LBJer
Jr. Member
Posts: 1,664
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« on: June 27, 2011, 11:24:49 PM » |
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I don't understand why Caro is so negative on Johnson. He spends most of his second volume on LBJ, entitled "Means of Ascent," going on and on about how "amoral" Johnson's use of vote fraud in his Texas elections was, particularly his successful Senate campaign of 1948. I find it very difficult to be troubled about this. Vote fraud, while obviously far from an ideal thing, was commonplace in elections in Texas (and much of the rest of the country) at that time. There were whole regions where the votes were basically up for sale to the highest bidder. What was LBJ supposed to do, not go into politics at all in order to be some sort of saint? I don't think it would be reasonable to ask him or someone in a similar situation to do this.
I often think that if we took the DeLorean (the time machine from the movie "Back To The Future") back in time and persuaded Johnson to be the kind of man Caro seems to think he should have been, when we returned to our present time we'd not only find that Johnson failed to be elected to anything, we'd also find that as a result the South still had Jim Crow segregation.
If Caro has a specific gripe with LBJ, he should just come out and say it rather than unfairly condemning him for one thing after another.
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