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

it is the third most gripping history I have read

What are the first two?

-- Mr. Goodman, Friday, February 15, 2008 9:42 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

alley oop for a zing if ever i saw one

I'd like to at least read The Power Broker before I die, but it'd probably be foolish of me to even attempt this.

Start it! It's really engaging and hard to put down until like 800 pages in.

roommate has been chugging through these for the last couple of months

LBJ is my favorite US president to read about. Minus all that "Vietnam" stuff, I genuinely find him to be one of the best presidents this country has ever had.

When is the final Years of LBJ book coming out?

LBJ is my favorite US president to read about. Minus all that "Vietnam" stuff, I genuinely find him to be one of the best presidents this country has ever had.

... Yeah, what he said.

finished the first volume of this last night and immediately picked up the second one. it is literally an epic. like jd says upthread, caro can be hilariously melodramatic (and repetitive: don't know how many times he uses the phrase "a drive to win, to dominate, to bend others to his will" but it's a lot) but when the work is this big and this detailed and spins out to cover so much of texan+american history 1870(!)--1968 (eventually, maybe, if caro lives; he is the george r r martin of presidential biographers: a joust with johnsons) the heightened tone is excusable. love when it introduces a character and then leaves johnson for ten or twenty or fifty pages to insert a biography-within-a-biography -- long-serving speaker sam rayburn in particular is almost a protagonist in the second half of the first volume, and the details in the huge chapter that introduces him aren't just for detail's sake but get returned to again and again w/r/t his personality's interaction with johnson's -- and love how much it ends up telling you not just about lyndon johnson but about every environment he was ever in: the texas hill country, the d.c. congressional bureaucracy, the implementation end of the new deal, the fdr-era house of reps. (looking forward like crazy to the 1000-page brick about his senate years.) also omg its extended digression about texas governor/senator pappy o'daniel; i didn't know about him at all. so yeah, noted "poptimist" me sez way >>>>>>>> justified.

He, unlike LBJ, gets more poised and assured with each succeeding volume. By the time you get to Master of the Universe it's a Mann novel.

vol. 2's first instance of "not merely to lead but to dominate, to bend others to his will": pg. 22

i didn't realize robert caro had a bio of timberlake out

Minus all that "Vietnam" stuff, I genuinely find him to be one of the best presidents this country has ever had.

As Peewee Herman said, everybody's got a big... minus.

as i said elsewhere johnson comes across as a clinical psychopath in this book

wow, just googled caro to see if there was anything new on the last volume. apparently he's doing FIVE LBJ books now. jesus.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2011/11/robert-caros-next-giant-lbj-book-due-out-may/44406/

next one due out in may!

that is EXCITING NEWS in my household!!

not surprised it's stretching to five volumes; considering what went on w/LBJ in 1964-68 it may become six

anyway, yay

I'd never fit these books into the rest of my allotted lifespan

Bill O'Reilly has signed a deal to write two more books for Henry Holt and Co., publisher of his current best seller Killing Lincoln, the Fox News commentator's first work of history. O'Reilly's already under contract to write a memoir for Holt and Holt publisher Stephen Rubin says one of the two new projects will be a biography of a president-to-be-determined, and promises it will read like "history told in a narrative, novelistic fashion."

I read the first volume of this many years ago, thought it was excellent; this reminds me that I need to follow up.

(LBJ, not Justin Timberlake.)

It's here!.

In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better — or to understand him better — than Johnson knew or understood himself. He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for his penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.

so excited for this. am only like halfway through vol 3 (got sidetracked by trotsky's caro-length history of the revolution, then by some related stuff and for some reason the magic mountain) but will probably push through this month, to be ready. where is the hbo miniseries.

or series, rather. obviously there is nothing mini about this.

yay! though i'm gonna wait till it comes out in paperback.

that story makes me want to give up on my life so i can become a historian and understand political power

Always wanted to read this and liked how uncompromising he came across but also really offputting how the research and time and willingness to say something in 15 sentences rather than one is put into saying that...power corrupts. Does he really understand political power or is his somewhat romantic conception of it massaged over and over again into 3,000 pages of prose.

Maybe Foucault's ghost could re-write it sometime.

in this book johnson is just about exactly as corrupt at age 8 as he is when he's king of the senate, so i don't think that's the moral. plus like the article says half of vol. 2 is about coke stevenson, whom caro (suspiciously, yes) portrays as basically a saint, but a powerful one -- just not as powerful as johnson becomes, probably because the quality that most makes him a saint in caro's eyes is his lack of interest in power. (at the end of the volume, when johnson's successfully stolen the 1948 texas senatorial election from stevenson after a campaign involving helicopters and an insane legal fight that goes on forever, the last we see of stevenson is him standing in a boat drifting down the river on his ranch, opening his arms to embrace the land he owns, a private citizen again, blissful and powerless.) the book's more about where power comes from, both generally and in american republicanism; how you get it; how you hold it; what you can, with sufficient skill and patience, train it to do; the checks and balances both designed and accidental placed on it by various different institutions at various different times; how these are almost all overcome by a guy who Wants To Be President basically from birth and will play totally amoral multi-decade three-dimensional chess to make it happen -- but who is also, despite his lust for ascension and refined talent for manipulation and deceit, driven by a desire to utterly destroy, in america, the poverty he grew up in. he also ends up being the one to finally break jim crow. if the book (so far) has a Theme it's the way johnson's psychopathic power-lust coexists+intertwines with his belief in social justice: dark and light "threads" that both unspool from the same childhood experience of destitute humiliation. if you wanted to get fancy (caro so far thankfully has not) you could say that these same two threads run through america as they run through lbj; run, in both cases, all the way into the vietnamese mud. but you don't need to -- this is just a long story of an interesting guy with a series of interesting jobs.

(if you rolled your eyes at any of that prose you will roll them out of your head within ten pages of caro, but i do that too. it ends up affectionate.)

nah appreciate the explanation and glad that it seems to be going somewhere else than something so simplistic.

http://www.robertacaro.com/newvan.htm

interesting read from 1999

just read that NYTMag piece, I'm amazed he finishes anything.

Another Caro profile:

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/robert-caro-0512?page=all

loled at this exchange:

CARO
I had talked to Lyndon's relatives and they said everything [in LBJ's preserved boyhood home] was exactly like it was when they grew up. So I got permission to take Sam Houston in there after hours when it was closed and there were no tourists in there. We went in at about five or six o'clock at night. And I had him sit down at the dining room table. It was a plank table, long and thin, just like the original, and Lyndon's father and mother used to sit in chairs at the two ends. There were two plank benches and the three sisters used to sit on one side, and Sam Houston and Lyndon sat on the other. I had him sit in the place in which he had sat when he was a boy. And then I said to him, "Now I want you to tell me about these terrible fights between your father and Lyndon." I wanted to put him back in his boyhood, to make him remember accurately how things had happened. At first this was very slow going. His memories came back very slowly, and there were long pauses between his sentences. I'd have to ask, "Well, then, what would your father say?" And then, "What would Lyndon say?" But gradually the inhibitions fell away, and it was no longer necessary for me to say anything. He started talking faster and faster. And finally he was shouting back and forth-the father, for example, shouting, "Lyndon, God damn it, you're a failure, you'll be a failure all your life." By this time I felt that he was really in the fame of mind to remember accurately, and I said, "Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me all the stories about your brother's boyhood that you told me before, the stories that your brother told all those years, only give me more details." There was this long pause. Then he said, "1 can't." I said, "Why not?" And he said, "Because they never happened." And he started talking and basically told me the story of Johnson's youth that is in my first volume. And after that I went back to the other kids, old people by now but then kids, who had been involved in each incident in college or in California or whatever and when I asked them about the incidents that Sam Houston had related, they would say, "Yes, that is what happened and I remember so and so." Everything was confirmed. So when you ask about Lyndon Johnson, and whether I like him or dislike him, that doesn't even compute in my feeling. I felt I had come to understand him. And, understanding him, I came to feel very sorry for him. He was so ashamed of his background and there was no reason to be. He was so ashamed that he made up a whole myth about his youth.

VONNEGUT
I was wondering if devoting so much of your life to other people's lives has done anything to your mind?

That Esquire profile is remarkable.

Tomorrow!

Chapter 2 - The Rich Man's Son - on Kennedy pretty great. Love how Caro does these little min-biographies on the other major characters in the story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/the-passage-of-power-robert-caros-new-lbj-book.html?pagewanted=all

huh, it's coming out a whole month later over here

i've read none of these books, but i want to

i didn't look at the byline on that nyt thing so i was thinking 'why does this guy think this book review is about him so much' and then i got to

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States.

i've been meaning to read these for ages. pre-ordered the new one. figured i care about this stuff more than his stealing his high school elections.

lol

nah the college years stuff in the 1st one is awesome, he's like scamming highly sought-after campus jobs for his cronies and undermining his enemies in pointlessly spectacular fashion. at a tiny teacher's college in nowhere, texas. good shit.

oh it sounds fascinating! but if i only get around to spending five hours reading one doorstop about lbj i feel like i ought to learn about the civil rights act instead, y'know?

yeah, the college stuff is great, plus 1 has insane coen-inspiring radio flour salesman and charlatan texas governor pappy o'daniel; it's as good as 3. 2 was kind of a dip for me because the last few hundred pages get very detailed about the blow-by-blow of johnson's 1948 senate election and start really suffering from caro's worst habit, which is that he likes explaining the same thing to you over and over to make sure you haven't forgotten; but the stuff about COKE STEVENSON, AMERICAN ICON is fun. (altho he's cast so flawlessly as mirror-johnson it's kinda suspicious.) third one is :O :O :O all thru tho so yeah if you do only read one -- although it will be full of spoilers! like reading only a storm of swords.

https://twitter.com/#!/aaronsw/status/197679232246235137

WSJ interview.

Just finished the JFK bio in the new one.

here's a moving anecdote about young RFK buying drinks at a bar for the football team but infuriated by someone else's birthday party:

...he walked up behind Magnuson and hit him over the head with a beer bottle, sending him to the hospital for stitches. (A few days later Ken O'Donnell apologized to Magnuson; Bobby hadn't come himself, he said, because "it just wasn't his nature to apologize"

or Bobby abandoning a bro who couldn't sail:

The wind was fading, and as lunchtime approached, Kennedy realized that they might not make it ashore in time for lunch. Obsessed with his father's insistence on punctuality, he simply dove overboard and swam for shore, leaving his helpless crewmate to fend for himself. After flailing about, the friend was rescued by a passing boat. Kennedy made no attempt to apologize. Bobby was not a boy at the time The incident occurred in 1948, when he was twenty two years old

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States.

insufferable "review"

I just reached the JFK assassination. Life often plays like a bad movie. Apparently at the same moment the Senate Rules Committee was accepting evidence that LBJ's aide de camp Bobby Baker had accepted bribes and peddled influence.

Lots of lols throughout. I didn't know that if the JFK campaign had been less ruthless LBJ would likely have garnered the nomination in '60. LBJ way with a insult (about JFK: "A little scrawny fella with rickets") glitters throughout.

pretty much everything i have ever read about RFK, minus apologetic stuff about the '68 campaign, has left me thinking he was a total SOB from day 1.

Garry Wills NYRB review, mostly just highlights:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/24/americas-nastiest-blood-feud/

http://assets.nybooks.com/media/photo/2012/04/30/wills_1-052412_jpg_470x320_q85.jpg

any idea what is the worst thing LBJ said about JFK in public?

Yeah it’s not an untenable position. It’s more the smug way he and others talk about her like she’s a Labrador.

much as I love and respect you, caek, I'm not going to accept that amount of scornful characterization without at least some evidence to examine

I said to Ina, “I’m not understanding these people and therefore I’m not understanding Lyndon Johnson. We’re going to have to move to the Hill Country and live there.” Ina asked, “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” But Ina is always Ina: loyal and true. She said, as she always says, “Sure.”

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Sunday, March 17, 2019 6:33 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You read that as smug and condescending.

I observe that loyalty and truth are not traits which are exclusive to Labradors, and when they appear in humans they inspire admiration more often than not. He calls her "loyal and true" and states she is steadfast in these traits. To me this is a compliment. So, as you see, I read it differently.

Amy Goodman interviewed Caro last week (April 29) on Democracy Now.

his words-a-day schedule (with excuses when he doesn't hit his 1000)

Amazing for anyone who has ever tried to write: Robert Caro’s calendar. He tried to write 1,000 words a day. On days he fails he includes his excuses in parentheses. (“lazy”)
From @wsj pic.twitter.com/DE69xIbImo

— carolynryan 🏳️‍🌈🏓 (@carolynryan) November 23, 2021

12 june: (dog)

Just learned of this now:

https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/turneverypage/

I've only read one volume of the LBJ bios--I think the first, but I honestly can't remember--but would love to see this.

Finally saw the film (on YouTube for $5). Excellent--really, the only thing I didn't care for was the way the final scene, the two of them editing together, was handled. I of course now want to read all the LBJ books but 1) as I posted above, there's a chance the one I read many years ago was not the first (do I then read that one over?), and 2) I don't read quickly, and I always have two or three books on the go, so I'm just not sure I'd get to the finish line at my age. Anyway, the film has a five-minute rumination on semi-colons, and that's a film for me; I love semi-colons. One fascinating segment is Bill Clinton talking about LBJ when it's so overwhelmingly obvious he's talking about himself.

i'm listening to it on audible at 1.5x to keep sanity while baby wrangling. it's 66 hours. still have 10 to go. it's Quite Good.

I am listening to it on audible also, at 1.2x. The narration is fantastic. The whole thing is engrossing and fascinating. The thread title is particularly funny to me, because I only started listening to the book on the recommendation of a friend, and when it starts by describing (I think) the chemical makeup of the grasslands of the Texas hill country prior to the arrival of any white settlers, I immediately thought "this is my kind of history book".

have gotten much delight over the years from telling people that the first hundred pages of this are about soil composition: ha ha makes sense, wait really?

With a detailed five minutes in the film given over to what it means to steal an election (Johnson's first senate bid), I'm glad Lizzie Gottlieb resisted the temptation to bring in Trump--it's there for you to notice and think about yourself, if you want to. (Unavoidable.) I did not, in any way, think the film was adopting a fence-sitting position on Trump ("Well, maybe..."). I took it more as "This is what it means to go out and find actual proof."

Gottlieb kind of reminded me of Christgau. Caro comes across as genuinely heroic. I don't think he has a false moment in the film (which in the context of a documentary amounts to playing to the camera). I love how he'd close his eyes for many answers, like he was summoning every last ounce of concentration to find exactly the right words for the most honest answer he could give.

This documentary is high on my to see list - still frustrated that I missed the when it was briefly in the theater around here.

It's on Criterion now

That's what I don't get--it was supposed to be on Criterion in August (I posted on the Criterion Channel thread), but when I checked the other night, and again this morning, it's not there. Again, if you have a good hookup and don't mind paying $5, it's on YouTube (and Google Play).

the eye closing seems to be a tic of some sort

gottlieb was the star of this, just impossibly erudite and charismatic. was worried the film (made by his daughter) would be too sentimental, but it’s just tender. I loved it

It's amazing to me that anybody could devote as much of his life as Gottleib has to someone else's life's work. Putting out his own books all the while obviously helps--tried to find a cheap copy of Avid Reader last night, couldn't--but that's still a monumentally ego-less act. I want to go back now and read about what kind of relationship he had with Kael...will check the Kellow book.

That's what I don't get--it was supposed to be on Criterion in August (I posted on the Criterion Channel thread), but when I checked the other night, and again this morning, it's not there.

Checking their August additions post, I see it is indeed marked US-only.

I'm wounded and deeply offended. You just wait till I make five-hour documentary on Joey Smallwood.

It's no biggie if you don't read the volumes in order.

i'm listening to it on audible at 1.5x to keep sanity while baby wrangling. it's 66 hours. still have 10 to go. it's Quite Good.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, May 1, 2018 1:50 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

listened to the power broker with baby #1 and the first three vols of lbj with baby #2 and lockdown like this. different times.

threads that give you palpitations when you see them revived

i picked up my NYPL library card at the main library at bryant park on friday, and they had a "books written here" display so i was thinking about him. hope he's doing well.