1.
The history of the United States is a history of class mobility. This is an entirely separate statement, to be clear, from an uncritical acceptance of the "American Dream" of hardworking lumpenproletarians rising through the ranks - to virtually everyone, including those on the very bottom rungs of American society (women and racial minorities), the doors to real advancement were firmly shut. But not all who held power, even in eras associated with stodgy WASP-aristocratic hegemony, were born to it.
At the same time that C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite was making the case that America's caste system put power solely in the hands of a small class of elites, the unacknowledged emperor of New York City was a member of a despised ethnic minority. He had achieved that power, in large part, by allying himself with a member of a different despised ethnic minority, and furthermore one who was born to a family on the edge of poverty that would fall into it outright during his childhood, who had never attended high school and worked for twelve dollars a week for four years at a fish market.
Simultaneously, both houses of Congress were led by Texans from poor farming families, who had grown up picking cotton on their hands and knees. Both were Anglo men, true, and that instantly put them in a privileged position, but millions of other Anglo men from poor Southern families lived and died in total obscurity.
What separated Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, to pick two examples of a distinct type, from the millions of others? Who are these people, what are they like, to rise through the ranks when there was no possibility of rising with them? What kind of person does the system select for?
Corey Robin once described Donald Trump as a "Coasean grotesque". For elaboration, Ronald Coase's article "The Nature of the Firm" argued that corporations could be understood as unitary entities - where management gave orders, and subordinates unequivocally followed them - that related only to other firms, or to entities of similar scale like governments or labor unions. For a firm to set prices, for example, by negotiating individually with each consumer would be like trying to redirect a river by negotiating individually with each molecule of water; consumers negotiate, formally or informally, as a bloc. Who are the Millsean grotesques?
2.
Robert Caro may have chosen his subjects - first Robert Moses, and then Lyndon Johnson - through serendipity and a desire to understand the nature of power, but it's worth noting that both have lives that fit well into narratives. It's very close to a classic Campbellian Hero's Journey for both, in fact - the beginning in obscurity, the call to adventure, the aid from powers near the supernatural, the roads of trials, the series of confrontations culminating in apotheosis, and the arduous crossing of the threshold when their powers fail. Neither of them achieve the "freedom to live", but neither of them are really heroes anyway, so that checks out.
Under construction:
Legacy obsessed both of them. Once Johnson reached the peak of his career he obsessed over how history would remember him, hoping against hope that it would be for civil rights, or the Great Society - anything other than the Vietnam War, what he called "that bitch of a war" that killed "the woman [he] really loved — the Great Society". In perhaps his greatest speech, he declared,
There he cut to the core of the matter; for all of his altruism, Lyndon Johnson's support of civil rights was about more than the fortunes of those it helped. It was about him too; how he would be remembered.
His Press Secretary, Bill Moyers, tells of a time Johnson was asked why he had chosen to support civil rights after so long opposing it. "He said in effect," Moyers said, "Most of us don't have a second chance to correct the mistakes of our youth. I do and I am." To call his prior position a "mistake" seems, at first, to undersell it; it was deeply calculated, with Johnson showing real empathy both when it helped his career ("while during other staff meetings he occasionally referred to blacks as '[n-word]s,' when, during a staff meeting attended by [NYA Assistant Director Richard R.] Brown, one of Johnson's assistants made a remark that was mildly racially disparaging, Johnson said, 'You can't use that term here.'") and when it seemed genuine and from the heart (when a Mexican-American soldier killed in the Second World War was refused service in his hometown's only funeral parlor, Johnson's gut reaction was to say, "By God, we'll bury him in Arlington!") - and backing down when it seemed to undermine his ambitions.
I am reminded of a passage from Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, about another earthy, provincial leader of a world power who got there by sucking up to the powerful and undermining his rivals, through complicity in a massive atrocity. Nikita Khrushchev could not have been unaware of that - it echoes in every line of his "Secret Speech". The passage lists off a long series of abuses and evils done and permitted, but it concludes, "We did the dirty work so they could inherit a clean world." In another article, Spufford expands more concisely: "Khrushchev was a true monster and he also had an undestroyed conscience, which was a very awkward combination. Once he had fought his way ruthlessly to the top and succeeded Stalin, he tried his best to undo the worst excesses of Stalinism and to justify the suffering of the past by a genuine effort to deliver everything that the revolution had promised."
On a societal level, what can possibly justify such evils than to bring about utopia? On a personal level, what can justify sin than to say, "I only did this so that I could bring about a greater good - and here it is"? Ironically, the more evil is done, the more there is to justify, the harder one must work to justify it, to be remembered as a great carpenter and not just an evil jackass.
The monument Lyndon Johnson built to himself is an imposing presence. Even from blocks away, it is a hulking mass against the Violet Crown. From up close, it looks like a solid concrete monolith, a Brutalist chunk of perfectly even stone dropped on a broad plaza with only a few concessions to nature, wildflowers in a set of low stone boxes dwarfed by the edifices on either side of it. There is nothing organic to its form, nothing that indicates that it was built by or with any part of humanity. To look at it is to be transported back to the era of hydraulic Keynesianism, when the forces of nature were tamed for the construction unions and the re-election of Western Senators. It looks like it belongs in a dam.
On its inside, it is no less monumental. I've only had the pleasure of entering once, but I remember the vast interior atrium as like a throne room, its monumental stairs drawing the eye to four full broad floors of red-bound books, the physical manifestation of institutional memory. I've been to a few other Presidential libraries in my time - the Carter Center is a modest little building, and the Bush libraries look like nice museums, but still museums, and buildings that could easily house dinosaur skeletons or paintings rather than their honorees' personal effects. But even fifty years after leaving the office, the Johnson Presidential Library still looks Presidential.
The only external sign of Lyndon B. Johnson as a man rather than a set of bronze letters is a single statue, tucked into a corner of the museum's entrance. The Art of Persuasion by Joshua Krezinski is a recent addition to the museum, sculpted in 2011, and in its design it almost seems at odds with the architectural message of the building: dwarfed by the ten stories of the building that looms over and around it, Krezinski's depiction stands in a slightly hunched posture, holding the glasses Johnson's public image so often lacked, and the combination of extremely unstylized features and an oddly rough surface treatment has an almost grotesque effect. Lyndon Johnson the sculpture of the mortal man is shadowed and outshone by Lyndon Johnson the edifice, for which every architectural decision conveys strength and solidity.
Where Johnson lived in the limelight, Robert Moses' palace was built under a toll plaza. Every day, millions of commuters threaded through the passages of the Triborough Bridge, one of his greatest achievements and the rock on which he built his empire, without paying a single thought to the man who got it built or even noticing the building beneath it.
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It's worth noting that Robert Caro's books are not his alone. His wife, Ina Caro, not only typed up the whole thousand-page manuscript of The Power Broker several times, but also did much of the research for it. More than that, she sold her family home and took on a teaching job in order to support the writing of the book. (In fairness, this was not a one-sided deal - her own master's thesis was based in part on both her research and that of Robert - but it would also be wrong to pretend that it was a more equal deal than it was.)
Perhaps this informs how The Power Broker talks about the women in Robert Moses' life. There is a long silence there, entire chapters of the book in which female names pop up not at all or only in passing. As Caroline Fraser points out in her examination of Caro's career, "for Caro, choosing the right man would by definition involve great men, because the 20th century—and every previous century—was nothing if not a master class in their use and abuse of political power." The same is true for the lesser men; Moses manipulated figures like Robert Wagner Jr. and Newbold Morris, but he rarely had to do anything to women, because they had no power over him.
But every so often, the mask that Robert Moses put up to claim his role as a self-made man - the mask Robert Caro pulled down for effect every so often - slipped. In The Power Broker it happens about halfway through the book, in a five-page appendage to his chapter on Robert Moses' relationship with his brother Paul.
