The Old Bull

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by Robert A. Caro (Knopf, 1,167 pp., $35)

LYNDON JOHNSON’S reputation is a useful barometer of the mood of America’s liberal intelligentsia. When they are depressed or on the defensive, his stock tends to rise; when they are feeling strong and ebullient, it plummets virtually without trace. In the palmy, confident days of Camelot, when Johnson was JFK’s despised and neglected vice president, they dismissed him as a rube and an ignorant boor. Then, in the uncertainty following the Kennedy assassination and the 1964 Goldwater insurgency, they clung to him as their savior; Johnson encouraged this with his pompous campaign catch phrase, “Let us continue.” They even opened a New York discotheque called the LBJ, where glitterati grooved and frugged beneath enormous pictures of the man with the face (in Rowland Evans and Robert Novak’s memorable phrase) of “a chaingang boss.”

About the Author

Arthur Herman

Arthur Herman is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

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Ronald Reagan

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by Robert A. Caro (Knopf, 1,167 pp., $35)

LYNDON JOHNSON’S reputation is a useful barometer of the mood of America’s liberal intelligentsia. When they are depressed or on the defensive, his stock tends to rise; when they are feeling strong and ebullient, it plummets virtually without trace. In the palmy, confident days of Camelot, when Johnson was JFK’s despised and neglected vice president, they dismissed him as a rube and an ignorant boor. Then, in the uncertainty following the Kennedy assassination and the 1964 Goldwater insurgency, they clung to him as their savior; Johnson encouraged this with his pompous campaign catch phrase, “Let us continue.” They even opened a New York discotheque called the LBJ, where glitterati grooved and frugged beneath enormous pictures of the man with the face (in Rowland Evans and Robert Novak’s memorable phrase) of “a chaingang boss.”

About the Author

Arthur Herman

Arthur Herman is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.