the years of lyndon johnson the path to power

The unexpected death of a president provides the closest thing to a natural experiment that history can offer. This debate is too big for a single story to provide anything but an anecdote. There is a perennial debate about whether great men or great forces direct the flow of history. The same is true for history - to understand a place and time is not only to know what happened, but to understand what could have happened instead, and what historical dynamics picked our timeline over the counterfactuals. CounterfactualsĪ professor in college once told me that you don’t really understand a proof until you see all the alternative ways in which it could have been constructed. If you knew about some of the ways in which Johnson got things done, you wouldn’t treat this speculation lightly. This is the modern liberal equivalent to Machiavelli’s The Prince - it is a guide for a person aligned with Caro’s politics on how to amass power in the American political system, and how to use that power to get things done the way Johnson was able to get them done. That these volumes are not written to educate the public (who are portrayed as secondary characters anyways), but rather to train the next Lyndon Johnson. If you asked me to identify a Straussian reading of the books, this would be it. But if the main character Lyndon Johnson wants the bill to pass, then the bill will pass nonetheless.

A bill may become harder to pass if the opposite party gains a few seats. The democratic process in Caro’s books acts as a world-building magic system. But the ultimate basis and focus of the novel are the few individual main characters who move the plot forward. In a fantasy novel, the magic system exists to provide background constraints on the story. But nothing ever happens just because “the people” want it. Something might happen if Richard Russell, the South’s great general in the Senate, wants it - or if Sam Rayburn, the all-powerful Speaker of the House wants it - and something will definitely happen if the master of the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, wants it.

But if you read his books, this is definitely not the message you get about how power works. Because in a democracy, what matters is what the people think and want. He always responds that he wants people to understand how political power works. Caro is often asked why he has dedicated his life to writing the biographies of powerful political figures.

The years of lyndon johnson the path to power