When one looks at Octavius/Augustus’ victories, one finds Marcus Agrippa standing immediately behind the emperor, no doubt casing the room and looking for errant senators who want to cry, “Speak, hands, for me!” and engage in some unconstructive criticism of the Emperor. I was most made aware of this when reading The War that Made the Roman Empire, concerning the battle royale between Octavian and Marc Anthony. Robert Harris’ Agrippa focuses the spotlight on Octavian’s right-hand-man and relative by marriage, letting us see how an adolescent friendship turned into a relationship that forged an empire. Robert Harris is an old favorite of mine, with a bench of diverse thrillers to his credit and easy familiarity with the late Republic, and yet despite the presence of nitro and glycerine, this book didn’t explode for me. It was perfectly enjoyable, but I’m used to Harris being excellent.
We meet Marcus Agrippa when he encounters a young boy being bullied, and Agrippa intervenes; the boy is Octavian, and he was being beaten up because his uncle Julius Caesar had just been a naughty boy and crossed the Rubicon River with troops, in violation of Rome’s orders. Rome had had a recent issue with generals marching on Rome with troops and quite a few people literally lost their heads during the dictatorship of Sulla which followed. (Actually, they lost quite a bit: Sulla realized that looting people was an easy fundraising scheme. This continues to work in our day, but generally with less murder and almost no heads on pikes.) Agrippa and Octavian become fast friends, and considering that Octavian is a favorite nephew of Rome’s new master, Agrippa’s career prospects are bright so long as no harm befalls Cae- oh, dear. Octavian turns disaster into triumph, however, and Agrippa zooms along in his wake – not passively following his old friend, but actively helping him make their fortune. Harris incorporates some battles in this, but not nearly as many as I would suspect: it’s largely about Agrippa navigating his complex loyalty to Caesar (the name he gives Octavian after the real Caesar is assassinated). Caesar can make him one of the most powerful men in Rome, yes, but Caesar will also casually demand he divorce his beloved wife to marry into Caesar’s family. One aspect of Agrippa I did not know about was that he was engaged in a great many building projects in Rome – aqueducts and the like – and Harris’ version of him was prouder of those than his battles.
This was enjoyable and informative; it runs through territory I consider myself familiar with. I didn’t actively dislike anything and yet I’m so used to Harris plumbing new terrain, making the familiar exciting again somehow, that when I finished this I was slightly disappointed. It’s like coming to see Babe Ruth hit homers and instead he bunts. The play chosen is good, it works, Babe gets on base, but it doesn’t make you stand up and cheer, waving your hat around.
Today’s topic from Long and Short reviews is “Something I always thought was true, but isn’t”. One thing the presidents project taught me was that things we receive as compressed crises that unfold within a few months, like the American Revolution or the secession crisis that led to the Civil War, were in reality much more long-term affairs. We get a sequence of events in school, and sure, there are dates appended, but when you settle into reading people’s stories during that time you realize how much time was passing within that sequence. It’d be like people in the future writing about the Afghan War not really understanding that a child conceived at the beginning of it could have grown up to fight in the very same war as his father.
WWW Wednesday
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Agrippa, Robert Harris. Review today, probably. It was very…average, as in “The time I spent reading this was sufficient to the entertainment received, but it does not live up to my Robert Harris expectations.
WHAT are you reading now? Surging forward on Delta-V by Daniel Suarez; pecking at This is How You Lose the Time War. I picked that up because so many of my goodreads friends like it and it has birbs on the cover. So far it’s two irritatingly named people (Red/Blue) exchanging letters with one another as they fool around with the timeline. I am told that I will like it the more I read it. Still technically reading Into the Planet. It’s “this is interesting enough but I have other things I could be reading” territory.
WHAT are you reading next?
I could name any random title and you and I both perfectly know it would have no bearing on what I actually read.
Tonight I stumbled upon a comic adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “And there will come soft rains”, which until I’d read “The Veldt”, was the most unsettling Bradbury I had encountered. Unfortunately, one can’t share the premise without spoiling the story, but let’s say it’s about an automatic house that keeps living when…well, its owners don’t. It opens on August 4, 2026, and yes I did make a post about the original back in August, and shared an audio version of the story. I think this is the only spoiler-free page:
Recently I listened to two rather different Arthur C. Clarke stories.
“All the Time in the World”. I originally experienced this as a Twilight Zone episode, or so I thought, in which a frustrated bank teller embraces a nuclear war as an occasion to finally get around to his TBR pile, only to be frustrated by breaking his eyeglasses. The premise of THIS story is rather different, and Clarke notes at the beginning that not only does he not remember how his story was adapted, he can’t imagine how it was adapted given the technology at the time. His confusion stems from the fact that the original premise involves aliens offering human burglars a special tool – the Accelerator, a bracelet that seems to slow down time – provided they will steal various art works. The only shared point between stories is….uh, nuclear holocaust, and I’ll leave it at that. The ending has the same bittersweet feeling. On further research I found out that the Twilight Zone episode was adapted from a completely different story, “Time Enough at Last”, which would explain the very shallow Venn-diagram overlap.
“Deep Range”. A…story about near-future humans shepherding flocks of whales using dolphins as sheepdogs to defend them against deep-sea beasts. Can’t really say more than that, to be honest. It was an enjoyable enough way to spend 20 minutes but I don’t think I’ll remember it in a week.
“Memories breed memories. They multiply like vermin. As soon as I catch one, another emerges — some incident or conversation I had forgotten about entirely. My pen cannot keep pace with them all.” – Robert Harris, AGRIPPA
Is Agrippa science fiction? No. But I’ve been waiting on it in our holds system for a month now, of course I’m reading it!
Today’s prompt from SciFiMonth2026 is “one word reviews for the last 10 SF titles you read”, which works suspiciously well with today’s Top Ten Tuesday Topic which is “one word reviews for the last ten books you read”. I’m going to go with SciFIMonth2026’s variant.
Now Lorraine can blame all the other things on me, but she was the one who picked out the Pigman’s phone number. If you ask me, I think he would have died anyway. Maybe we speeded things up a little, but you really can’t say we murdered him.
Not murdered him.
Recently on substack someone asked about books we read when we were younger which have stuck with us for reasons which we could not explain. I didn’t have to think about it for a moment: the answer was The Pigman by Paul Zindel. I discovered it in the discard sale at the library, probably lured by the strange title, and it has never left my mind since. The fact that I have not visited it in the life of the blog is baffling.
It opens simply, with two bored teenager (John and Lorraine) who have created a game involving telephone booths. They dial a random number in their town and would take it in turns to see who could keep a stranger talking for the longest time. And then they found Mr. Pignati, a lonely widower who loved to talk and had no one to talk to. When Lorraine identifies herself as being a charity worker for the “L&J Fund”, Mr. Pignatti cheerfully volunteers to pay $10 if they are able to pick up the money directly. So begins a fascinating friendship and a troubled period in their lives.
John and Lorraine find Mr. Pignatti entertaining company, as he’s full of little games himself — like personality quizzes embedded inside stories. After a few visits the kids confess their lie to Mr. Pignatti, but he has been hiding something himself: his wife Conchetta isn’t away on vacation, she’s passed on. The Pigman is happy to keep entertaining the kids, as they to the zoo and visit a department store that sells exotic snacks like chocolate-covered aunts*. Mr. Pignatti, despite his age and sadness, reveals to have a freer spirit inside, and revels in roller-skating with the kids. Only…it turns out old men with serious wine habits should take physical activity easy, and things take progressively sadder turns.
When I read this for the first time, I was rather young and not prepared for the more serious themes: it was in fact the first book that ever made the old eyeballs leak a little. John and Lorraine enjoy being treated like adults in the Pigman’s house, but adulthood is not merely drinking wine and eating ants: it comes with losses, responsibility, and the heavy weight of consequences.
I’m glad I went back and revisited this: if not for SciFiMonth2026 I’d be sorely tempted to read Zindel’s direct sequel and his book The Pigman and Me, which was about the inspiration for the story. I remember it as being thought-provoking when I found it back in the day.
It’s SciFi Month, and for the third year in a row I’m planning on participating. What will I be reading? Well, let’s make some wild plans so I can laugh wildly or shake my head ruefully in a month’s time, eh?
Classics:
I’ve read bizarrely little of Arthur C. Clarke aside from a few short stories and 2001: A Space Odyssey
Bob Heinlein. I’ve read a fair bit of him, but not some of the works he’s most known for like Stranger in a Strange Land
Return to le Guin?
It’s been a long time since I reread any of Asimov’s SF aside from the original Foundation collection, pre-Mule. Going back to some of his stories might be fun.
Contemporary
There’s Suarez, of course, and Scalzi is dropping another novel on November 3rd. I’ve already begun reading Delta V by Suarez to kick things off.
There are two books in Chris Hadfield’s Apollo Murders series I haven’t gotten to
Standing interests in cyberpunk and solarpunk titles. Snow Crash is an obvious potential, and I’d also like to revisit Vernor Vinge.. His early conception of cyberspace fascinates me.
One of my favorite Star Trek authors did a Tiberium Wars novel. Kane lives in death!
Been a while since I read any Becky Chambers
Streaming
Watching either Foundation or Fallout would be in order, but given the recent death of Sir Patrick Stewart, I also may binge The Next Generation. Part of me is also tempted to play an SF oriented game like Tiberian Sun or Bioshock, but given that the Tolkien seminar is ongoing, I wouldn’t bet on any of these streaming predictions to manifest.
I did not watch a lot during October, but the monthly recap was ungainly enough without throwing in movies. No TV streaming, either — just history and literature lectures from Brad Birzer and evenings spent on my own writing.
Scarface, 1983. I’m not sure how many times I’ve watched this since 2005, when I bought my DVD of it, but despite regarding it as a waste of money the first time, I’ve grown to like it more with every viewing. The story of a Cuban refugee who becomes a drug lord and destroys his own life and the lives of everyone around him through excess and greed. Love the 80s Miami aesthetic. The murder, quasi-incest, and keeping a tiger on a short chain, not so much.
Tony: I’d kill a Communist for fun. But for a green card? I’mma gonna carve him up real nice.
Tony: Me, I want what’s comin’ to me. Manny: What’s comin’ to you? Tony: The world, chico. And everything in it.
Tony: You gotta get the money first. When you get the money, then you get the power. When you get the power, THEN you get the woman.
Frank: Remember what I told you, Tony, when I started you. The ones who last in this business are the guys who fly straight. Low key, quiet. The guys who want it all – chicas, champagne, flash – they don’t last. Tony: Joo finished?
Vamos a bailar Esta noche Vamos a gozar Hasta la mañana
Río, lloro si quiero Cuanto te ansiaba libertad Mira ¿Ves? Los sueños si existen, mi amigo La libertad
Dallas Buyers Club, 2013. Fun fact: the reason I originally watched this film a few years ago was because Andrew Heaton used it in his EconPop series, in which he used movies to demonstrate economic argu- HEY, WAKE UP! This is a great drama about a man who is diagnosed with AIDS, realizes the government’s regulatory structure is keeping him and other victims from finding medical treatment, and improvises ways for people to get the treatment they need outside the scope of the law. And it’s got good acting! It’s a fascinating character drama, apart from the political implications: Matthew McConaughey’s character Mr. Woodroof goes from being a stereotypical Texas redneck to someone who’s besties with AIDS-afflicted men and stares at food in the grocery store like processed foodstuffs are pointing a gun at him and his immune system.
Mr. Woodroof: It’s one thing for me not to like ya, but why can’tcha be a better friend to yourself?
Mr. Woodroof: Sometimes I feel like I’m fightin’ for a life I ain’t got time to live
I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997. A rewatch. Haven’t seen this since…Jennifer Love Hewitt was a regular feature in Teen PEOPLE magazine. I…somehow forgot Sarah Michelle Gellar was in this. Was Melissa Joan Hart in it it, too? Why did that generation have so many teen girl stars with three names?! …and is that Johnny Galecki?! Anyway. Four teenagers graduating high school go to the beach and have a nice time with Johnnie Walker, and on the way home they hit someone who was standing in the middle of a curvy hilly road. Frankly, I think if you’re going to stand on the middle of curvy hilly roads in the middle of the night you get what’s coming to you, but the kids agree that hitting someone to death is a bad thing. A plurality of the kids (everyone but JLH) believes that telling the cops about hitting someone while the car stinks of Mr. Walker is like, a total vibe-killer, so they dump the body in the water. Months later…..(horror chords). JLH receives a “I know what you did last summer” note, despite being the only one in the party who cared about Mister Deathwish. Weirdly, JLH is the only one who goes to college after high school: Sarah is working in a department store, the black-haired dude is a fisherman, and the guy who looks like Justin Timberlake is just…living with his rich parents. Even Johnny Galecki is working for a fishery, and I’d assumed he was the nerd because he’s Johnny Galecki. This does NOT bring back the nostalgia the way SCREAM does: maybe Scream had novelty going for it, but the smaller cast and far more generic music also didn’t help. I liked seeing JLH and SMG, but that was about it.
Killer: Happy Fourth of July. Let me give you some advice: the next time you leave a man for dead, make sure he’s actually dead. Me: Solid advice, actually.
Freddie Prinze Jr: I love you, Julie. No one gets me the way you do. JLH: I understand your pain. Me: What is this dialogue?
Scream 2. 1997. Haven’t seen this since it originally hit Blockbuster. “Stab 2? Who would want to do that? Sequels suck!” Like Scream, it parodies horror movies – but in this case, sequels. While a few members of the original cast cycled back on, no one has anywhere REMOTELY the chaotic charisma of Matthew Lillard in the original. Lillard’s Stu is the highlight of the original Scream, really. (And there should really be a viewer discretion tag for Meathead doing an off-key rendition of “I Think I Love you” in a university cafeteria. I can deal with stabby murders, but that level of cringe is real violence. The only time my college cafeteria broke out singing was to “Don’t Stop Believin'”. That was a weird breakfast hour.) Unexpected pleasure: David Warner!
Gail Weathers; Who got punched here, again? Me: Who deserved it, AGAIN?
Me, watching Scream 2: Who is this Sarah Michelle Gellar lookalike? Me, consulting IMDB: Ah. Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Well, October was quite a month! I’m posting this early because my internet is out at home and depending on when the outage is resolved, I might not be online again until Monday. I began the month with four goals: make progress in re: the Science Survey, knock out a couple of presidents, and make gentle nods towards German history and horror. Then an older friend of mine started his annual re-read of LOTR and I realized “I haven’t done that in a while” and committed to a BBC series based on the story, and people on substack announced it was Kirktober because it was Russell Kirk’s birthday on October 19th. Meanwhile, Dr. Birzer (who has written a biography of Russell Kirk and contributes to a website based on Kirkian principles) is launching his Tolkien seminar, so suddenly I’m listening to an audio version of LOTR and then lectures on Fellowship—the road goes ever on and on! The month proved to be an interesting mix of delightful cold fall moving in after a hurricane, and then gusts of dead presidents. I also leveled up in Unclery, as my godsister safely delivered. I also checked out a new indie bookstore, Parchment and Potions. It’s steeped heavily in fantasy and horror, but there was a small SF section I admired, and they intend on hosting events like game nights and stuff. The owners appear to be involved in Prattville’s bookish community — the Silent Book Club, the Fountain City Litcon (which I missed, alas), etc — so I’m eager to see how they grow. Check out their interior shots! This was especially welcome news given that my local bookstore, Fairoaks Books, is closing up shop by the end of the month. Now where am I going to sit around and gossip on Saturday afternoons?
America at 250
I read one, two, three, four, five, SIX! presidents. Ah, ah, ah. And now I have read a biography for every single dead president, which I said at the beginning of the year I would not do because “that’s like, thirty dudes.” I’m working on a post called “41 Thoughts about Having Read 41 Presidents”, so look forward to that next week.
Science Survey
I read science books! Specifically, I knocked out Human Errors and To Infinity and Beyond, and got a good start on Into the Planet, taking care of biology, cosmology, and (soon) geology.
Bible in a Year
Unfortunately, the amount of Brad Birzer lectures I’ve listened to in the last few weeks have unseated my Bible in a Year podcast, and now I’m a few weeks behind. Father Mike would not be pleased. (Neither would Dr. Birzer, I don’t think, being a devout Catholic.)
Kirktober
I started reading The Surly Sunken Bell and other Stories by Russell Kirk, which I’m assuming is a collection of “ghost” stories — though I suspect as with Ancestral Shadows that description does not quite hit the mark.
Lectures and Podcasts
“Tolkien and Beowulf“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Tolkien Seminar. A lecture that covers the Christianization of the Germans and the influence that had on Christianity, too — between the absorption of the warrior ethos and some moral codes that were even more severe in their consequences than Roman Christianity. (i.e. adulterers being beheaded.)
“The Ring is Sin. The first time we do it, it’s hard — but then it gets easy. With every sin we commit, we become less than we are meant to be. It’s almost like alcoholism — it starts slow, a drink here or there, but a year in there are bottles under the sink and you’ve become more and more distant from everything. We become less. Bilbo is becoming LESS Bilbo because of the Ring.”
“Beren and Luthien“, Dr. Brad Birzer, Tolkien Seminar. On the Silmarillion’s great love story and its connection to Arwen and Aragorn in LOTR.
“John Calhoun: A Quick Primer“, Dr. Brad Birzer, Jacksonian America series. I’m glad I listened to a prior lecture by him on Calhoun for his Jacksonian America class last semester, because it was longer and went into more depth. Reviewed the five points of Calhoun’s philosophy very briefly.
“John C. Calhoun“, American Heritage class during coronamania. Dr. Brad Birzer. His dog is named Chesterton.
“Me and Chesterton are going to go for a walk. Maybe we’ll be arrested!”
“Knife in the Dark, and the Council of Elrond“, Dr. Brad Birzer, Tolkien Seminar. Learning that Sam absorbed a lot of poetry and song from Bilbo, and being called to the Council of Elrond by…well, let’s ask Elrond. (“You are called here, but I did not summon you.“
In this world, we live in what Tolkien calls the Long Defeat, in which evil keeps decaying good, over and over and over again. Again, we know it will end in Victory for God, but that’s not for this world. This world is still very damaged. Even if we conquer evil at one point, it will arise again: we never fully conquer evil. God will conquer evil, but we do not. We just keep fighting — we fight it as much as we can, with all the energy and grace we have. We fight it, knowing it assumes new shapes, new forms. So even though Morgoth is gone, Sauron is not — and when Sauron is gone, there is still the remnant of the Orcs and other things Sauron had damaged. There is no point that we can rest and say ‘Evil is done.’ Not in this world.” – Dr. B
“Christian Humanism: Why Science Fiction?”, Dr. Brad Birzer. Christian Humanism class. Listening to Birzer talk about science fiction and politics is how I found him, and I’ve read a couple of his books that play with the topic, so I knew I was in for a good time here. This particular lecture was filmed in late March 2020 (“The day that Frodo left the Shire to destroy the Ring,” Brad announces), so the intro has some musing about that. The lecture mostly examines Ray Bradbury’s essay “Why Science Fiction” and then begins exploring Canticle for Leibowitz.
Even communism, which frames itself as a rational, materialistic system, has its mythology –its grand evil to overcome, its heroes, its world to come. These people [in Bradbury] don’t have any of that. They have no story, not even a shit one. They just produce and consume.
Paganism always focuses on willpower; Christianity focuses on Grace.
Elrond, not Boromir, is right. We cannot wield this Thing. Notice the danger: it’s not just evil tyranny, it’s turning a good man into a tyrant. Yes, we don’t want tyranny, but in large part we don’t want tyranny because it turns good men into tyrants. This is John Quincy Adams’ argument against slavery!
This is so important to reading Tolkien: the only power that is Good is God’s power. ALl other power is evil in and of itself. And notice that debate — what is with the other rings? Those who made them did not desire strength or hoarded wealth, but for understanding. To preserve all things, unstained. Tolkien is giving us a choice, There are only two options: you either love Beauty, or you love Power. And notice the very destruction of Power will come not through a counter-power, but through sacrifice. Is this Romantic? Utterly. Tolkien is standing against the entire tide of western civilization and yelling “stop”: he is an Old Western man, not a new western man. His West is that of Socrates and Jesus Christ, not Machiavelli and Napoleon.
The West has been defined by two things: the liberty of conscience, and our willingness to use that liberty to sacrifice for one another. That’s history. History is not conquest. It is sacrifice.
Nonbook Commonplace Entries
“We are called to serve the world, not to control it.” – The Reverend Amy George. (A very Berrian thought!)
“You know the saying of St. Maximus, that God has three wills: the good will, the will when he’s trying to help you solve things, and the third will is when he’s leaving you alone. That’s terrible, because you are there with your will all alone. God somehow put me in front of a mirror and said, ‘OK, that’s how you are.'” – Father Chrysostom, as quoted in Rod Dreher’s “Rummaging through the Wonder Files“.
“[T]here is no normal now. Everything is turning in strange directions and very little makes sense. Here I am typing words onto a screen and wondering how many non-human entities will be reading them. Normal is over, I think, and for quite some time to come. On the plus side, it’s been a great year for tomatoes.” – Paul Kingsnorth, Abbey of Misrule
“Solomon did the exceptional things exceptionally — but he didn’t do the small things.” – Fr. Mike Schmitz, as guest on the Exorcism Files episode, “These are the Lies We Need to Overcome“.
“We offer you our failures, we offer you attempts, The gifts not fully given, the dreams not fully dreamt, Give our stumblings direction, give our visions wider view, An offering of ashes, an offering to you..” – “We Rise Again from Ashes“.
This was the opening hymn at a Cursillo closing, which at first I thought was odd — I associate Cursillo closings with joy, not repentance — but which I was then overwhelmed by. Some phrases, like ‘dreams not fully dreamt’, reminded me of Lewis’s quote from Weight of Glory:
Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
It reminded me of the true work of Cursillo, which often involves a breaking of ego and pride through sheer love. The bishop observed in his sermon that Cursillo often forces people to travel the greatest distance in the world, between the head and the heart. Personally, pride is my easiest and greatest sin to fall into, aside perhaps from acedia. Attending a Cursillo closing was…a moment of grace, I think.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.– “The Agony”, George Herbert. Quoted by Malcolm Guite in re: Arthurian legend
We exist in the world, says McGilchrist, but we no longer belong in it. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity, and it’s impossible to exaggerate its significance. The way out of this problem, he says, and I agree, is to reclaim the right hemisphere’s dominance over the left, to learn to see again the full picture rather than just the details, to treat the earth as an organism rather than a mechanism. How do you do that? By changing your quality of attention; seeing differently. He says attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what you find there. – “AGAINST THE MACHINE“, Paul Kingsnorth. Touchstone Magazine.
So maybe, if we are Christians and we are thinking this way, what we need to do is remember to trust God and get on with the business of repentance, of seeing differently, of repairing our own relationship to this world that God created. And we can do that, robots or no robots, starting right now. We can change our way of seeing. We can live differently. We can apprehend differently. We can look at our phones differently. We can look at our lives differently. We can ask ourselves where this information is coming from, who is manipulating us. We can reject technological tyranny in our own lives, which is the only place we have any power to do anything. We can refuse the values of a system that, to my mind, is ever more openly satanic. As much as we can, we can refuse to participate in it if we want to. We can say no. We can set limits. We can draw lines. – IBID
“Actually I would suggest that it’s the only way to stay sane. If we don’t define our and our children’s relationship with the machine, the machine will define it for us, and we’ll just keep being sucked along down the river toward the singularity.” – IBID
Coming up in November
Two things: one, SciFi Month 2026. More deets to follow. Two, I usually spend some time with CS Lewis in late November during his deathday-birthday week, which I have sometimes called “A Week with Jack”. Spending time with him and posting about him are two different subjects, however. I do anticipate reading Through the Shadowlands, a joint biography of Jack and Joy. Currently, I’m reading Delta-V by Daniel Suarez, In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Brad Birzer, Heirs to the Founders by HW Brands (on Clay, Calhoun, and Webster), and Into the Planet, a cave-diving memoir. Actually, Delta -V is about a cave diver sent to space to mine asteroids, so I might try to review them back to back for fun.
I went to use the Butcher (Children’s old-fashioned paper cutter, which is far more impressive than the cute modern ones with widdle biddy detachable bwades) and for some reason a Jack O’ Lantern bucket was sitting on it. I thought it and the Butcher would make for a fun shot.
“And if, during the long evolution from a “constitutional” to an ‘imperial’ Presidency, there was a single administration in which the balance tipped decisively, it was the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson.” – PATH TO POWER
Over the last year when I have considered what books I would take on to understand LBJ, Robert J. Caro’s four-volume set (with a fifth in the works) was always recommended. No, said I, never. I disliked LBJ, thought him reprehensible in ways — his vulgarity, his humiliation of subordinates, etc — and even if I respected his power as a political actor I didn’t want to read thousands of pages of Caro. Still, sitting at my desk I see Caro all day long, and I wondered — what kind of writer was he? So, following up on Launching LBJ, which covered (briefly) the Kennedy-LBJ transition, I decided to look at Caro’s own treatment and gobbled down seven hundred pages in a weekend. Caro lives up to his reputation.
The Passage of Power is fourth in Robert Caro’s monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” series, one that has been in the making so long that Richard Nixon read it and disapproved of how it reduced LBJ to ‘animal instincts’.) Why am I making my introduction to Caro through the fourth volume in his work? Well, one, it’s the only volume of Caro my library has, and two, it’s of a period in Johnson’s life of immediate interest to me. If all we had was his volume on Lyndon Johnson, Poor Kid and Congressional Aide, it would probably still be sitting on the shelves. But Passage details Johnson’s gamble: to leave his post as master of the Senate to serve as vice presidency, seeing it as his only hope of getting near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The rise of Kennedy was wholly unexpected: he looked like death half the time, and he was almost never at work!
The gamble was desperate and dire: Johnson went from holding Washington by the short hairs to being a man in the corner who all of JFK’s buddies made jokes about. Johnson’s tendency to resort to folksy expressions and stories a la Abraham Lincoln made him an object of ridicule among Kennedy’s bright young things, who dismissed him as Uncle Cornpone. Interestingly, JFK appears to have wanted to make more use of LBJ, but there appears to have been little communication between the two as to how Johnson was to best serve. It didn’t help that Johnson had practically no alone time with JFK, so LBJ appears to have thought his best course was to withdraw despite asserting that ‘power is where power goes’. JFK and the New Frontier people were too insular and dismissive to ever take him seriously. Their blood was azure, their degrees lambskin — to them, regardless of his accomplishments, despite his previous power in the Senate, LBJ was just some hick from Texas hill country. Despite being Vice President, he was not the number two man in Washington: Bobby Kennedy, a jumped-up lawyer appointed Attorney General despite never having tried a case, was. He had the President’s ear. Johnson was lucky to be invited into the room with the New Frontier Boys.
Where the book gets interesting is Johnson’s sudden transition once in authority. The great bull, castrated and humiliated for two years, was suddenly large and in charge once again — and he had a mission. Congressional LBJ had always voted against Civil Rights measures and weakened Eisenhower’s ’57 bill — but his political decisions were at variance with the man himself, who had taught poor Mexican kids and had personally interceded several times over Civil Rights matters, forcing one group in Florida who wanted him to speak to allow the seating of black guests, even if only at their own table. Once LBJ was in the West Wing, he was able to use the tragedy of Kennedy’s death to push “Kennedy’s bill” into being debated and passed. It was quite the turn round, and Caro impresses by making me believe Johnson suppressed his sympathetic instincts as legislator to better exercise his political instincts. Yes, the ’57 bill was weakened by LBJ — but it could not have passed otherwise. A few yards of forward momentum is better than none at all.
This was a heck of a book, somehow making a man I disliked into a subject of total immersion. Granted, I’ve kept running into Lyndon over the summer and have gotten increasingly interested in better understanding him, but all the same I was glad to not run into the vulgarian in this book. We see a man riding a rollercoaster from power to despair to power again, and then attempting to use that power towards good ends. (The means are another thing: one of the other reasons I dislike LBJ was his staggering expansion of the federal government, but that’s not the subject of this book.) It should be noted that this series, the Years of Lyndon Johnson, is not purely about Johnson: this volume contains character profiles of people Johnson worked with or against, like RFK, and those are fascinating in their own right. I can now see why Caro is regarded so favorably and want to consider his Master of the Senate — eventually.
Given that LBJ is alive and well when this book ends, ‘the Johnson treatment” is not done — but given how much of his earlier context Caro weaves in here for context, and the amount of Johnson that popped up during the summer, I am satisfied with entering LBJ’s name into the Hail to the Chief lists.
Quotations
[LBJ] had been enveloped by power. (“Good morning, Leader,” “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?”, “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off.”) Of course, they would be happy to let him running it. “He thought he WAS the senate,” Neil MacNeil says.
Among Johnson’s assistants were men who loved him, and they could hardly bear to watch the way their Chief was being treated [by JFK]. The adoring Horace Busby, to whom Johnson would have been a father figure had Busby loved and revered his father, was in fact physically unable to bear it.
“Just when you get Bobby typed as the white hope, compassionate, he’ll do something so bad it’ll jar you completely, destroy you faith in him,” a journalist wrote. “And just as you’re ready to accept the excessive condemnations, to accept him as ruthless and diabolical, he’ll do something so classy it stuns you. The inescapable truth about Robert Kennedy is that the paradoxes are real, the conflicts do exist.” Said another, “From one day to the next, you never know what Bobby Kennedy you’re going to meet.”
“Like so many other aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s assumption of the presidency — the presidential transition of 1963 — the imminence of those dates made it a transition unlike any other in American history. No Vice President had ever come to office with so little time in which to establish a record on which he could run in his own right. Johnson, Neustadt was to write, ‘faced the unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year.'”
