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Numerous reviewers have already had their say on Robert A. Caro's book about Lyndon Johnson's ascension to the presidency by way of his controversial choice as John F. Kennedy's running mate in 1960 and JFK's assassination in November 1963.

I don't intend to add to that number. I plan to confine myself to a few points which, I believe, deserve greater attention than they've gotten. Most of my comments concern (a) Caro's interpretation of the immediate consequences of LBJ's elevation to the Presidency or (b) the book's several revelations, which I found fascinating. A couple comments at the end will address Mr. Caro's writing style which I consider to be very good in some places and frankly abominable in others.

My first point is that Caro is entirely right in arguing that the Kennedy tax bill and the civil rights legislation JFK sponsored would never have passed in 1964 if Lyndon Johnson had not become President. No doubt the legislation got an immense, though tragic, boost from JFK's assassination and the memorial ceremonies that followed. Most Americans watched the killing happen again and again in their own living rooms and spent hours in front of their television sets following the solemn events that accompanied the display of his coffin and his eventual burial.

I believe Caro is quite correct in describing the emotional impact of those few days in November as the most powerful in history. If you were an adult then, as I was, a surprising number images leap to mind unbidden, even though you might have been engulfed in an emotional fog as most of us were.

However, whatever the claims of Kennedy advocates, the facts are undeniable. Johnson grasped the essentials of the legislative process far better than JFK or anyone on his team. More important, LBJ knew better than any man living or dead how to use power in a legislative context and how to move members to do his bidding, not always willingly. He foresaw the strategies that would be employed on the civil rights (and tax) bills by the immensely powerful members of the Southern contingent on both sides of the Capitol, and he frustrated those strategies at every step of the way.

I worked in the Senate for a time while LBJ was Majority Leader. I knew many of his people and I'd watched him operate from a reasonably good position. Although I was no longer in government in 1964, my work required me to be very attentive to what was happening at the White House and on Capital Hill. I had very good sources, colleagues who knew at least as much as I did. And I cared for personal as well as professional reaons.

Without taking anything away from John F. Kennedy, whom I worked for in 1960 and enthusiastically supported, no one but Lyndon Johnson could have done what Johnson did in 1964. And that he accomplished it without the help of Sam Rayburn, who had passed away, verges on the miraculous.

Kennedy was surrounded by some very smart people while he was in Senate and by a lot more of them once he became President. But JFK hadn't been an especially attentive legislator. His understanding of Congressional politics was among the least of his skills, and the very ablest of his legislative lieutenants did not know collectively what Lyndon Johnson grasped intuitively and understood in detail at a single glance. Unwisely, though for reasons that Caro explains in depth, the Kennedy Administration made no use of Johnson's legislative talents, rarely asked his advice and almost never listened.

Once Johnson took over as President, he effectively deployed some of Kennedy's legislative aides but it was LBJ who determined the strategy and, in a number of cases, it was Johnson who did the work that mattered most. Anyone who believes that what happened in 1964 would have happened any way might as well confess openly that he or she knows nothing about Congress.

Second, Caro establishes, far better than I understood at the time, that Lyndon Johnson was ruthless, corrupt and willing to cross just about any moral, ethical or legal line to achieve what he wanted.

Lyndon Johnson gained a lot of approbation for putting his financial assets in "a blind trust" when he became Vice President. But who knew that Johnson installed secret telephones, not connected through the White House switchboard, over which he talked regularly to his chosen trustees, often late at night or early in the morning, to tell them exactly what he wanted done? "Blind?" LBJ's trust didn't even bother with sun shades.

Caro doesn't say how or if Johnson used inside knowledge to further his financial interests as President. But we certainly know from previous, authoritative accounts that the family fortune "Lady Bird's money" came because of favorable rulings on her television interests that were extracted, a better word might be "coerced," from the Federal Communications Commission. At the time, the FCC exerted virtually absolute control over commercial television and the broadcast spectrum. The family's money came gross abuse of power. Caro doesn't say perhaps no one can if Lyndon Johnson misused his power as President for personal enrichment. But what he did was scandalous and would have produced an enormous public outcry if known at the time.

Caro also tells his readers at considerable length how Johnson bribed there is no other word for it the owners of the Houston Chronicle into promising him support throughout his term of office by extracting a written promise from the Chronicle's owner in exchange for approving the merger of two major Houston banks. The "public interest'' in approving or denying the merger wasn't carefully weighed. In the end, it wasn't even considered. Johnson demanded a letter from the Chronicle promising unequivocal support, and he got what he wanted. While the letter carefully avoided naming the quo for which the quid was given, that was precisely the nature of the transaction. Having been paid what he demanded, Johnson blessed the merger. And that was that.

No doubt, Lyndon Johnson was a great president before the escalation of the war in Viet Nam. But he was also deeply flawed and, I would contend, based on the evidence Caro has presented, a man of, shall we say, flexible moral character.

Having made these points, let me move on to Caro's writing style. Despite the praise he has attracted, the Pulitzer prizes and the National Book Awards, Caro needs an editor as capable and ruthless as Max Perkins, who transformed the self-indulgent and incoherent prose of Thomas Wolfe into his masterpiece, Look Homeward, Angel.

It's been reported that Caro is a ferocious defender of his own prose -- of every word, of every punctuation mark, of every stylistic vagary. But he is as self-indulgent as any hack writer in several respects. Most importantly, he packs warehouses of information and trainloads of verbiage into many sentences, filling them after the noun and verb with dependent clauses, colons and semi-colons, parenthetical interpolations, thoughts separated by dashes, digressions and assorted other grammatical paraphernalia before he gets around eventually to recording the predicate to complete the beginning element of the sentence. Not only is it often as difficult a line to follow as any ascent in the Himalayas, but I found several occasions on which I believe the grammar was simply incorrect. The end of the sentence did not agree grammatically with the beginning. Unlike Colonel Nicholson, Robert Caro does not require outside intervention to blow up the grammatical equivalent of the Bridge Over the River Kwai. He proves quite capable of doing so himself.

Caro's hubris in dealing with editors is unjustified, and I'm astounded that critics have supinely accepted as "brilliant" a style which is unnecessarily complicated and, at times, self-defeating. I'm not asking Caro to write like Ernest Hemingway. But if I remember my Thomas Macaulay and Edward Gibbon, both of them managed to write long, complicated sentences, packed with information, without losing track of how they'd begun a sentence before coming to the end. More important, while readers of Macaulay or Gibbon might have needed to pay close attention to absorb the flow of the narrative styles, they were unlikely to become lost en route.

In Caro's case, it's difficult at times to follow him without a GPS. Despite his brillance as an historian, no self-respecting editor or publisher should have permitted that kind of self-indulgence. Letting him pitch a few fits would have done his work a world of good.

At the same time, It's necessary to say that when he lets the narrative flow, unimpeded by barriers inserted for no useful reason, Caro is capable of conveying the drama of events without gross artifice. The events surrounding the assassination, the actions that followed, the accumulation of emotions while the nation mourned are executed with a precision and mastery that any historian might admire.

Caro has a second fault which is far less significant but which I occasionally found deeply annoying. The old saw about telling the reader what your going to tell him, then telling him, then telling him what you've told him sometimes achieves astronomical dimensions in Caro's writing. In some cases he seems to find it necessary to impart the same information, adding a morsel or two each time, quoting someone and then another someone and several more someones until he's pounded the point into the ground deep enough to have produced a gusher of oil.

His initial chapter on the hatred between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson is like that. In brief, the long, long chapter says that Bobby Kennedy detested Lyndon Johnson, and the feeling was reciprocated. Many of the examples cited are both fascinating and enlightening. Quotations from a wide variety of observers, friends of one, enemies of the other, co-workers and acquaintances of both, add quite a bit of color. But the essence is the same. Enough should be enough, and there comes a point when every writer ought to conclude that he or she has proved his or her point. Caro, however, seems unable to stop until he has used every bit of every interview he conducted and every scrap of research he or his wife collected from the many libraries they visited and the correspondence or diaries they read.

I'd like to assure Mr. Caro that I got the point of his book that I persevered (sometimes reluctantly) through his endless sentences, entangled like the statue of Laocoon and his sons in the grasp of the serpents, and that I learned a great deal more about developments i thought I already understood pretty well, having lived through them. He's produced a fine and fascinating book about a crucial moment in American history.

But I think Mr. Caro might finish his next, and presumably final volume, in The Years of Lyndon Johnson, much more quickly if he allowed a sympathetic editor to suggest a few modest improvements in his draft. It's not necessary to throw out the baby with the bathwater, Mr. Caro, but drowning the baby in too much bathwater is not a recommended procedure.