for their situation? None indicated Talmich replied. Talmich said that during the 1950s Johnson would assure the Southerners that they could count on him to weaken a civil rights bill as much as possible, that he was on their side of the civil rights issue, that he had to pretend he wasn't to meet the Southern caucus as infrequently as possible, but that he really was their ally.

11:40He would tell us, I'm one of you, but I can help you more if I don't meet with you. And Talmich said that the Southerners believed him. Believed that while changes in the civil rights law were inevitable, Johnson would keep them as minor as possible, that he was with us in his heart. I believed him, Talmich said, but I changed my opinion. When, when he was president, Talmich said, how did you feel then? Disappointed, Talmich said, angry. There was a long pause and then he added, sick. When asked, how did you feel when he said, we shall overcome, Talmich replied, sick. The author then asked, did you feel that Lyndon Johnson betrayed you?

12:24There was a longer pause because you could not have been easy for a politician as widely as Herman Talish should admit that he had been fooled so completely. Yes, he said. Robert Carro, master of the Senate. I hear a lot of talk about empowering ambitious young people within Silicon Valley circles. The word ambition seems to have lost the suspicion, with which it was treated in previous generations. For example, the Federalist papers explicitly say that the purpose of this new constitution is to counteract rather than empower ambition. This is largely a good thing. Smart young people are usually quite self -interested, and a society does better by aligning their self -interest with the social good than by discarding competent people altogether.

13:11But a bit of shrewdness is warranted when you meet a brilliant 18 -year -old who claims to believe what you believe might have actually gotten himself to believe what is convenient to believe right now. And who is eager for admission, mentorship, a grant, or an open role? Counterfactuals A professor in college once told me that you don't really understand a proof until you see all the alternative ways in which it could have been constructed. The same is true of history. To understand a place and a time is not only to know what happened, but to understand what could have happened instead, and what historical dynamics picked our timeline over the counterfactuals.

13:53There is a perennial debate about whether a great men or great forces direct the flow of history. This debate is too big for a single story to provide anything but an anecdote, but nonetheless we proceed. The unexpected death of a president provides the closest thing to a natural experiment that history can offer. In an instant, one man is substituted for another. And how much that man matters in comparison to the forces around him becomes obvious rather quickly based on how different are the results he can obtain. The civil rights movement in America had been building up for decades leading to 1964.

14:33It was not in some obvious sense stronger in 1964 in 1965 than it was in 1963. And yet, 64 and 65 saw a torrent of liberal legislation that just a year earlier was hopelessly stuck in committee. Quote, Scoob Jackson would say that when Jack Kennedy, as president, urgently needed a sender's vote, he would summon him to the Oval Office and would explain precisely why that bill was so important and how much he needed the sender's support. If, however, the sender said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the Senate.

15:18Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn't agree, but that he understood. Lyndon Johnson, Jackson would say, and Jackson worked closely with Johnson as representative and senator for 25 years. Lyndon Johnson wouldn't understand. Would refuse to understand. He would charm you or knock your block off or bribe you or threaten you, anything to get your vote. Jackson would say, he would do anything he had to to get that vote. And he'd get it. That was the difference. Robert Carro mastered the Senate. As vice president, Johnson had been sidelined by Kennedy. He had gone from the second most powerful person in the country as Senate majority leader to a humiliated showpiece who could not even get an audience with Kennedy without waiting for months.

16:09The scene of him returning to power as illustrated in volume four, the passage of power reminds me of Steve Jobs returning to Apple. Executives and product managers are called in to explain why they have been making such unthinking and obvious mistakes. Entire departments are disbanded or reorganized. Important projects which have been stuck for years are jolted in action. At the time of Kennedy's death, not only was the president's civil rights bill hopelessly trapped somewhere in the gears of the congressional machinery, but so were several other important appropriations bills, including Kennedy's tax cut bill, which was essential to an economic recovery.

16:47Literally, within days of the assassination, Johnson had identified why all these bills had been stuck, and he had been able to get them moving. Even as head of a separate branch of government, Johnson was able to micromanage Congress, getting his ideas for parliamentary maneuvers to his protégé Senate majority leader, Hubert Humphrey, instructing executive agency heads to make grants to certain state projects contingent on the loyalty of that state's representative, and renewing his relationships with the old Southern Barons of the Senate, who helped Johnson as their protégé. How, when confronted with evidence like this, can we claim that the great men of history are irrelevant, and that the great forces could have proceeded without them?

17:28Reading Power Quote, Lyndon Johnson's political genius was creative, not merely in the lower technical aspects of politics, but on much higher levels. Nibbara was a single aspect of his creativity that had been throughout his career, most impressive. It was the capacity to look at an institution that possessed only limited political power, an institution that no one else thought of as having the potential for any more than limited political power, and to see in that institution the potential for substantial political power, to transform that institution so that it possessed such power, and in the process of transforming it, to reap from that transformation substantial personal power for himself.

18:13Robert Carro, master of the Senate. In college, Johnson was blackballed by an exclusive club called the Black Stars, so he formed the White Stars, and from it, he practiced the same Machiavellian talents, which he would eventually rehearse on a national stage. He was steel elections, distribute, to loyal friends, the patronage he earned from kissing up to administrators, and even direct members to sleep with girls in order to manipulate their votes. Who would bother doing all this to win a college election? The kind of person who would eventually win a national election? Before Lyndon Johnson grasped for it, the Senate majority leadership was seen as a crown of thorns, to be avoided by anyone serious about his political career.

18:57It forced the holder to take positions on controversial proposals and bills, but did not give him the power by which to get other senators to vote in solidarity with these positions. Before Lyndon Johnson became Senate Majority Leader, the Senate was, as it is now, a chamber of bickering old men who would hamstring and belay any important legislation. The men in charge of the most powerful committees in Congress, and therefore, the most powerful men in Congress, were not figures of generational gravitas and wisdom, as during the time of the founders or in the reign of Clay Calhoun in Webster. But rather, they were seen as old men, unable to comprehend, much less energetically saw the problems of a technologically advanced modern society.

19:42The institution was becoming a joke, one that was contemptuously told, and the default punchline of the joke would be the Senate majority leader who was the face of this feclisence chamber. More than one majority leader lost re -election, because he was identified in the press as the man accountable for the Senate's failure to get anything done, and because the responsibilities for the stankless shop kept him away from his state, while his opponent got to attack a wide surface area of positions that a majority leader is forced to take. It was largely because the position of leader was seen as an embarrassing and powerless one, the Johnson was able to maneuver himself into it, only after four years in the Senate.

20:24But while the majority leader was a crippled figurehead until Johnson, this was a disability designed by the founders. Senators were meant to be independent and equal ambassadors for sovereign states. They were supposed to be wise, powerful aristocratic personalities, who would, through lengthy deliberation and redrafting of bills, could check the transient impulses of the majority, and of the House, which is a direct representation of the majority's will. Volume 3, Master of the Senate, tells the story of how Lyndon Johnson inverted the founders' vision of the Senate. How he converted the majority leadership, formerly a meaningless position that was fumbled around like a hot potato in two the seat of absolute power.

21:11How he became behind the president, the second most powerful person in the country. It is also the story of how Lyndon Johnson made the Senate function, maybe not in the way the Senate founders intended it to function, but function nonetheless. The volume about Johnson's domination of the Senate reads a lot like the story of how modern nation states, like France or Germany, performed. A powerful king disempowers provincial men of medieval lords, institutes top down bureaucracy, and claims the monopoly on violence. Quote, In a single day, as Newsweek reported, the Senate passed 90 bills, confirmed an ambassador and a federal trade commissioner and then knocked off because it had temporarily run out of business.

21:53The lapse time, four hours and 43 minutes, Swashington was jolted to attention. The first session of the 84th Congress, Aslau Proat, is certainly the most sufficiently run session in recent memory. In less than six months, as majority leader, the youngest majority leader in its history, Lyndon Johnson has tamed the untamable Senate, Robert Carro, master of the Senate. Here are the top handful of maneuvers by which Lyndon Johnson came the master of the Senate. One, each party in the Senate had a policy committee, a tertiary institution whose responsibility was to give some clarity on the will of the party as a whole.

22:34But under the leadership of Johnson, the Democratic policy committee went from observing to deciding the will of the party. Johnson asked the heads of the Senate's most powerful standing committees, which acted as independent bearities, if they would be so kind as to advise his policy committee on the content and timelines of their bills. Slowly but unmistakably, Johnson's policy committee would be the one's advising the standing committees, not the other way around. The policy committee would suggest what the bills being drafted inside these committees ought to say. It would also suggest when the bills ought to hit the floor so that it wouldn't clash with other important legislation in the calendar.

23:15If a deal needed to be struck between two senators were a bill to move forward, then it was not the senators who would resolve their differences. Rather, they would come before their majority leader, like fighting siblings, who come crying to their mommy to iron out compromises. Two, before he would bring a bill to the floor, he would make a motion for a unanimous consent agreement. This Parliamentary device, among the many that Johnson discovered hidden and dusty old rule books and transformed into instruments control, restricted the ability of senators to debate bills or offer amendments once they were already on the floor.

23:55The very raison d 'âcher of the Senate was to consider an alter legislation in a studious and unheard manner, but this l 'ortharchic pace was not acceptable to the new majority leader. Three, it was not just bills which Johnson moved through the Senate, it was senators themselves. The Democratic Steering Committee decided who would be assigned to which communities and who among them would be the chairs of those committees. Before Lyndon Johnson became a majority leader, these positions were filled by seniority, so that the most important committees, which were the most coveted, were filled with the oldest members and the oldest among them would be their committee chairman.

24:32Seeing this sluggishness and inflexibility of these old men, Johnson versus all to change the system. Immediately after his ascension, the Steering Committee started selecting not the oldest candidate, but the candidate who Johnson wanted. This required of course loyalty to Johnson, but allegiance was not sufficient. These men had to be capable of pushing through the bills which Johnson needed to be pushed through. And so, for the 10 years in which Johnson was majority leader, mirrored became a greater consideration that seniority, the appointment of committee seats and chairmanship. Four, all these powers reinforced each other because of the overwhelming control which Johnson had over what bills would say and when, or whether they would make it to the floor, senators would have to appeal to him directly in order to get things moving.

25:18And here is a situation engineered to produce leverage. You do not antagonize a man who will decide whether the bill authorizing a major project in your state will get added to the docket, or whether you will remain chair of your committee before you become too senile to do your job. You will be asked to favors. You want a certain vote to go one way or another? And should you obstruct the majority leader, you will be threatened to back down, unless you want all your future bills, projects and committee assignments blocked. All these threats and favors built up an ever -thickening enamel of South Power atop the already sturdy mirror parliamentary creativity.

25:56Then effective all these reforms was that bills drafted in large part by Johnson AIDS and from the policy committee would pass through the Senate expeditiously and without complication, like a high fiber meal. What is interesting is that Johnson accomplished each of these maneuvers without opposition from other senators. These were wise shrewd men who treasure their own power and independence, and not just for its own sake, but because they believed that their chair's Senate would lose its very purpose if one man could run the chamber like an orchestra. Quote, Johnson accomplished this almost without conflict or opposition precisely because authority and influence of this kind had been of no significance to the exercise of Senate powers and were not perceived as a potential threat to those who ruled.

26:46It did not occur to his powerful associates, respectfully consulted in every move, that from such insubstantial resources Lyndon Johnson was shaping the instruments which would make him arbiter and eventually the master of the United States Senate. Robert Carro, master of the Senate. Riches to rags. An interesting thing I've noticed in the biographies of Great Men is that their ancestry includes people of great status and power, but for tragic and random reasons, their family has fallen into poverty and humiliation by the time they are born. So there ends up being this conflict between the station they feel entitled to because of their aristocratic heritage, and the demeaning and conspicuous scarcity they have to face growing up.

27:30And the ambition of these men seems to be in large part motivated by the need to resolve this incongruity. Some notable examples. Napoleon. Then the Bonaparte were a noble family on the island of Corsica. When that island was conquered by friends, the former nobility lost most of their wealth and privileges. Instead of being respected for his elite descent, young Napoleon was mercilessly bullied. He would not be found in the playground socializing with other kids, but rather in the library reading about the campaigns of Alexander or Caesar. Churchill. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, made it all the way to the cabinet, but in one of the biggest blenders in the British political history, Fredin Resigation, that to his surprise was accepted.

28:16Churchill was racially that he was part of the ruling class of Britain, and that he had inherited with his privilege a noblest oblige. Later in his life, he wrote a four -volume biography of his ancestor, John Maburo, who led the Allied armies from 1701 to 1710 against Louis IV -IV -IV -IV. But in reality, his childhood had little resemblance to the nobility which he thought he inherited, and his father, whom he idealized his entire life, was powerless and humiliated, not to mention negligent. And so it was with Lyndon Johnson. Quote, Lyndon's father, Sam, was described as a man of great optimism, and to some extent that optimism was justified in Austin.

28:59Popular and skilled in the legislature, he got an impressive number of laws passed, but he had also had to make a living, and he had to make it in the hill country. And his optimism, his romanticism, idealistic streak, kept him from looking at the hard facts. Generations before, in the 1870s and 80s, the era of the cattle kingdom, there had been a great sprawling Johnson ranch along the Perdon -Nallis River, but the family had ceased making money and had lost the ranch some decades before Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908. And now, when Johnson was 10 years old, he came back on the market, and Sam Johnson determined to buy it, to recreate the original Johnson ranch, to make the whole Perdon -Nallis Valley Johnson country again.