In volume four we find out Johnson’s great skill at Senate politics does not translate to national politics. Whether due to arrogant presumptiveness, simple miscalculation or some of both, LBJ blows his chances for the 1960 presidential nomination. Caro suggests fear of failure kept LBJ from an...
Fascinating story of a pivotal time in US history with the assassination of JFK and the passage of Civil Rights. This is the fourth book in a five part biography of Lyndon Johnson, but it stands on its own with background on his life before becoming VP. (Part 5 not published yet.) It tells the st...
Caro confirms what I have felt for years. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would not have passed when they did were it not for the political acumen of LBJ. As much as I despised him in the 1960s and 70s, he knew how Washington worked and how to get legislation throug...
At nearly 1,200 pages of text (not including endnotes and the index), Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is a big book. And despite its uniformly excellent quality – its Pulitzer Prize is well deserved – I felt every single one of those pages. This book came to dominate my reading time, to the extent...
This is the second volume (of four thus far) in Robert Caro's magisterial biography of former president Lyndon B. Johnson. It treats the period from mid-1941, when Johnson lost a special election for the U.S. Senate, through 1948, when Johnson won election to the Senate in a hotly contested and h...
As I was reading this book, I thought back to our recent election, and to a minor flap that occurred when Michelle Obama said she was "proud" of America for the first time in her life. Some people - white people - didn't, or couldn't, understand what she meant. They should probably read this book...
Published in 1982, this is the first volume in Robert Caro's massive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Originally scheduled to run three volumes, the fourth has just been published and there is at least one more to follow. Caro has devoted the last forty years of his life to this project. He has do...