![]() ![]() LBJ, he’s always insisted, was a supremely complicated person who, for all his venality, was also magnanimous, his merciless crawl to power having been motivated, at least in part, by a heartfelt desire to help the underprivileged. On the other hand, he was a civil-rights hero who cared deeply about the plight of poor blacks and Mexicans. On the one hand, he was colossally corrupt in business, he cheated on an epic scale to win his first Senate election, and he refused to withdraw from Vietnam, at least in part because he was making a mint in payoffs from companies like Bell Helicopter. They read like novels.Īnd as in any good novel, the protagonist, LBJ, was morally ambiguous. Reading his first two LBJ books, I admired more than ever his stately prose, eye for detail, and narrative gift. (If the pattern holds, his final volume should appear in another year or so.) When his first LBJ book came out, Caro was already respected - not least by me - for his 1974 study of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. Johnson, which he’s always described as being about how political power works in America. Then along came Robert Caro, who in 1982, 1990, 2002, and 2012 published the first four massive volumes of his biography of Lyndon B. And as the y ears passed, Best Evidence faded from my memory. ![]()
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