The Tribune

“BUT although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.”

- Robert Caro, Biographer of Lyndon B Johnson

What Lord Acton actually said in a letter to an Anglican Bishop is: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Acton, an English Catholic, was a politician, historian and writer with extraordinary insight into political power.

For decades, journalist and author Robert Caro has painstakingly explored such power by meticulously researching and chronicling the lives of two seminal figures including Robert Moses, a public official, who indelibly transformed New York City’s landscape over a 44-year public career, during which he ruthlessly wielded power.

Though failing to win elections to the governorship of New York and mayoralty of New York City because of his brutal public manner, Moses, a rabid racist who thought ill of poor people, got laws enacted that entrenched his positions as head of various commissions.

Obsessively dictatorial and thin-skinned, he often had more budgetary and statute power than successive mayors and governors, whom he outflanked with his brilliant imagination, work habits and urban vision.

Patronage

Though incorrupt in terms of personal financial gain, Moses presided over a system of ingrained patronage which he dispensed to control and cajole politicians, business people, attorneys, contractors, state and city bureaucrats and others.

Historically, some, including business people, religious leaders and media figures and journalists have bemoaned patronage in various jurisdictions. Yet, many of these same individuals sometimes simultaneously beseech politicians for this very same patronage and favour. As Caro would note, this is how power works in actuality.

Caro has conducted thousands of interviews, scoured hundreds of thousands of pages of archival material and read scores of books in his relentless pursuit of telling details and insight to present a multi-dimensional and fair portrayal of his subjects, and the true nature of power typically not found in civics texts.

Caro’s other outsized and titanic figure is Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), the alternatingly volcanic and deeply charming 36th President of the United States, whose Great Society accomplishments were historic and expansive, transforming education, health care and social welfare.

In The Passage to Power, Caro writes movingly of LBJ’s civil rights and racial equality accomplishments:

“It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.

“How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history’s eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.”

Tragically, Johnson, who died young for a former President at 64 - just four years after leaving the White House - lived out his remaining years haunted by his and America’s colossal failures in the Vietnam quagmire.

He could not silence in his mind the chants he heard from the streets, which reverberated in the White House as the war raged in Southeast Asia, killing and maiming Vietnamese civilians, and combatants on all sides, including young Americans soldiers returning home in body bags: “Hey, Hey, LBJ; How many kids did you kill today?”

Ruthless

Caro explains that though the ruthless Johnson is a fascinating figure, he is more interested in how the latter amassed and utilized power. He has written four literary and novelistic-like volumes on the exercise of power, with LBJ as the lead character but with political power as the master theme.

He avers: “I’m not obsessed with Lyndon Johnson. I’m interested in how power works in a democracy.”

The volumes include: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power. There is a final unpublished volume in this master study and class on the intricacies of power.

Power reveals the character, for good and ill, as well as the admixture of personal and larger ambitions of those who rise to the top. Caro observes how power brings out mostly the worst in some.

The Johnson biographer also believes power brings out the best in some and cleanses the ambitions of others like Al Smith. Smith, the four-term Governor of New York State, the first Roman Catholic nominated on a major party ticket, the Democratic Party, for the US presidency.

He sought to tame as much as possible the notorious Tammany Hall political machine in New York, which was known for vast corruption and for stealing elections. Smith introduced sweeping legislative and other measures to improve significantly the healthcare, education, housing and social welfare of New York State.

In a Texas Monthly article, Jan Jarboe Russell noted of LBJ: “Part of him wanted great power for the glory of helping others on a mass scale. Another part of him wanted power so that he could satisfy rawer instincts, including… the thrill of dominating others.”

Intoxicant

The drug cum intoxicant of power has attracted all manner of men and women. Some have grabbed for it mostly to satisfy financial, psychological and physical and lustful desires.

Some of the pathologically egomaniacal desperately need power to anaesthetise or ease deep-seated and chronic insecurities, which can never be externally quenched. Power, like other addictions, craves even more and greater fixes. The loss of such power can be depressive and deeply wounding.

In The Passage to Power, Caro emphasises a part of Johnson’s character revealed after reaching the summit of power, and on the eve of an address to a Joint Session of the US Congress and a traumatised nation days after the assassination of John F Kennedy. It occurred at a meeting in his home as his aides prepared his remarks:

“ ‘One of the wise, practical people around the table’ urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn’t waste his power on lost causes – no matter how worthy the cause might be.

“‘The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,’ he said. ‘Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?’ Lyndon Johnson replied.” His essential plea might also be translated as: “What the hell is power for!?”

The ruthless Johnson, a Southerner and former Senate Majority Leader achieved stunning legislative success that Kennedy would likely not have achieved and would have envied:

“[He] began by enacting long-stalled legislation such as Medicare and federal aid to education and then moved into other areas, including high-speed mass transit, rental supplements, truth in packaging, environmental safety legislation, new provisions for mental health facilities, the Teacher Corps, manpower training, the Head Start programme, aid to urban mass transit, a demonstration cities programme, a housing act that included rental subsidies, and an act for higher education.”

Of the 87 bills Johnson submitted to Congress, he was able to sign 84, or 96 percent, perhaps “the most successful legislative agenda in US congressional history.”

Egomania

Johnson craved power, which satiated his egomania and personal ambition. But he also wanted power to do big things, including substantially reducing poverty, which he knew from hardscrabble personal experience because of his father’s bankruptcy and the subsequent loss of the family farm in the Texas Hill Country.

Sadly, history is replete with many politicians who sought power for its own narrow sake, including the satisfaction of the basest of needs or for personal self-aggrandisement, and who mostly leave office with few accomplishments.

There are many lessons that may be derived from Johnson’s political genius, including for politicians at home who could learn a great deal from history and literature about the nature of power.

As an observer noted: “Johnson tried to win over his political enemies by going overboard to be nice to them.” The tactile and backslapping Johnson was a notorious flatterer, who enjoyed buttonholing others in his legendary charm offences.

He spent as much time with his allies as he did with supposed and real opponents. Only the most insecure politicians shun and refuse to court opponents, real and imagined. Politics is more about building coalitions and fostering shifting alliances rather than keeping potential allies perpetually at bay.

Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) despised each other. Yet Johnson asked him to remain as Attorney General after John Kennedy’s (JFK) assassination.

The older Kennedy, also disdainful of Johnson, had the political sense and maturity to choose Johnson as his Vice Presidential running mate, which RFK petulantly opposed. The addition of Johnson played a part in helping JFK to win a close election against Republican Richard Nixon.

Johnson, like JFK, surrounded himself with highly capable people. The gathering of such talent buoyed them.

Weaker and more insecure leaders are more comfortable with obsequious advisors who are often less capable than the principal. This is typically a recipe for disaster as a leader or politician may not access the best advice possible from a mix of advisors.

“When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary,” Caro instructs.

The better politicians appreciate this. They try to be clear-eyed about their flaws and inadequacies, compensating for them through restraint and the avoidance of a bunker mentality.

Such restraint and perspective are typically best achieved through the advice of family, friends and advisors who constantly try to keep them grounded as power tends to inebriate many if not most of those who drink from the fountain of its intoxicating nectar.