Giving LBJ a pass.

• Author: Hayden, Tom
• Position: 'The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson' - Book review

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

By Robert Caro

Knopf. 736 pages. $35.

Robert Caro's multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson as been described as a "monument" (historian Michael Beschloss) and "at the summit of American historical writing" (The Washington Post). One volume, Master of the Senate, has won a Pulitzer Prize. Yet Caro may have been with Johnson too long by now since he seems to suffer from a form of Stockholm Syndrome.

Hardly mentioned in Caro's latest 700 pages are two crises, each of which left an indelible stain on the Johnson presidency: his secret deal-making to deny the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) seating at the 1964 Democratic convention, and his deceits leading to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Rather than minor errors, these decisions led to the polarizations that eventually destroyed LBJ and the potential of the Great Society.

Regarding Mississippi, Caro says virtually nothing about he 1964 convention controversy (the word "Mississippi" appears only three times in the index). Yet Johnson's backroom pressure prevented the convention delegates from voting for Fannie Lou Hamer and other Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates opposed to the all-white pro-segregation Mississippi delegation that had pledged to defy the federal government. Johnson dispatched Hubert Humphrey to "put a stop to this hell-raising" and to "get his Reuther and the rest of 'em in here--and [civil rights lawyer] Joe Rauh--and make 'em behave."

By all accounts, LBJ was testing Humphrey's loyalty, and that of his closest liberal allies, before agreeing to name Humphrey his vice presidential running mate. LBJ's Presidential tapes reveal Humphrey and labor leader Walter Reuther as servile to the President's demands.

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Humphrey told him, "We're just not dealing with emotionally stable people on this." Reuther warned the President, "We can reduce the opposition to this to a microscopic faction so that they'll be completely unimportant."

LBJ was driven by exaggerated fears, at least at the time, of losing white Southern states if he appeared to cave in to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. He defeated Barry Goldwater handily that November. But granting his fear for the sake of argument, the question is why he delegated the decision to Humphrey and others. A last-minute White House compromise proposal for two nonvoting seats for Freedom Democrat observers was bound to be rejected as too...