Caro recounts LBJ’s first hours as president
Distinguished biographer Robert Caro, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, said Wednesday night that his job has larger implications than simply recording the life of a historical figure.
Life lesson · Biographer Robert Caro speaks to students at Town and Gown Wednesday about chronicling President Lyndon B. Johnson’s life. – Ralf Cheung | Daily Trojan
Caro delivered the Dennis F. and Brooks Holt Distinguished Lecture at Town and Gown touching on his most recent biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the role of power in government.
“I never think of my books as just the biography of … Lyndon B. Johnson,” Caro said. “When I started writing books, I never had an interest in writing a biography simply to record the life of one person. I try to use the life of a great man to explore the forces that shape his time, particularly political power.”
The biography, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Passage of Power, is the fourth book in a five-volume series titled The Years of Lyndon Johnson. on the life of the 36th president of the United States.
To Caro, political power is a key force in shaping contemporary social issues, just as it was at the time of the Johnson presidency.
“We’re in a democracy, so ultimately, power comes from the votes we cast at the ballot box,” Caro said. “Power comes from us, so the political power … the raw, naked reality of what political power really is, the more informed our votes will be, and therefore the better our democracy will become.”
The event, which was part of a lecture series jointly sponsored by the Price School of Public Policy and the Bedrosian Center on Governance, was open to an audience of students and guests.
For students interested in public policy and government, Caro’s lecture gave insight on their fields of study. Yet some students, such as Sam Dorn, a sophomore double majoring in broadcast and digital journalism and political science, were disappointed with the lack of variety in subject matter.
“I’ve read all of his books and it seemed like he was basically restating the information from his books, with short anecdotes about his interviews,” Dorn said. “As a journalist, I found that interesting, but it wasn’t really what I came here to see.”
However, Aubrey Hicks, assistant director of the Bedrosian Center, said that Caro tried to touch on issues of interest for both graduate and undergraduate students of politics.
“Thinking about governance and what it means to be a citizen, as well as what [Caro] said about how power comes from the people … is very interesting in terms of what we want to talk about in this lecture series,” she said.
The series continues on Feb. 19 with a lecture by former L.A. mayor Richard J. Riordan.
Here are some good books relating to the role of Lyndon Johnson in the JFK assassination:
1) “LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination” by Phillip Nelson
2) Watch “The Men Who Killed Kennedy – the Guilty Men – episode 9” at YouTube – best video ever on the JFK assassination; it expertly covers Lyndon Johnson’s role.
3) “The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy” by Harrison Livingstone
4) “Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ killed JFK” by Barr McClellan
5) “The Final Chapter on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” by Craig Zirbel
6) “The Texas Connection” by Craig Zirbel
7) “Texas in the Morning” by Madeleine Duncan Brown
8) “Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend” by Billie Sol Estes
9) “Dallas Did It” by Madeleine Brown & Connie Kritzberg
10) “Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III” by Peter Hounam (LBJ’s role in the attack on the USS Liberty)
11) “Bloody Treason: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy” by Noel Twymann
12) “The Dark Side of Lyndon Johnson” by Joachim Joesten
13) “How Kennedy Was Killed – The Full Appalling Story” by Joachim Joesten
14) “The Dark Side of Camelot” by Seymour Hersh
15) “Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson” by D. Jablow Hershman
16) “Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir” by George Reedy
17) “Remembering America” by Richard Goodwin, Chapter 21 “Descent”
18) “JFK and the World Oligarchy: When Enough is Never Enough” by Robert Burnside
19) “Coup d’Etat: from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush” by Robert Burnside
20) “JFK: Conspiracy of Silence” by Charles A. Crenshaw
21) “The Men on The Sixth Floor”by Glen Sample & Mark Collum
22) Watch “LBJ: A Closer Look” VHS 1998 by Lyle Sardie
23) “Bond of Secrecy: My Life with CIA Spy and Watergate Conspirator E. Howard Hunt” by Saint John Hunt
24) Google “LBJ-CIA Assassintion of JFK”
25) Google “The USS Liberty, Israel & President Johnson’s Order to Destroy the USS Liberty”
26) “Lyndon Johnson the Tragic Self: A Psychohistorical Portrait” by Hyman Muslim & Thomas Jobe
I grew up in Texas with sons and daughters of oil men from Dallas and Houston, the kids of politicians and lawyers in Austin. I knew LBJ and his nephews. I went to high school with them.
I believed in 1963 that Lee Oswald killed JFK and that was the end of the story. After fifty years of study and some very disappointing and disturbing realizations, I am certain that those oil men, the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover and LBJ were essentially the murderers of JFK and RFK. I didn’t want to this to be true. I knew and loved some of those people who wanted the Kennedys dead and wanted LBJ in power. So, when Robert Caro, a person I met while working in the LBJ Library, skipped over the assassination of JFK without even a shadow of a comment, I was disappointed. I can understand why Bob did this. It is too complicated a situation to fit into his massive and excellent history of LBJ. I know that he is going to give LBJ failing grades for getting us into Viet Nam at the urging of his defense contract buddies, but I doubt he will ever re-visit the deaths of JFK or RFK. I can only hope that he has TWO more books coming. The “last” LBJ book will deal with the Viet Nam war and the “very last” book will confirm my own knowledge of that shameful day in Dallas.
Robert Caro was quite fascinating when I saw him on C-SPAN’s Book-TV, but I have to agree with you on the JFK assassination (as least in regards to the cover-up, no matter who was ultimately responsible).