The Vol. 4 bio of LBJ by CARO is out!1
The link to CARO’s interview yesterday is: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7407124n&tag=mg;cbsthismorning
I dived into to the new LBJ volume eagerly, without the daunted feeling I got with the first volume that was my intro to CARO’s pyramid building scope of writing. After reading the whole three volumes, I was addicted to CARO and went back to 1982 to read his pre-LBJ The Power Broker bio of Robert MOSES, the builder of just about any massive proportions bridge and park, parkway/expressway, and public building in NYC. So when I heard last week’s news about the woman driver who plummeted off of the Bronx Parkway into the Bronx Zoo, I knew she was the non-virgin sacrifice to MOSES’ tribute demands. While his 40 yrs of building yielded landmarks, he displaced hundreds of thousands of mostly low income people, took by low prices or confiscation/eminent domain property, and benefitted the uppers and upper middles at the expense of the poor and minorities and set NYC on a course of passenger vehicle traffic that was wasteful and damaging instead of mass transit. Guess who were his allies: Car manufacturers, steel and oil companies, and construction industry and unions. He was so devious that he built underpasses below 11 feet high so that buses could NEVER access his roads, at least not without raising them. And as for his class warfare, while he did his displacements and Confiscations of the poor for Lincoln Center, somehow he granted Joseph P. KENNEDY & 4 of his spawn (RFK & 3 sisters) MILLIONS for THEIR property there. And don’t think he was a Democratic shill. He was a Rethug, thoroughly arrogant and despicable, but big money likes other big money.
The new book ONLY covers LBJ’s miserable years as vice president and the SEVEN WEEKS when he turned the transition from JFK into the LBJ presidency, seven weeks when he took charge and battled the hatred (& his own hatred and fear) of RFK and everything else against him and ended the transition with the grand announcement of The Great Society/War on Poverty. Vietnam and more lies won’t be covered until the next and final volume, three or so years from now.
I'll just say that CARO provides CONTEXT, both for events and personalities. In previous volumes his chapter on the Senate makes gridlock understandable as being BUILT IN and how the nation was ready for Civil Rights and other reforms for generations but was stopped by the Senate. And (Vol. 2?) describing the stolen (one of many) "election" to the Senate turns into an epic with all the same legal dodges and outcome that make (Shrub) v. GORE look like child's play. We're reliving the TeaBaggers as the same a-holes who obstructed FDR just because the CARO books haven't been read enough.
A more professional, if bloom-is-off-the-CARO/adoration, review: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-robert-a-caros-the-passage-of-power-the-years-of-lyndon-johnson/2012/05/01/gIQASh16uT_story.html
Oh, here's one by Bill CLINTON: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/the-passage-of-power-robert-caros-new-lbj-book.html
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