The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Part 4

I’m looking at a copy of Robert Caro’s latest, THE PASSAGE OF POWER. This is the fourth book in his series THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON.

One of the themes in the early going of Vol. 4 could be summarized in the words “Johnson dithered.” It is Caro’s view that he might well have won the Democratic nomination for President in 1960 if he had grabbed for it himself with his usual decisiveness and energy. But that would have meant laying groundwork as early as 1958, and engaging in a serious hunt for delegates through 1959. Johnson did neither of those things.  Nor did he close the door on them. 

He dithered.

By January 1960, he finally seemed ready to get busy. His strategy required the Mountain West. He assumed he could go into the convention as the south’s candidate, but to be something more, his natural allies were to be found in the mountain states – on mining and other resource issues, he had a Senate record that found admirers there.

So Caro gives us the following scene from early 1960. An experienced western-states political operative, Irving Hoff, was now working there on LBJ's behalf, and Hoff spoke for example with a key figure in Idaho who had the wonderfully appropriate name Tom Boise.

These are Caro’s words:

In Idaho, where the Hells Canyon Dam was rising day by day, and where political leaders knew who had gotten them the dam at last, the Democratic state chairman, Tom Boise, had told Hoff that, despite all the Kennedy efforts, many party leaders were still considering supporting Johnson. ‘These guys were for Johnson,’ Hoff says, ‘If we had been able to tell them that he was going to run, we’d have had that delegation.’ He explained this to Johnson, and Johnson accepted an invitation to speak in Lewiston, Idaho, and afterwards to have a drink with Boise and his leaders in a hotel suite. But in the suite [Johnson still couldn’t quite bring himself to declare.] He said, ‘What the heck do you think I’m out here for – catching butterflies? Do you see me carrying a net?’ But there were future government positions at stake, careers at stake,  issues at stake – with the convention so close, rhetorical humor wasn’t enough. They pressed him further. But all Johnson would say was, ‘I’ll let you know…You’ll be the first to know.’”  

(p. 74.)

I love Caro’s way of developing – and, you might say, milking – such a scene. He even tells us that Johnson was walking around the living room of the hotel suite in his pajamas while saying these evasive things, and that he was stirring his drink with his big finger. That’s the way to do biography!

John Lindsay

Some recent reading of mine on the history of the city of New York gives the impression that man who was its mayor from 1966 to 1973, John Lindsay was -- how shall one put it? -- a clueless twit.

If any of my readers with a long memory or who have done reading that leads to another conclusion wants to make a pro-Lindsay case, please feel free to use the comment option here.

I'll just give two brief quotations supporting the clueless-twit image.

Roger Lowenstein, in his recent book about America's ongoing pension crises, talks of how in the Lindsay period the public-employee unions "leapfrogged" one another with ever higher pension demands, and Lindsay was all too eager to comply, at the expense of the city's future solvency.

"The response of a Lindsay aide to one such pension demand [by parks workers in 1970] was memorable: 'When would we have to start paying for it?' Told that, due to the peculiarities of the pension calender, an increase would not affect the budget until three years later, by which time Lindsay would be serving out his final year, the aide breezily approved it."

Okay, that's the aide's cluelessness, but presumably it was the result of a climate the boss encouraged.

But let's go back a bit. This spring I read for the first time a classic work on New York City, written in the 1970s, Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, that "master builder" of highways, bridges, parks, etc. Lindsay came into office aspiring to take Moses down a peg. As it turned out, Lindsay had no idea what that would entail, or how to go about it. Gov. Rockefeller did have some valuable ideas in that area, which in time would yield fruit, but that's another story.

Of Lindsay, Caro writes: "It wasn't polemics that was going to count in any confrontation; it was power. John Lindsay and his glib young aides had the polemics; the grim old ruler of Randall's Island had the power. More, he knew how to use power. There was a phrase he employed in discussing Lindsay's merger proposal that had a certain signifdicance. It was, he said 'ripper legislation.' 'Ripper legislation' -- a phrase denoting legislation passed to remove an official from power indiredctly when it was impossible to do so directly -- was a phrase out of another age; it had not been in general use since the 1920s. The significance lay not in the phrase but in the fact that the man using it was still around....These men with their first taste of power laughed athim; he had not only tasted power but held it longer than many of these men had been alive."

The floor is open.