LBJ - the tragic figure

It's by every measure a biography that focuses on politics, the use of power, and history without a look at the personal or private life (other than family background, early education, childhood influences). Yes, it's overwritten at times. Yes, the author makes the same point repeatedly. Yes, the author drives home every bit of evidence that he can unearth or assemble. Yes, the hardbound edition is so heavy that it hurt my hands and just to read it. Yes, the author is overly interested in the press coverage of his subject - though of course he's writing about the glory days of American newspapers, when every city had at least one and usually two or more major dailies, each with its own Washington bureau, editorial pages, op-ed columnists, plus there were several competing wire services all covering every facet of the presidency for a readership that in retrospect seems to have been amazingly literate and perspicacious. All true - yet Robert A. Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power," is a damn good bio, thoughtful and opinionated and full of rich material and easy to read - it helps us understand not only LBJ but the whole political era of the 1960s and the assumption and use of power anywhere at any time. Caro is in awe of Johnson, but it's not in any sense a sycophantic book - he's in awe of Johnson as one might be in awe of a monster, we see LBJ as a powerful man and potentially as a great evil man. This volume (#4) of the bio series presents Johnson at his most pitiable (a feckless VP) and at his best (a champion of civil rights), but Caro is wise enough to peek around the edges of this bio, in the last chapter in particular, to remind us how Johnson would meet his doom through his foolish and stubborn pursuit of "victory" in Vietnam - a classic tragic hero, rising through his talents and character and then falling from grace through his own hubris.