LBJ Biography Reflections

The other day, I finished the fourth volume of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson biography of the former President. The fifth volume is still being written, the tail-end of over 40 years of meticulous research and masterful writing by the author. I cannot extol Caro's work enough; I've started my next audiobook by a different author providing a history of reality television, and the level of detail contained in the text as well as the writing style just leaves something to be desired when following a Caro masterpiece.

But I digress. Caro's biography of LBJ changed my perspective on several things, a few of which I am documenting here as lessons learned.

Lesson 1: Election integrity in the United States has always been fraught.

Caro describes in The Path to Power, the first volume, how in LBJ's first unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1942, he played his cards wrong, announcing victory in certain precincts before all results were counted. By doing so, LBJ's opponent knew how many votes he had to "come up with" to ensure victory. His opponent still had enough time to encourage his pawns in precincts that had not yet reported to change the results. Caro characterized such practices as commonplace in Texas politics. He described how, especially in the rural counties of Texas near the Rio Grande, voting was effectively controlled by local bosses, or "jefes", who either cast ballots on voters' behalves, told them how to vote, or bribed voters to cast their ballots a certain way. A candidate could essentially "buy" a precinct. And that was how the game was played.

The final episode in the second volume in the series, Means of Ascent, tells the story of LBJ's victory over Coke Stevenson in the runoff Democratic primary election for the open U.S. Senate seat for Texas. LBJ eked out with the nomination by a margin of a mere 87 votes, and he went on to win the general election and win his Senate seat. However, Caro provides substantial evidence that LBJ's victory in the primary runoff election was achieved through fraudulence. The electoral results in Precinct 13 ("Box 13") in Jim Wells County showed an addition of 202 votes after the polls had closed, with registered voters who did not show up to the polls being added to the end of the results tabulation in alphabetical order, in the same handwriting, and with the same pen. 200 of these votes went to LBJ, and 2 went to Stevenson. Challenges to the results' certification were filed in courts, but access to the original Box 13 receipts was never obtained to verify these results. Had the 202 names not been added, or had this precinct's results been thrown out, LBJ would not have ascended to the Senate in 1948.

Given how Caro characterized the convenient vote totals in 1942 as the way the game was played, it seems probable that what happened in the Box 13 scandal was merely one incident--the one that got challenged in court and therefore had visibility. Stevenson almost certainly had his own pawns at work "coming up with" votes all across the state. It's also hard to determine to what extent LBJ was personally involved in the Box 13 machinations.

Regardless, Caro's writing made me consider current conversations and anxieties around election fraud. The 2020 election educated me quite a bit about voting security and certification practices and processes. The country's magnifying glass on the vote collections and tabulations in that election somewhat shook my confidence in our elections' integrity because of how many ways that exist to game the system. (I do not believe that mail-in voting ballots are magically a more secure way to vote, as the left seems to unequivocally advocate.) I got the impression that election security and integrity was deteriorating from how it used to be.

But the LBJ stories showed me that voting has always been corrupt in the United States, with bad actors, especially those in charge of the results, always able to exploit the system. What I also realized is that elections are more, not less, secure now than they were in the past. Our electoral system learns and adapts when loopholes are discovered. Basic changes such as using machines that count ballots, which are far less error-prone than hand counting, enhance election security.

That is not to say we should be grateful for what we have and just accept that things are improved now. We need to remain vigilant and to continue to challenge our elections systems to ensure that one person equals one vote. But it is folly to think that election integrity is getting worse over time. That was my takeaway.

Lesson 2: Utilities should not be run by private companies.

Utilities were really not a central plot point of the biography volumes. However, in The Path to Power, Caro goes to great lengths to describe daily life in the rural Hill Country of Texas in the early 1900s. He describes in detail the grueling manual labor required, mostly performed by women, to complete daily household tasks without the aid of electricity or plumbing: collecting water, washing clothes, ironing, cooking. He describes this not only to set the scene of LBJ's boyhood, but also to highlight how transformative extending electricity to the Hill Country through the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was to those who lived there.

The REA was established to fill a gap that the private market, which was the mechanism by which electricity was provided prior to the New Deal, refused to fill. Private electrical providers refused to extend their service areas to rural areas due to a low perceived benefit-cost ratio. Because these rural areas were sparsely populated, the revenue that these companies would obtain by providing service would be small compared to the upfront costs required to construct the electrical distribution infrastructure. It did not make business sense for them to venture into these service areas.

This is exactly the niche that government is intended to fill. No private company would want to provide roads, streetlights, drainage systems, or other such utilities, because these services would not be profitable. To ensure all citizens have fair and equal access to what we deem a basic standard of living, the government must step in. The private market cannot be relied upon.

I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but I am reminded of PG&E and the decades of deferred maintenance on their electrical systems in the name of shareholder profits. Whether or not this is true, it is plausible. And faulty PG&E and SCE equipment has been named as causes for several massive wildfires in California within the last decade. It's unclear whether wildfire destruction could have been mitigated had there not been a profit incentive by the utility operator, nor is it clear that a government-run utility would be better. But at the very least, government-run utilities have the mandate of ensuring fair and equal access to its citizens.

Lesson 3: The United States Senate is designed to be obstructionist.

The third volume, Master of the Senate, begins with a 100-page history of the U.S. Senate. Through this history, Caro highlights several nuances of the Senate: how it distinguished itself from the House through more lofty and stately member conduct and courtesy; how strongly it valued its independence from the executive branch and sought to entrench that independence; how the rules governing Senate practice were set by the Senate itself rather than being spelled out in the Constitution; and how in the post-Civil War era, Southern Senators became experts on Senate rules, parliamentary procedures, precedent, and strategy, because they knew that realistically, a Southerner could not be elected President, so they instead focused their efforts to Senate mastery.

But the most compelling point I took away was that although the Senate is frequently lambasted today for its lack of progress and how it does not reflect majority opinion, it was designed to be this way. Caro includes in his volume the possibly apocryphal story of George Washington pouring his tea into his saucer to illustrate to Thomas Jefferson that just as the saucer cools the tea, the Senate was intended to "cool" or "temper" House legislation. Indeed, the very structure of the Senate, with its members serving six-year terms that expire on offset midterm cycles, was designed to ensure it was free from the whims and vicissitudes of the executive--and even the House--electoral cycles. The fact that Senators were not directly elected until 1913 was another way of preserving the Senate's independence from popular opinion. Thus, the Senate was designed to be a tempering governing body instead of a body driving progress.

Furthermore, the Senate in its structure is undemocratic by design--and this was intended. Each state was allocated two Senators, regardless of the population within the state. While this structure does not intuitively seem fair, its purpose was to mitigate the "tyranny of the majority" in fully democratic systems. Equal Senate representation by state was explicitly designed to grant minority interests of smaller states more power, ensuring that these interests were not trampled as they would be in the House.

It was a sobering reminder that as frustrating as the Senate's present-day lack of progress can be, it had more or less always functioned that way. The New Deal era was a notable exception to this historical precedent, in which FDR basically got a rubber stamp from Congress to pass his New Deal legislation. And, in fact, there were serious contemporary concerns about the perceived degree of control that the executive had over the Senate during the New Deal. The marriage between the Senate and the executive branch was ended when FDR attempted his "court-packing" scheme to add more justices to the Supreme Court.

In an interview given related to The Power Broker, Caro's biography of Robert Moses, Caro expressed his own frustration and concern that the modern-day Senators belonging to the same party as the President largely cow to what their party's executive wants. "Don't you [Senators] know the rich history of the Senate? Don't you see what you're losing?" Caro approximately expressed.

Of course, just because the Senate was originally designed to be obstructionist does not mean that this structure necessarily continues to serve the 21st century United States. Our Constitution need not be considered an infallible document, and the "founders' intent" need not receive as much weight as it does in modern-day arguments. Governmental structures should be adapted to suit the needs of its people, and it is worth questioning whether the Senate's structure is suited to modern Americans' needs.

Lesson 4: Senate mechanics are complicated.

A lot of ink is spilled in Master of the Senate and The Passage of Power, the fourth volume, describing the nuances of parliamentary procedure at play in the Senate. Infamously, the Senate has special rules and procedures that minority interests can leverage to indefinitely stall legislation: namely, the filibuster. The filibuster is unique to the Senate, which I hadn't realized. A filibuster can be stopped through the achievement of cloture, which was established through Senate rules in 1917. At the time of LBJ's time in the Senate, cloture required a two-thirds majority to pass (today, it is 60 percent).

A lot of strategy goes into navigating around the filibuster: if legislation is brought to the floor, will it be filibustered? And if it is filibustered, can cloture be achieved? The filibuster, or even the threat of a filibuster, sometimes stops legislation from even being brought to the Senate floor at all if the answer to the latter question is unclear

And even upstream of bringing legislation to the floor, legislation has to be added to the Senate agenda first. Even a motion to add something to the Senate agenda itself can be filibustered, so there is a necessary calculus behind that decision as well.

This is why the ability to "count votes" is so valuable in the Senate. Caro asserts that LBJ was deft at doing so, which is why he was so successful as the Majority Leader of the Senate.

But the point is, navigating a bill through the Senate is a fascinating problem in game theory requiring a lot of will and skill.

Lesson 5: I still don't know if LBJ truly cared about civil rights.

One of the landmark pieces of legislation passed while LBJ was President was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When LBJ was the Senate Majority Leader, he also oversaw passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. Additionally, Caro highlights several stories from Johnson's life which paint a picture of a compassionate man who wanted to improve the lives of the downtrodden. One such story covered his stint as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, where his colleagues characterized him as the first teacher who cared about the kids in the school, most of whom were poor Latino children. LBJ successfully obtained funding to provide resources such as playground equipment for the students, and he came in early and stayed late to help his students. He had plenty of feathers in his cap with respect to civil rights and seeking to improve the lives of the less fortunate.

On the other hand, LBJ was a product of his time, and he was a Southerner. Caro includes several examples of LBJ disparagingly referring to black Americans, including use of the n-word. His first speech after he was elected to the Senate was his "We of the South" speech which cemented his allegiance to the Southern cause and all that it stood for.

Nevertheless, one of Caro's main theses in the volumes is that LBJ had an extremely high political acumen. LBJ took to heart input from many an advisor that if he wanted to be elected President, he would have to "clean up" on Civil Rights, abandoning the "scent of magnolia". LBJ would often switch his positions or ideas on issues when talking to different audiences to the point that many people could not tell what LBJ truly stood for or believed. He would even change his style of speech and pronunciation of words ("Negro" in particular) based on whom he was speaking with. He was sly, ambitious, shrewd, and opportunistic.

From Caro's narrative, it is hard to definitively say that LBJ was personally invested in championing civil rights. Was he simply exploiting a pressing social issue to advance his own political career? A solid argument can be made to support that claim.