http://slate.msn.com/id/2064790/entry/2065109/ caro review.

ruff notes on an outline for the lbj stuff:

1960: did lbj steal the election in texas and illinois as nixon claimed?

billy,bobby, and bobby. billy sol estes, bobby baker,bobby kennedy.
chapter on debunking kennedys.
example: teddy expelled from college over cheating. sort of thing not generally know.
1962 - sulking as veep.
1963: was he paranoid, and were they out to get him?
I am -not- on of those who thinks jfk killed kennedy.sure, he could have, and gotten away with it, but it's not his style - he would have gloated more.

1964 - demonization of goldwater

foreign policy: greece, carribean, asia, latin america.

credibility gap.

the 100 days - in 1964-65, lbj ran the senate and house through a windmill of activity, moving legislation along, in the way described in master of the senate.

decline and fall: 66 elections he loses ground and nearly gives up.
vietnam ruins everything?

The tapes. Enemies lists, wiretaps, j edgar hoover.

blackmail/ killing? sexual assault? any evidence of specific crimes? body count?

dirty tricks - dem
dirty tricks - gop.

clinton legacy - i could end up writing a 2 volume set about politics and corruption. for marketing reasons, dems in one volume, gop in the other.

that's a start. if i could get comments working (www.haloscan.com?) i'd havethe egg of an open-source ljb project. more to follow.
a note on sources;
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1982-). John Connally, with Mickey Herskowitz, In History's Shadow: An American Odyssey (New York: Hyperion, 1993). D. B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987). Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). William Manchester, The Death of a President (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (New York: Putnam, 1980). Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978). James Reston, Jr., The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

For now, i'm going to use this spot as a placeholder for a rant on lbj, that i hope will evolve into an article then a book. Here's what i blogged last night:


Wed Apr 07, 12:13:41 AM | gt bear | edit ]
oh yeah, one of the fun things that happened in this week i haven't blogged, is i
got an offer to web-publish my book/article/rant on lbj. not an offer to be paid, just a place to put it. i'll be following the www.craphound.com model of publishing...give away enough copies and someone will buy one to read in the bath. meanwhile i'm gonna go take a bath and finish eric's "the tragedy of lyndon johnson."
(quirky jfk scandal page here.
lbj.blogspot.com... "How LBJ killed jfk" i read it on the net so it must be true...
) http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/lbj.htm
update: here's what i said in the comments section in de novo:
Agree; open source is a powerful tool. Software is just the beginning. I'm planning an open-source biography of lbj's presidential years.
Essential readings on open source include eric raymond's "the cathedral and the bazaar." MIT?harvard's the Berkman Center has an open source
law project going on. Here via crescat.

Posted by arbitraryaardvark at April 7, 2004 01:49 PM

And so it begins. 1 pm april 7. not that these are billable hours, but i wanted to note when i started, so i can follow how this thing builds, or fails to.
caveats: i have dozens of half-finished projects lying around. i've never written or published a book. i have other, higher, priorities. so maybe nothing much comes of this. but here we go.
(i realize, i don't even know the url for this page. maybe i can google it.)

long ago, in the dim ages, before the turn of the century, i heard a bit about robert caro's book on lbj. i found the book, read it, and saw that it was good.
Now it turns out that caro had written "the power broker: robert moses and the rise and fall of new york" which is one of my mom's favorite books.
caro's books are meticulously researched stories of how absolute power corrupts. so when he decided to devote the rest of his career to a 4 volume study of LBJ, i was hooked. Borrowed book I from my erstwhile law partner,
R.J Tavel. (We were, at the time, Tavel & Stewart, Public Interest Law Firm. No longer.)

Borrowed book II from my mom, and then when book III, Master of the Senate, came out, I got mom a copy but read it first. $34 from borders; it would have been cheaper from amazon but i wanted it now.
Because they are meticulously researched, his books only come out every 10 years, so we are 8 years away from volume IV, the last one, covering lbj as president. But I'm hooked. I can't wait 8 years.

Because the caro volumes show lbj as an amazing character study. A sort of benevolent tyrant, the ultimate in "ends justify means." I was torn between
being shocked and appalled, and taking notes on his techniques.
Maybe this would be a good time to point out that i'm an anarchist lawyer,
dedicated to undoing lbj's great society. My lifetime of involvement with the Libertarian Party has been a tilting at windmills kind of thing, ineffectual.

So I decided that rather than wait for volume IV, I'd do the research myself, piece together the answers myself. At some point I realized I might be able to get a book out before Catro and scoop him a bit. This project took a great leap forward when my pal zorry took me to a bookstore in milwaukee and i came out with a crate of books on lbj. I've been reading them, so far just a quick skim without notes or quotes, but it confirms the caro thesis, that lbj was a little off his rocker.

Here's some of what i've been reading:
My brother lyndon, by sam houston johnson.
the tragedy of lyndon johnson, eric goldman
flawed giant, dalleck.
Also, by pure chance i found "I should have died" by a greek journalist, which shows how lbj caused a coup in greece, overthrowing a democracy.
The book was in a dumpster at the church down the strreet. Phillip Dean Gigantes. No hint of the greek coup in any of the other books - this was a clue
that i've only scratched the surface of the iceberg. Another dumpster find a few years ago was "cat chaser", a movie about johnson's war on the dominican republic, which i hadn't known anything about. I was about 5 at the time, forgive me.

And that's really what this project is about, me. I was born in 1960, and have no memory of Kennedy, but I remember Johnson. When I was 7, in 1968, I watched the speech in which he said he would not run again.
If the personal is the political, my study of lbj as possibly an abusive psychopathic monomaniac, is also about me trying to come to grips with my father,
a benevolent despot of the lbj mold, born in texas, uneasy in a new environment of enlightened east coasters. Dad yelled and hit and whined, in a manner lbjologists would recognize. Maybe i was born crazy, maybe living with dad is what drove me over the edge. Becaused I'm depressed, clinically, and I've only learned that recently, and am trying to learn to cope. Like johnson, i'm not entirely happy until i rule the world. At 43 i'm not making much progress.
On the other hand, it's until I rule the world or write a good book about wanting to - johnson was an anti-intellectual who wouldn't have been satisfied as a writer of books.
So while on the one hand this will be a book for the general public, about lbj,
it's also a journey of self-discovery of a sort.
This is something i'vwe benn carrying in my head for months and am glad i'm finding the time to write it down today.
All for now, more to come.