Pod Insights Dwarkesh Podcast Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration] About this episode This is a narration of my blog post, Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lyndon-johnson.
You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lyndon-johnson
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dwarkesh Patel? Hey everybody. This is a narration of my blog post, Lessons From The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert Caro. This was written May 3, 2023. Explore a single individual deeply enough, and truths about all individuals emerge. Robert Caro. Robert Caro's The Years Of Lyndon Johnson are not only the best biographies I have ever read, and not only the best histories I have ever read, they're perhaps the best books I've ever read. Below are the main lessons I've got from these four volumes about power and powerful personalities.
0:38 Dwarkesh Patel? If you do everything. Quote, "As an N.Y.A. director, two hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference. As an unknown 28-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless campaign for Congress against seven older, better-known opponents, a race in which he drove himself so ruthlessly that a fellow politician, a man who worked terribly hard himself, said, 'I never knew a man could work that hard.'" At every stage in his adult life, as congressman secretary, congressman, senatorial candidate, he had displayed a willingness to push to their very edge and beyond the edge, the limits not only of politics,
1:23 Dwarkesh Patel? but of himself. In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head, and his face grew gaunt and cavernous, and he trembled with fatigue, and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry. And whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn, without a word hinting at fatigue, to do it, to do it perfectly. His career had been a story of manipulation, deceit, and ruthlessness. But it had also been the story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing.
2:07 Dwarkesh Patel? He would sacrifice himself to that ambition as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others.
2:14 Dwarkesh Patel? If you did everything, you'll win. To Lyndon Johnson, everything meant literally that, absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made, no matter how difficult making it might be. Robert Caro, Means of Ascent. There are three kinds of extraordinary attempts. In the first, a person perfectly executes on the 20% of things, which will produce 80% of the results. In the second, a person extends that same care and diligence to the remaining 80% of tasks, because every marginal drop of results, no matter how diminishing, is worth the squeeze.
2:59 Dwarkesh Patel? And the third is exemplified by Lyndon Johnson, for a person not only does every single thing that might reasonably help his odds, but even the unreasonable. He accepts the assignment, which has only the remotest possibility to make the difference, and he completes it with the same intensity and attention as the task which will make all the difference. If you do everything, you'll win. The reason why Robert Caro is able to write so compellingly about these qualities of Lyndon Johnson, his resourcefulness and ruthlessness, his inexhaustible energy, his need to win, his inability to take no for an answer, is that the biographer shares many of the attributes of the subject.
3:44 Dwarkesh Patel? A man who has spent almost 50 years writing the biographies of a single person, who has spent those decades sifting through thousands of crates of documents in the LBHA library, or making former goons disclose how they helped Johnson's key elections, or moving to the Texas Hill country to experience for himself the poverty and loneliness of Johnson's youth, who continues to push himself in this way past his 87th birthday, when other men would have long retired, because his last volume, the one about the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, remains unfinished, is a man who understands Johnson's aphorism, "If you do everything, you'll win."
4:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Did Lyndon Johnson push himself to his physical limits and then beyond to satisfy a lifelong ambition that was almost spiritual in its intensity? A man nearing ninety doesn't just wake up with a physical energy to turn the next page. Something other than the physical must be motivating him. Did Lyndon Johnson manipulate people to get what he wanted? Well, it wasn't just a charming New York accent which allowed Caro to elicit damning confessions from the people around Johnson, including Lady Bird herself, whose testimony inadvertently helps paint her beloved late husband as a philandering, amoral megalomaniac.
5:05 Dwarkesh Patel? I imagine him, Caro, sitting in front of this Smith Corona typewriter, frustrated that the words no longer flow as easily as they used to, that he keeps losing his train of thought, that he fatigues much faster than he used to. I imagine him glancing at framed images of the Johnson aides he has interviewed over the decades, people with whom he had developed close friendships, and I see him remembering each of their funerals. Quote, "I used to call him Horace Busby, day after day as I was writing, to ask him if he remembered some detail I had forgotten to ask about." My single-spaced notes of our interviews are 142 pages.
5:47 Dwarkesh Patel? Buzz was one of the smartest analyzers of politics and people I ever met. We became great friends and we used to go out to dinner together. Buzz had quite a crush on Ina, Caro's wife. Once, he had a stroke, and when he got out of the hospital, he wrote Ina a letter. He wrote that, when he was afraid he was gonna die, he thought, "It will be hard on Robert, because nobody can tell him about the vice presidency." The letter was typed. He could still type. But when he tried to sign his name in ink, it could only make a scrawling, shaky B. Ina cried when she saw that. I may have teared up a little bit, too. Robert Caro, Working.
6:29 Dwarkesh Patel? I imagine him regretting the years he spent studying that one senate race from the 40s that Lyndon Johnson stole from Coke Stevenson. While that race was important, did it detract from the sum of time he could dedicate to his magnum opus? Did it make the completion of the final volume impossible? I imagine him worrying whether, in his old age, he's able to do justice to this project and his legacy. I see him picking up one of his older volumes, reading a passage of beautiful prose, and remembering the moment of clear insight and hypnotic flow from which it emerged. I see him asking himself how long it's been since he had one of those moments, and I
7:13 Dwarkesh Patel? see him comparing that decades-old excerpt to the stilted and simple writing he's able to produce in his late 80s. And yet, he can't rest. To surrender the task to which he has dedicated the overwhelming majority of his life, to enjoy with his wife the golden years of his life, to hand off his research notes to some young enterprising biographer, that would be unthinkable. For it was not just Lyndon Johnson who had to win. But, there's one big difference between Johnson and Caro. The pages of history are crowded with the names of men who are willing to do everything for advancement, for money, or for fame.
7:56 Dwarkesh Patel? I understand how people could be so resourceful, ruthless even, for power, but how likely are you to find somebody who has the intensity and ambition of a Napoleon or an Alexander, and who is willing to aim those talents towards writing a great biography? It's like finding out that Darth Vader is using the Death Star to carve wooden figurines. Men like Caro are rarer than men like Johnson, because the willingness to do everything is usually paired with an unyielding need for personal power, wealth, or status. And one of the consequences of this fact is that there will always be more great people who have lived fascinating and important lives than there are people capable of writing
8:41 Dwarkesh Patel? great biographies of them. I remember Bern Horbart asking who, outside of politics, would make for a great candidate for a Caro biography. If you could ask GPT-7 to write, in the style of Robert Caro, biography of some figure in tech, science, or entertainment, what is the first name you enter into that prompt? My answer? Robert Caro's books are about formidable, single-mindedly devoted characters with storybook life arcs. It may be the case, then, that the only person who could write the biography of Robert Caro is the man himself.
9:19 Dwarkesh Patel? Ambition. Lyndon Johnson, as president, was perhaps the person most responsible for the advance of modern liberalism, maybe second to FDR. And yet, throughout his entire pre-presidential career, he was sponsored and mentored mainly by men who were conservative, reactionary, and even racist to their core. For the first 55 years of his life, he had convinced men of tremendous intellect and drive of their own that he was a scion of the Southern cause, that the only hope for that cause was to make Lyndon Johnson president. So much so that when Johnson was majority leader, the Southern senators, who at the time controlled all the important committees in Congress, allowed Johnson to pass liberal
10:04 Dwarkesh Patel? legislation they scorned because they believed it would help him become president. And, they believed, as president, Johnson would govern as a conservative, especially on the issue of race. The tragic irony and betrayal here is hard to overemphasize. These powerful conservative men, who, while being ignorant and backward in certain ways, were famously shrewd and intelligent, conceded on issue after issue, and campaigned with their immense political influence for a man who ended up being the biggest liberal president since FDR. Here is a story Robert Caro recounts for after interviewing the dying former senator from Georgia Herman Talmadge.
10:46 Dwarkesh Patel? Quote, "Asked about his relationship with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, Talmadge said, 'At first, for years, I liked him. He spent a lot of time cultivating me, hours and hours. They would talk about everything,' Talmadge said. 'Girls, hunting,' and, Talmadge said, 'they would talk about civil rights and the relationship between whites and Negroes.'" How did Lyndon Johnson view the relationship between whites and Negroes? "Master and servant," Talmadge replied. "Well, didn't he have any sympathy for their situation?" "None indicated," Talmadge replied. Talmadge said that during the 1950s, Johnson would assure the Southerners that they could count on him to weaken a civil rights bill as much as possible, that he was on their
11:30 Dwarkesh Patel? side of the civil rights issue, that he had to pretend he wasn't to meet the Southern Caucus as infrequently as possible, but that he really was their ally. He would tell us, 'I'm one of you, but I can help you more if I don't meet with you.' And, Talmadge said, that Southerners believed him, believed that while changes in the civil rights law were inevitable, Johnson would keep them as minor as possible, that he was with us in his heart. 'I believed him,' Talmadge said, 'but I changed my opinion.'" "When?" "When he was president," Talmadge said. "How did you feel then?" "Disappointed," Talmadge said. "Angry." There was a long pause, and then he added, "Sick."
12:12 Dwarkesh Patel? When asked, "How did you feel when he said, 'We shall overcome,' Talmadge replied, 'Sick.'" The author then asked, "Did you feel that Lyndon Johnson betrayed you?" There was a longer pause. It could not have been easy for a politician as wily as Herman Talmadge to admit that he had been fooled so completely. "Yes," he said. Robert Caro, Master of the Senate.
12:38 Dwarkesh Patel? I hear a lot of talk about empowering ambitious young people within Silicon Valley circles. The word ambition seems to have lost the suspicion with which it was treated in previous generations. For example, the Federalist Papers explicitly say that the purpose of this new constitution is to counteract rather than empower ambition. This is largely a good thing. Smart young people are usually quite self-interested. And a society does better by aligning their self-interest with the social good than by discarding competent people altogether. But a bit of shrewdness is warranted when you meet a brilliant 18-year-old who claims to believe what you believe, who might have actually gotten himself to believe what is convenient to believe right now,
13:22 Dwarkesh Patel? and who is eager for admission, mentorship, a grant, or an open role. Counterfactuals. A professor in college once told me that you don't really understand a proof until you see all the alternative ways in which it could have been constructed. The same is true of history. To understand a place and a time is not only to know what happened, but to understand what could have happened instead, and what historical dynamics picked our timeline over the counterfactuals. There is a perennial debate about whether great men or great forces direct the flow of history. This debate is too big for a single story to provide anything but an anecdote. But nonetheless, we proceed.
14:06 Dwarkesh Patel? The unexpected death of a president provides the closest thing to a natural experiment that history can offer. In an instant, one man is substituted for another. And how much that man matters in comparison to the forces around him becomes obvious rather quickly based on how different are the results he can obtain. The civil rights movement in America had been building up for decades leading to 1964. It was not in some obvious sense stronger in 1964 and 1965 than it was in 1963. And yet, 64 and 65 saw a torrent of liberal legislation that just a year earlier was hopelessly stuck in committee.
14:51 Dwarkesh Patel? Scoob Jackson would say that when Jack Kennedy, as president, urgently needed a senator's vote, he would summon him to the Oval Office and would explain precisely why that bill was so important and how much he needed the senator's support. If, however, the senator said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the Senate, Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn't agree, but that he understood. Lyndon Johnson, Jackson would say, and Jackson worked closely with Johnson as representative and senator for 25 years, Lyndon Johnson wouldn't understand, would refuse to understand.
15:36 Dwarkesh Patel? He would charm you, or knock your block off, or bribe you, or threaten you, anything to get your vote, Jackson would say. He would do anything he had to, to get that vote, and he'd get it. That was the difference. Robert Carroll, master of the Senate. As vice president, Johnson had been sidelined by Kennedy. He had gone from the second most powerful person in the country as Senate Majority Leader to a humiliated showpiece who could not even get an audience with Kennedy without waiting for months. The scene of him returning to power, as illustrated in Volume 4, The Passage of Power, reminds me of Steve Jobs returning to Apple. Executives and product managers are called in to explain
16:20 Dwarkesh Patel? why they have been making such unthinking and obvious mistakes. Entire departments are disbanded or reorganized. Important projects which have been stuck for years are jolted into action. At the time of Kennedy's death, not only was the president's civil rights bill hopelessly trapped somewhere in the gears of the congressional machinery, but so were several other important appropriations bills, including Kennedy's tax cut bill, which was essential to an economic recovery. Literally, within days of the assassination, Johnson had identified why all these bills had been stuck, and he had been able to get them moving. Even as head of a separate branch of government, Johnson was able to micromanage Congress, feeding his ideas for parliamentary maneuvers to his protege Senate Majority Leader Hubert
17:05 Dwarkesh Patel? Humphrey, instructing executive agency heads to make grants to certain state projects contingent on the loyalty of that state's representative, and renewing his relationships with the old Southern barons of the Senate, who helped Johnson as their protege. How, when confronted with evidence like this, can we claim that the great men of history are irrelevant, and that the great forces could have proceeded without them? Reading Power "Lyndon Johnson's political genius was creative, not merely in the lower technical aspects of politics, but on much higher levels. And if there was a single aspect of his creativity that had been, throughout his career, most impressive, it was the capacity to look at an institution that possessed
17:49 Dwarkesh Patel? only limited political power, an institution that no one else thought of as having the potential for any more than limited political power, and to see in that institution the potential for substantial political power, to transform that institution so that it possessed such power, and, in the process of transforming it, to reap from that transformation substantial personal power for himself." Robert Caro, Master of the Senate. In college, Johnson was blackballed by an exclusive club called the Black Stars, so he formed the White Stars, and from it, he practiced the same Machiavellian talents, which he would eventually rehearse on a national stage. He would steal elections, distribute to loyal friends the patronage he earned from kissing
18:34 Dwarkesh Patel? up to administrators, and even direct members to sleep with girls in order to manipulate their votes. Who would bother doing all this to win a college election? The kind of person who would eventually win a national election. Before Lyndon Johnson grasped for it, that Senate majority leadership was seen as a crown of thorns, to be avoided by anyone serious about his political career. It forced the holder to take positions on controversial proposals and bills, but did not give him the power by which to get other senators to vote in solidarity with these positions. Before Lyndon Johnson became Senate Majority Leader, the Senate was, as it is now, a chamber
19:14 Dwarkesh Patel? of bickering old men who would hamstring and belay any important legislation. The men in charge of the most powerful committees in Congress, and therefore, the most powerful men in Congress, were not figures of generational gravitas and wisdom, as during the time of the founders, or in the reign of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, but rather, they were senile old men, unable to comprehend, much less energetically solve, the problems of a technologically advanced, modern society. The institution was becoming a joke, one that was contemptuously told, and the default punchline of the joke would be the Senate Majority Leader, who was the face of this feckless, chamber. More than one Majority Leader lost reelection, because he was identified in the press as
19:58 Dwarkesh Patel? the man accountable for the Senate's failure to get anything done, and because the responsibilities for this thankless job kept him away from his state, while his opponent got to attack a wide surface area of positions that a Majority Leader is forced to take. It was largely because the position of Leader was seen as an embarrassing and powerless one, that Johnson was able to maneuver himself into it, only after its four years in the Senate. But while the Majority Leader was a crippled figurehead until Johnson, this was a disability designed by the founders. Senators were meant to be independent and equal ambassadors for sovereign states. They were supposed to be wise, powerful, aristocratic personalities, who would, through
20:41 Dwarkesh Patel? lengthy deliberation and redrafting of bills, check the transient impulses of the majority, and of the House, which is a direct representation of the majority's will. Volume 3: Master of the Senate tells the story of how Lyndon Johnson inverted the founders' vision of the Senate. How he converted the majority leadership, formerly a meaningless position that was fumbled around like a hot potato, into the seat of absolute power. How he became, behind the president, the second most powerful person in the country. It is also the story of how Lyndon Johnson made the Senate function. Maybe not in the way the founders intended it to function, but function nonetheless.
21:25 Dwarkesh Patel? The volume about Johnson's domination of the Senate reads a lot like the story of how modern nation-states like France or Germany performed. A powerful king disempowers provincial medieval lords, institutes top-down bureaucracy, and claims the monopoly on violence. Quote: "In a single day, as Newsweek reported, the Senate passed ninety bills, confirmed an ambassador and a federal trade commissioner, and then knocked off because it had temporarily run out of business. The elapsed time: four hours and forty-three minutes. Washington was jolted to attention." "The first session of the 84th Congress," Aslop wrote, "is certainly the most sufficiently run session in recent memory.
22:06 Dwarkesh Patel? In less than six months, as majority leader, the youngest majority leader in its history, Lyndon Johnson has tamed the untamable Senate. Robert Caro, master of the Senate." Here are the top handful of maneuvers by which Lyndon Johnson came the master of the Senate. One. Each party in the Senate had a policy committee, a tertiary institution whose responsibility was to give some clarity on the will of the party as a whole. But under the leadership of Johnson, the Democratic Policy Committee went from observing to deciding the will of the party. Johnson asked the heads of the Senate's most powerful standing committees, which acted
22:47 Dwarkesh Patel? as independent baronies, if they would be so kind as to advise his policy committee on the content and timelines of their bills. Slowly but unmistakably, Johnson's policy committee would be the ones advising the standing committees, not the other way around. The policy committee would suggest what the bills being drafted inside these committees ought to say. It would also suggest when the bills ought to hit the floor, so that it wouldn't clash with other important legislation in the calendar. If a deal needed to be struck between two senators for a bill to move forward, then it was not the senators who would resolve their differences. Rather, they would come before their majority leader, like fighting siblings who come crying to their mommy to iron out compromises.
23:32 Dwarkesh Patel? Two, before he would bring a bill to the floor, he would make a motion for a unanimous consent agreement. This parliamentary device, among the many that Johnson discovered hidden in dusty old rulebooks and transformed into instruments of control, restricted the ability of senators to debate bills or offer amendments once they were already on the floor. The very raison d'etre of the Senate was to consider and alter legislation in a studious and unhurried manner. But this lethargic pace was not acceptable to the new majority leader. Three, it was not just bills which Johnson moved to the Senate. It was the senators themselves. The Democratic Steering Committee decided who would be assigned to which committees
24:16 Dwarkesh Patel? and who among them would be the chairs of those committees. Before Lyndon Johnson became majority leader, these positions were filled by seniority, so that the most important committees, which were the most coveted, were filled with the oldest members, and the oldest among them would be their committee chairman. Seeing the sluggishness and inflexibility of these old men, Johnson resolved to change the system. Immediately after his ascension, the Steering Committee started selecting not the oldest candidate, but the candidate who Johnson wanted. This required, of course, loyalty to Johnson, but allegiance was not sufficient. These men had to be capable of pushing through the bills which Johnson needed to be pushed through. And so, for the 10 years in which Johnson was majority leader, merit became a greater consideration than seniority
25:00 Dwarkesh Patel? in the appointment of committee seats and chairmanships. Four, all these powers reinforced each other. Because of the overwhelming control which Johnson had over what bills would say and when, or whether they would make it to the floor, senators would have to appeal to him directly in order to get things moving. And here is a situation engineered to produce leverage. You do not antagonize a man who will decide whether the bill authorizing a major project in your state will get added to the docket, or whether you will remain chair of your committee before you become too senile to do your job. You will be asked to do favors if you want a certain vote to go one way or another. And should you obstruct the majority leader, you will be threatened to back down,
25:42 Dwarkesh Patel? unless you want all your future bills, projects, and committee assignments blocked. All these threats and favors built up an ever-thickening enamel of soft power atop the already-sturdy marrow of parliamentary creativity. Net effect of all these reforms was that bills drafted in large part by Johnson, aides, and from the policy committee would pass through the Senate expeditiously and without complication, like a high-fiber meal. What is interesting is that Johnson accomplished each of these maneuvers without opposition from other senators. These were wise, shrewd men who treasured their own power and independence, and not just for its own sake, but because they believed that their cherished Senate
26:25 Dwarkesh Patel? would lose its very purpose if one man could run the chamber like an orchestra. Quote, "Johnson accomplished this almost without conflict or opposition precisely because authority and influence of this kind had been of no significance to the exercise of Senate powers and were not perceived as a potential threat to those who ruled." It did not occur to his powerful associates, respectfully consulted in every move, that from such insubstantial resources Lyndon Johnson was shaping the instruments which would make him arbiter, and eventually, the master of the United States Senate. Robert Caro, master of the Senate. Riches to rags. An interesting thing I've noticed in the biographies of great men is that their ancestry
27:09 Dwarkesh Patel? includes people of great status and power. But for tragic and random reasons, their family has fallen into poverty and humiliation by the time they are born. So there ends up being this conflict between the station they feel entitled to because of their aristocratic heritage, and the demeaning and conspicuous scarcity they have to face growing up. And the ambition of these men seems to be in large part motivated by the need to resolve this incongruity. Some notable examples. Napoleon. The Bonapartists were a noble family on the island of Corsica. When that island was conquered by France, the former nobility lost most of their wealth and privileges. Instead of being respected for his elite descent, young Napoleon was mercilessly bullied.
27:54 Dwarkesh Patel? He would not be found in the playgrounds, socializing with other kids, but rather in the library, reading about the campaigns of Alexander or Caesar. Churchill. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, made it all the way to the cabinet, but in one of the biggest blunders in British political history, threatened resignation that, to his surprise, was accepted. Churchill was raised to believe that he was part of the ruling class of Britain, and that he had inherited, with his privilege, a noblest of leech. Later in his life, he wrote a four-volume biography of his ancestor, John Marlborough, who led the Allied armies from 1701 to 1710 against Louis XIV. But in reality, his childhood had little resemblance to the nobility which he thought
28:39 Dwarkesh Patel? he inherited, and his father, whom he idolized his entire life, was powerless and humiliated, not to mention negligent. And so it was with Lyndon Johnson. Quote, "Lyndon's father, Sam, was described as a man of great optimism, and to some extent that optimism was justified in Austin. Popular and skilled in the legislature, he got an impressive number of laws passed. But he had also had to make a living, and he had to make it in the hill country. And his optimism, his romanticism, idealistic streak, kept him from looking at the hard facts." Generations before, in the 1870s and 80s, the era of the cattle kingdom, there had been
29:21 Dwarkesh Patel? a great sprawling Johnson Ranch along the Purdon Allo's River. But the family had ceased making money and had lost the ranch some decades before Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908. And now, when Johnson was 10 years old, it came back on the market, and Sam Johnson determined to buy it, to recreate the original Johnson Ranch, to make the whole Purdon Allo's Valley Johnson country again. One reason the ranch had been lost, however, was that its soil had worn out, had washed away when cattle grazed on it, or later when attempts were made to grow cotton on it, and there was no longer much soil left atop the limestone base. But beautiful as it was when Sam looked at it, there wasn't going to be any way of making money out of that land. And Sam didn't realize that. Seeing how beautiful it was,
30:06 Dwarkesh Patel? he had this romantic dream of restoring the Great Johnson Ranch. And so he believed he was going to make it pay. And to outbid other people, he overpaid for that ranch. He paid so much that the ranch couldn't possibly earn back what he paid for it. And very quickly, when Johnson was 14, Sam went broke and lost the ranch. And a crucial element of Lyndon Johnson's youth is a consequence of that loss: the insecurity that followed. Every month, Johnson had to live with the fear that a bank was going to take that house away. He lived in the house in which his father, broken by his financial failure, was constantly ill. And there was often no food. And the neighbors brought covered plates. Worst of all, perhaps, his father became the laughingstock of the town, an object of ridicule.
30:49 Dwarkesh Patel? Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man, but he's got no sense. And the speeches given at political barbecues, as his son stood listening. Robert Caro, Rooking. A Reader of Men
31:02 Dwarkesh Patel? There's a theory that our ability to empathize with people originated to help us and manipulate them. If we have a theory of mind about somebody, we can simulate how we can get them to believe a lie or to do something for us or feel a certain way about us. Among the old-school liberals, Johnson's empathy is legendary. He saw the plight of the poor, elderly, and colored. And he did more than any other president to help them. Among old-school conservatives, what is legendary is Johnson's ability and willingness to make people bend to his will. To powerful old men, he would posture as a son eager for his respected father's sage advice and favor. To men who were his equals, he would cajole those whose egos were too big and threaten those whose egos were not big enough.
31:47 Dwarkesh Patel? He would craft tailor-made arguments for different people that were mutually contradictory. He would tell a liberal that a moderate bill must pass because there was no way they could sneak through a even more liberal bill. And he would tell conservatives that if they didn't pass the moderate version of that same bill, the left-wingers were sure to ram through something totally socialist. But what if those two talents, to empathize and to manipulate, are the same? To put yourself in somebody's shoes, to really feel what they must be feeling, is a precondition to making them feel the way you want them to feel. It may be the case, then, that the most empathetic people are the most capable of manipulation. If you ask for an empathetic CEO, president, or husband,
32:29 Dwarkesh Patel? you're asking for a person who can access your mental state and figure out how to tweak it. Quote, "He tried to teach his young assistants to read men. 'Wash their hands, wash their eyes,' he told them. 'Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes.' And to read between the lines. More interested in men's weaknesses than their strengths, because it is the weakness that can be exploited. He tried to teach his assistant how to learn a man's weakness. 'The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he's not telling,' he said. 'The most important thing he has to say is what he's trying not to say.' For that reason, he told them it was important to keep the man talking.
33:12 Dwarkesh Patel? The longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. It's why he wouldn't let the conversation end, Busby explains. If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn't let it, the conversation, end until he got it out of him. And Lyndon Johnson himself read of the genius that couldn't be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive, that if close observer of his reading habit, Robert G. Bobby Bebeker calls it "a sense." "He seemed to sense each man's individual price in the commodity he preferred as coin. He read with a novel of sensitivity, with an insight that was enearing, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception,
33:56 Dwarkesh Patel? to look into a man's heart and know his innermost worries and desires." Robert Caro, master of the Senate. Johnson's ability to read and cultivate people was strongest on all powerful and lonely men. These patrician figures, who could influence entire chambers of Congress, had developed through decades of leadership, an air of stern and cold command that worded off any attempt at friendship. They had no wives or children to retire to on evenings or weekends, and Johnson knew this. So he would invite them to dinners and Saturday brunches at his home, with the tender and endearing hospitality supplied by Lady Bird. And this way, Johnson became the professional son to some of the most powerful men in the country.
34:42 Dwarkesh Patel? The Modern Prince. Caro is often asked why he has dedicated his life to writing the biographies of powerful political figures. He always responds that he wants people to understand how political power works, because then democracy, what matters is what the people think and want. But if you read his books, this is definitely not the message you get about how power works. Something might happen if Richard Russell, the South's great-grandgeneral of the Senate, wants it, or if Sam Rayburn, the all-powerful speaker of the House, wants it. And something will definitely happen if the master of the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, wants it. But nothing ever happens just because the people want it. In a fantasy novel, the magic system exists to provide Pacron constraints on the story.
35:26 Dwarkesh Patel? But the ultimate basis and focus of the novel are the few individual main characters who move the plot forward. The democratic process in Caro's books acts as a world-building magic system. A bill may become harder to pass if the opposition party gains a few seats, but if the main character, Lyndon Johnson, wants the bill to pass, then the bill will pass nonetheless. If you asked me to identify a Strossen reading of these books, this would be it: that these volumes are not written to educate the public, who are portrayed as secondary characters anyways, but rather to train the next Lyndon Johnson. This is the modern liberal equivalent of Machiavelli's The Prince. It is a guide for a person aligned with Caro's politics on how to amass power in the American
36:11 Dwarkesh Patel? political system, and how to use that power to get things done the way Johnson was able to get them done. And if you knew some of the ways in which Johnson got things done, you wouldn't read this speculation lightly. Thanks for listening. You can find the full post and many others at thoracashpatola.com, and I'll see you next time. Cheers.
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