Was it ethically acceptable of me to buy Volume I of Robert A Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning 3000-page Lyndon Baines Johnson biography, get bored by page 3, then exchange it for the Justin Timberlake

"But was there also something about Caro’s pursuit of L.B.J. that was just a little bit Ahab-like?"

an editor let this through?

If the Johnson of Volumes 1 and 2 is the “bad” L.B.J., then the Johnson of Volume 4 is the “good” one. It is almost as if Caro is writing about two different people — as if, for all his reportorial skill, he can’t countenance Johnson being both ruthless and compassionate in the same volume. He has to be one or the other.

This man has neither read Caro's book nor indeed any book.

I hope someday to become this maniacally devoted to a project. So far my project-perseverance record is a couple years at a couple hours a week.

guy is too effin' slow, he better live to 90

Caro makes by far the most convincing case for RFK Maturing than any one of the hagiographers I've read. Apparently he really did create a professional, elite Justice Department and did care about the poor.

oh, to have such an Attorney General once again ...

Jon Stewart seemed a little cowed by him the other night--hardly joked around at all.

after reading that Esquire profile I'd be cowed too.

alright i have a library copy of master of the senate

I finally decided to dig into this and um, started in the middle with "Passage of Power" since that was the first volume available from the library and holy shit this guy really delivers on the meticulously researched anecdotes

so many zingers

was sure he was either dead or finished

upon thread bump i mean.

johnson anecdotes always irresistable; i swear 50% of the footnotes in the taylor branch king years trilogy are just johnson quotes that couldn't be justified as part of the main text

or thin

xpost

Master of the Senate delivers big time.

passage of power probably the worst volume so far btw! mean this as good news.

he's so thin is the thing. he really is the shadow george r r martin.

I'll probably backtrack to the previous volumes if I can find them, I'm barreling through this one

JFK purportedly ordering his staff not to slight the veep, the veep getting snickered at Georgetown cocktail parties, Arthur Schlesinger the toady, the loathsome Kenny O'Donnell. I admire LBJ for being such a good politician that the mask never slipped: he never dissed JFK in public ever.

i need to go back and reread these, tho the thought of plowing through the first book again and all that forlorn texas countryside is kinda harrowing

what about the forlorn upholstery and the scampering feet of Kennedy children in the East Wing

it's not on the same level as caro but doris kearns goodwin's book about hanging out with LBJ at the end of his life is a good companion piece to these books, lots and lots of uncensored quotes from LBJ himself, probably more fun to read than his actual memoirs

what I've read about the final years is grim: LBJ becoming a mean old pasha directing to the last ounce grain rations for cattle, berating his staff over dumb shit, taking up smoking again. He treated the ranch like the majority leader's office.

shocked you didn't mention his hair

lbj back on the ranch is what's meant by the cliche "a broken man"

as shocked as Sissy Spacek during her BOTH BROTHERS moment

lbj back on the ranch is what's meant by the cliche "a broken man"

just going by the wiki entry it sounds like pretty hardcore deathwish shit

http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/12/04/LBJ_Library_slideshow.jpg

Discussing his latest new age electronica record

so how bad is this HBO thing w Cranston gonna be? Feel like they should've put some prosthetic jowls on him

is he playing Lady Bird

"It premiered on Broadway in March 2014, in a production also directed by Rauch, which won the 2014 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play. Bryan Cranston won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance."

maybe not that bad

wow, I had no idea Justin Timberlake wrote an LBJ bio

singer-songwriter-keyboardist-LBJ hagiographer

Turns out this HBO thing is really bad. I turned it off after drunk LBJ crashes his car into a lake while swigging whiskey behind the wheel and terrorizing hubert humphrey

cuz he caught Justin's dancing during "Suit & Tie"?

the car turns, bondstyle, into a boat, which is accurate lbj story #551

i couldn't finish it either tho. the sort of movie where people always say "the 1957 civil rights act," never "the '57 bill".

got off on the wrong foot with it when lbj's first scene was waking from a troubled+uncertain sleep returning from dallas on air force one. in caro he's a suddenly reactivated dynamo.

sort of admired mackie's 0% resemblance to mlk -- a pencil moustache and done -- and the decision to emphasize his canny+unyielding political operator side is probably a much-needed antidote to the cuddly dreamer cliche, but it kinda misses the freakish softness with which he'd be hard imo. did like what i saw of bob moses -- tho for the sake of staging its intra-movement ideological battles between its characters in person, for drama, the movie kept putting roy wilkins in rooms i'm not sure he'd be in. whatever tho it's a play, but see also something worse: when hoover, instead of sending bowdlerized excerpts of his mlk sex tapes to joseph alsop or writing intricately passive-agressive blackmail memos to nicholas katzenbach, is just suddenly sitting in the parked limo from Every Political Thriller while lbj himself listens to sex noises on reel-to-reel. idk.

those sorts of things i imagine playing better onstage -- interactions between movement ideologies or govt departments boiled down to dramatic abstraction. but movie realism made it seem cheap and dumbed-down somehow -- and also i think a network that finds so much time for the details of cersei's schemes should find some for hoover's.

after drunk LBJ crashes his car into a lake while swigging whiskey behind the wheel and terrorizing hubert humphrey

it's probably pretty boring but this sounds hilarious

but he terrorized Humphrey sober at Cabinet meetings

Yeah it sounds funnier than it is

Almost there!

Those waiting for the fifth and final planned installment of Robert A. Caro’s award-winning life of Lyndon B. Johnson might be both heartened and frustrated by the historian’s most recent update on his progress.

In an interview recorded in New York on May 18 with C-Span’s Brian Lamb (to air on the news channel sometime this summer), Mr. Caro said he had most of the research and 400 typed pages of the manuscript for the next book done. But “one more big thing” remains, he said: A trip to Vietnam.

Mr. Caro lived in the Texas Hill Country while writing and researching the first volume, which covered Johnson’s youth.

“I’m not going to change the way I do it just because I’m getting older,” Mr. Caro, 81, said of the process. “I don’t know what the point would be of that.”

I would think the only point would be to expedite the process of writing, just in case Caro drops dead. I don't wish him ill, but he's 81!

omg that's like exactly what he said the last two times anyone checked in; i thought he'd been in vietnam this whole time

The man sure is meticulous:

LBJ Presidential Library is just massive. The last time I was there, they had forty-four million pieces of paper. These shelves go back, like, a hundred feet. And there are four floors of these red buckram boxes. His congressional papers run 144 linear feet. Which is 349 boxes. A box can hold eight hundred pages. I was able to go through all of those, though it took a long, long time. This was when we were living in Texas for three years. Ina and I were spending five and a half days a week, typically, at the library.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6442/robert-caro-the-art-of-biography-no-5-robert-caro

Has anyone visited?

tbh the only presidential library I have been to is the Hoover one, on a family road trip around the state as a kid. it was about as great as Hoover was

Ina Caro should be listed as coauthor imo

we did a class field trip to the LBJ library at UT. i repressed all my urges to talk about his big penis.

also i had to yell at some kids who touched some piece of art despite clear signs that said DONT TOUCH THIS SHIT