Books: The Path to Power
by rrusczyk, Jul 9, 2008, 3:14 AM
The Path to Power by Robert Caro
Paul Zeitz took me to a used bookstore in Lincoln. We're both book nuts, so we agreed to buy each other a book. Recommending fiction is tough, so we each went nonfiction. I got him A Bridge Too Far, since he had mentioned an interest in reading some military history. For an American, the story of A Bridge Too Far is particularly compelling, since it focuses on the biggest battle of the Western front of the European theater of World War II that few Americans know much, if anything, about. Even the movie about it was much bigger in Britain than here. ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075784/]Check out the cast[/url]. They don't make movies like this anymore, thankfully, because we don't have wars like this anymore.)
Paul got me the first in Caro's series of books about Lyndon Johnson. (I like to do things backwards -- I've already read the third.) This book chronicled his early life and beginnings in politics. Caro's a fantastic writer (all three books won all sorts of awards), and like any good biographer/historian, he uses a book ostensibly about a man to tell a larger story of a time, much like Hampton Sides did with the Kit Carson book I discussed earlier. I don't nearly have the time to hit all the areas Caro touched on, but I'll mention a few that struck me most clearly.
As much as I gripe about how much the government props up farmers now, life was very, very, very hard for farmers, and maybe even harder for their wives, before the countryside had electricity. As jmerry noted a while back, bringing electricity to everyone was a great example of a tremendously successful government program. Maybe some company would have gotten to it eventually, but they had plenty of time to do it before the government came along and got it done.
The book did little to convince me anything besides the fact that politics is a grotesque endeavor that I would never personally want to take part in. And Lyndon Johnson was genetically designed in nearly every way to thrive in this environment, and even pioneer ways to make it more grotesque. Of course, he wasn't the only venal, ambitious sort around. He had plenty of competition on the way.
So, why was he so successful? Because he did have one redeeming quality that nearly every successful person has -- he was so passionate about what he was doing (advancing his career, that is), that he dotted every i and crossed every t. He worked very, very hard, doing things other, lazier people didn't, such as going to virtually every voter in his first House campaign, even though this meant wandering through 1-voter-a-mile territory. He wrote letters and letters and letters to his constituents, answering their letters to him. And, as unattractive a person as he was in his personality, he was very, very good at his job. To his credit, he was very good at nearly all the jobs he did. I have to have a bit of a soft spot for him, despite all the less attractive (and downright ugly) aspects of his personality and career, because early on, he was a teacher, and by most accounts of his students and administrators, one of the best ones those schools saw, because all that passion he poured into advancing his political career, he also poured into the couple years he spent in the classroom. Maybe he earned some karma points in those early years. But even those, together with the karma points he piled up in the civil rights era, weren't enough to get him through Vietnam...
Paul Zeitz took me to a used bookstore in Lincoln. We're both book nuts, so we agreed to buy each other a book. Recommending fiction is tough, so we each went nonfiction. I got him A Bridge Too Far, since he had mentioned an interest in reading some military history. For an American, the story of A Bridge Too Far is particularly compelling, since it focuses on the biggest battle of the Western front of the European theater of World War II that few Americans know much, if anything, about. Even the movie about it was much bigger in Britain than here. ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075784/]Check out the cast[/url]. They don't make movies like this anymore, thankfully, because we don't have wars like this anymore.)
Paul got me the first in Caro's series of books about Lyndon Johnson. (I like to do things backwards -- I've already read the third.) This book chronicled his early life and beginnings in politics. Caro's a fantastic writer (all three books won all sorts of awards), and like any good biographer/historian, he uses a book ostensibly about a man to tell a larger story of a time, much like Hampton Sides did with the Kit Carson book I discussed earlier. I don't nearly have the time to hit all the areas Caro touched on, but I'll mention a few that struck me most clearly.
As much as I gripe about how much the government props up farmers now, life was very, very, very hard for farmers, and maybe even harder for their wives, before the countryside had electricity. As jmerry noted a while back, bringing electricity to everyone was a great example of a tremendously successful government program. Maybe some company would have gotten to it eventually, but they had plenty of time to do it before the government came along and got it done.
The book did little to convince me anything besides the fact that politics is a grotesque endeavor that I would never personally want to take part in. And Lyndon Johnson was genetically designed in nearly every way to thrive in this environment, and even pioneer ways to make it more grotesque. Of course, he wasn't the only venal, ambitious sort around. He had plenty of competition on the way.
So, why was he so successful? Because he did have one redeeming quality that nearly every successful person has -- he was so passionate about what he was doing (advancing his career, that is), that he dotted every i and crossed every t. He worked very, very hard, doing things other, lazier people didn't, such as going to virtually every voter in his first House campaign, even though this meant wandering through 1-voter-a-mile territory. He wrote letters and letters and letters to his constituents, answering their letters to him. And, as unattractive a person as he was in his personality, he was very, very good at his job. To his credit, he was very good at nearly all the jobs he did. I have to have a bit of a soft spot for him, despite all the less attractive (and downright ugly) aspects of his personality and career, because early on, he was a teacher, and by most accounts of his students and administrators, one of the best ones those schools saw, because all that passion he poured into advancing his political career, he also poured into the couple years he spent in the classroom. Maybe he earned some karma points in those early years. But even those, together with the karma points he piled up in the civil rights era, weren't enough to get him through Vietnam...
February 2012
January 2012