If success and prominence were Johnson and Baines bloodlines, LBJ’s childhood also contributed to his larger-than-life personality. Johnson was an emotional orphan. He was the offspring of “absent” parents: his father was a self-absorbed character who was often away from the household, and his mother was usually too depressed to fill her children’s emotional needs. LBJ’s childhood is an object lesson in the formation of a narcissistic personality. Yet it does not explain how so self-centered a child, adolescent, and mature man was able to translate his neediness into constructive achievements that were the envy of healthier personalities. LBJ is also an object-lesson in the complexity of human behavior. He may have been, as New York Times columnist Russell Baker says, “a human puzzle so complicated nobody can ever understand it.”
.. Throughout his life Johnson had demonstrated a compensatory grandiosity that spawned legends. In one of them, German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard asked Johnson whether he had been born in a log cabin. “No, no, no,” LBJ answered, “you’re confusing me with Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger.”
.. Johnson’s behavior largely came from the conviction that intimidation was indispensable in bending people to his will. It was gratifying to have people love you, but it was essential to overpower them if you were to win on controversial public issues.
.. I remember once asking him, `Why did you cast that vote, Mr. President?’ `Bob,’ he said, `one thing you’ll learn someday is that you have to be a demagogue on a lot of little things if you want to be around to have your way on the big things.’ I’ll never forget him saying that. A lesson in primer politics from the Master.”
..The son of a famous father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Harvard-educated, handsome, charming, urbane, a northeastern aristocrat with all the advantages, JFK appeared to be everything LBJ was not. As painful to Johnson, Kennedy’s claim on the presidency seemed unmerited alongside of his own. “It was the goddamnedest thing,” Johnson later told Kearns, “here was a whippersnapper…. He never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing. But somehow … he managed to create the image of himself as a shining intellectual, a youthful leader who would change the face of the country.” Behind Kennedy’s back, Johnson called him “sonny boy,” a “lightweight” who needed “a little gray in his hair.”
What African Americans lost by aligning with the Democratic Party
The personal call and the timely intervention significantly bolstered Kennedy’s standing among black voters. They also strengthened the political alliance between the Democratic Party and African Americans. After his release, King praised Kennedy for exhibiting “moral courage of a high order.”
.. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he cemented a political alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party that continues to this day. But celebrating these landmark pieces of legislation makes it easy to overlook what black people in the United States lost when civil rights and equality for blacks were hitched to the Democratic Party.
.. As King understood, Democratic politicians acted more boldly on race issues in Alabama and Mississippi than in New York and Massachusetts.
.. “liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.”
.. After the 1964 election, where Republican candidate Barry Goldwater described the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional, black voters essentially found themselves in a one-party system for presidential elections.
.. This is a problem for black voters, because the Democratic Party’s vision of racial justice is also extremely limited. Northern liberals pioneered what scholars now call “colorblind racism.” That’s when racially neutral language makes extreme racial inequalities appear to be the natural outcome of innocent private choices or free-market forces rather than intentional public policies like housing covenants, federal mortgage redlining, public housing segregation, and school zoning.
.. “People have to understand that although the civil-rights bill was good and something for which I worked arduously, there was nothing in it that had any effect whatsoever on the three major problems Negroes face in the North: housing, jobs, and integrated schools…the civil-rights bill, because of this failure, has caused an even deeper frustration in the North.”
.. most white politicians and voters assume that the civil-rights revolution not only leveled the playing field, but also tilted it in favor of African Americans.
What Robert Caro taught me about the individual
The claim of the biographer is that history is better illustrated and understood through the prism of the single important life. Given Carr’s point that only some facts are historical, this inevitably means that most biographical writing is the account of the lives of great men and women. In that debate, the Caro and the Carlyle kept ganging up on the Carr with the proposition that the individual life changes the world.