He abused his associates and betrayed his wife. The Lyndon Johnson that emerges from this book is a complete scoundrel in both his personal and political life.
It's hard to imagine how Caro is going to explain in subsequent installments the achievements Johnson recorded as Senate majority leader and president or the knowing risks he took in his last 20 years of growing power.Īfter the biographer has labored so mightily to convince readers that the man is utterly selfish, self-aggrandizing and unscrupulous, he will have to ask them either to erase that image from their memories or convince them that the man who put his party at risk for the cause of civil rights and who put aside the presidency in acknowledgment of his failure in Vietnam was somehow transformed from the slimy creature who stole the 1948 Texas Senate election.
The caricature of Johnson as Evil Incarnate that was sketched in the 1983 volume covering the first 33 years of his life here becomes a Daumier-deep etching. Caro has dug himself far deeper into a Texas-size hole. WITH THIS second installment of his monumental biography of Lyndon B.
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