The Wages of Hate
The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson has appeared to rapturous reviews. Garry Wills joins the chorus in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Here’s how Wills begins:
Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson—this is the fourth volume of a planned five—was originally conceived and has been largely executed as a study of power. But this volume has been overtaken by a more pressing theme. It is a study in hate. The book’s impressive architectonics come from the way everything is structured around two poles or pillars—Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, radiating reciprocal hostilities at every step of the story.
Wills gives this stunning reading of Bobby bounding on to Air Force One when it landed in Washington carrying the body of his dead brother and the all too quick Lyndon Johnson:
Johnson, newly sworn in as president, had just come back to Washington on Air Force One from the terrible death of John Kennedy in Dallas. Robert Kennedy sped up the steps to the plane and rushed fiercely down the length of the cabin through everyone standing in his way (including the new president) to reach Jacqueline Kennedy. Understandable that he would first of all want to comfort the widow? Yes, but. This was the first of many ways Bobby (called that throughout) tried in the first days to ignore the man who had ignominiously, in his eyes, supplanted his brother by a murder in the man’s own Texas. Caro understands that Bobby was determined not to see Johnson, even if he saw him—so he did not see him. But Johnson saw him not seeing, and hated him the more. That is how hate narrows one—narrows what one wants to see, or is able to see, in order to keep one’s hatred tended and hard.
And, in a finale that may be but prelude to what is still to come, Wills writes:
I doubt that Caro, when he began his huge project, thought he would end up composing a moral disquisition on the nature of hatred. But that is what, in effect, he has given us. Hate breeds hate in an endless spiral. Clausewitz, discussing hate as the necessary fuel of war, says it is always on supply, since foes undergo a Wechselwirkung, a back-and-forth remaking of each other, one hostile act prompting a response even more violent, in a continual ratcheting up. That is what Johnson and Bobby are engaged in doing in this book; and Caro has given us many clues to their continued venomous interaction to come in his next volume.
I read Garry Wills’ review in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS of Robert A. Caro’s new volume about Lyndon B. Johnson. To be sure, Caro includes a lot of information about Robert F. Kennedy. However, before I read Wills’ review, I had not thought that Caro was detailing “hate” between RFK and LBJ and “hate” between LBJ and RFK. And after reading Wills’ review, I still do not think that Caro is detailing “hate.”
I would describe Caro as detailing male rivalry or male competitiveness or male agonistic (i.e., contesting) behavior between RFK and LBJ. I have been fascinated with male agonistic behavior ever since I took a course in 1971 from Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), on Polemic in Literary and Academic Tradition: An Historical Survey at St. Louis University. Subsequently, Ong developed his insights regarding male agonistic behavior in his book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of Ong’s 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
Nevertheless, reading Wills’ review did help me clarify my own thoughts about what is important in Caro’s new book. As a result, I posted a short customer review of Caro’s book at Amazon.com. I really did single out the parts of Caro’s book that I found worthwhile to read — the parts about LBJ’s commitment to civil rights and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But I skipped over the opportunity to critique Caro’s book in my customer review.
However, my former colleague at the University of Minnesota Duluth (we’re both retired now) James H. Fetzer did publish a strong critique of Caro’s book in his customer review at Amazon.com.
For years, Fetzer has been investigating President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Fetzer has edited a number of significant investigations of JFK’s assassination. But Caro does not even discuss the literature about JFK’s assassination. As a result, Caro’s discussion of JFK’s assassination is superficial, to say the least.
However, on page 574, to his credit, Caro does detail Robert F. Kennedy’s doubts regarding JFK’s assassination.
Mr. Farrell,
Thank you for your suggestive comments. I have not yet read Caro’s book (save for the long excerpt in a recent “New Yorker”). My impression (reinforced by what you say) is that Wills is interpreting what he sees in the book, hence my reference to his “stunning reading.”
Fascinating that you should bring up Ong’s masterful “Fighting for Life.” I was part of a reading group that discussed it some years back. If memory serves, Peggy and Peter Steinfels were part of the group.
However, it seems to me that “male agonistic behavior,” engaged in at fever pitch, so easily morphs into hatred. So Abel discovered to his dismay.
I think we should drop the word HATE from most of the almost casual uses we find in the hype of politics. When I was a student at the Philadelphia Academy of Psychoanalysis thirty years ago, I thought the usual opposition in Freudian literature of HATE v LOVE was not quite correct.
I am only 100 pages into Caro’s great book, but I would endorse Farrell’s suggestion of coming down from the pathological heights to—perhaps= intense antipathy.
In our lifetime, I think the word HATE is appropriate in extreme pathological cases: Mengele’s vivisection of children and Barak’s ordering the slaughter of anything that moved in Gaza— which included 410 children–an act of pure terrorism of Palesinian families or Breivak’s calculated massacre of the kids on the island in order to create enough fury to decimate Moslems in Norway.
As you may know, Garry Wills was trained professionally as a classicist.
The term that Ong eventually came to prefer to use is agonistic, which is formed from the Greek root word “agon,” meaning contest, struggle.
As I indicated, the title of the course that I took from Ong in 1971 featured the term “Polemic,” which is formed from the Greek root-word “polemos,” meaning war, struggle. In his earlier ambitious book THE PRESENCE OF THE WORD: SOME PROLEGOMENA FOR CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of Ong’s 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Ong referred to polemic.
So over the decades, Ong’s thought progressed from using the term polemic to using the term agonistic.
Now, back to Garry Wills for a moment. As a classicist, Wills might want to argue that the agonistic spirit in ancient Greek culture did indeed involve “hatred,” the term that he uses in his spirited review. I think that this point could be debated regarding ancient Greek culture. But I don’t want to undertake this debate here. I mention this point only to say that this may be where Wills as a classicist is coming from, as they say.
However, I do indeed want to debate Wills’ characterization of the details in Caro’s book as somehow showing “hatred” between RFK and LBJ, because I do not think that Caro’s details about RFK and LBJ show “hatred” toward one another, as I’ve indicated in my original message above.
Now, I reserve LBJ’s attitude toward President John F. Kennedy for a separate consideration.
LBJ’s attitude toward JFK may have involved hatred.
Next, I want to spell out that the Americans who conspired with one another to assassinate JFK were undoubtedly motivated by hatred of JFK. LBJ may have been one of the American conspirators who conspired with one another to assassinate JFK.
However, I do not think that the mutual antagonism between RFK and LBJ, as detailed by Caro in his new book, ever rose to the level of hatred whereby LBJ might have considered having RFK killed, or RFK might have considered having LBJ killed.
This is why I resist Wills’ characterization of the mutual antagonism between those two individual men as involving “hatred.”
Before commenting, I think one might do well to read Caro not onbly in this volume, but in his works on “power” and its use.
The personal dynamics are important, but the forward to ‘Passage to Power” stresses the complexity of LBJ’s transition and the good he accheived orginally and then lost in the Vietnam mess.
I’ve not read Garry Wills’ 1961 Yale University doctoral dissertation. But here’s the title: THE ARCHITECTONICS OF STRIFE: A STUDY OF THE DYNAMICS OF AESCHYLUS’ ‘ORESTEIA.’
In response to Bob Nunz, I would like to post here the complete text of the short customer review of Caro’s new book that I posted at Amazon.com. Reading Garry Wills’ review of Caro’s book helped me clarify my own thoughts about which parts of his book I consider to be most important. Those parts are about LBJ’s commitment to civil rights and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
For me, the most vivid and impressive parts of Robert A. Caro’s fourth volume in his ongoing biography of Lyndon B. Johnson are his detailed account of LBJ’s commitment to civil rights and how LBJ got the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed by Congress.
In the introduction, which is titled “Introduction: ‘What the hell’s the presidency for?’” (pages ix-xix), Caro recounts a session that LBJ had with certain key advisers on the evening of November 26, 1963, just a few days after the tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, LBJ’s home state. The following day President Johnson was to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress. LBJ’s advisers argued about how much emphasis should be given to civil rights in the speech. Caro reports, “And then, in the early hours of the morning, as one of the advisers recalls, ‘one of the wise, practical people around the table’ told him [President Johnson] to his face that a President shouldn’t spend his time and power on lost causes, no matter how worthy those causes might be” (page xv).
According to Caro, Lyndon Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”
Lyndon Johnson understood that as President, he had power. He meant to use that power. And he knew how to use that power, as the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts was to show.
In a later discussion of the proposed 1964 Civil Rights Act, Caro spells out what was becoming obvious about President Johnson’s commitment to the proposed legislation: “But whatever power he had, he was going to use it – and no one knew how to use power better than he. If there was only one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to push it” (page 487).
Caro finds certain extemporaneous remarks that burst from President Johnson on one occasion show his deep personal commitment to civil rights. He had been talking to governors about why a civil rights bill should be passed. Then he said, “So that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City [Texas, where Lyndon Johnson, the poor white boy, had grown up] that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly” (quoted on page 486).
On page 562, Caro reports that President Johnson assured “Richard Goodwin there would be ‘no compromises on civil rights; I’m not going to bend an inch,’ he added, ‘In the Senate [as Leader] I did the best I could. But I had to be careful. . . . But I always vowed that if I ever had the power I’d make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it. And I’m going to use it’” (material in square brackets added by Caro).
In short, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress because President Johnson had the power to get it passed and used that power to get it passed. As Caro notes, President Johnson was also instrumental in getting the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act effectively brought the Jim Crow laws and customs of the South to an end.
Mr. Caro made an appearance on Andrea Mitchell’s show this past week (Thursday I think), and much of their discussion centered on the RFK-LBJ dynamic. The first words out of Caro’s mouth were (I’m more or less quoting verbatim, but you could google a transcript I’m sure): “As a historian, you never like to use words like ‘hate.’ In the case of Bobby and Johnson, they absolutely hated each other. Hate is exactly the word.”
However, I do indeed want to debate Wills’ characterization of the details in Caro’s book as somehow showing “hatred” between RFK and LBJ, because I do not think that Caro’s details about RFK and LBJ show “hatred” toward one another, as I’ve indicated in my original message above.
Thomas Farrell,
Robert Caro himself would not agree with you. Gwen Ifill interviewed Caro on the Newshour Thursday, and this is what he said:
With all due respect for Jeff Landry and Robert Caro and Garry Wills, I do not think that “hate” is exactly the right word to characterize the antagonism between RFK and LBJ, because I do not think that LBJ ever wanted to kill RFK, as he may have wanted to kill JFK, and I don’t think that RFK ever wanted to kill LBJ, at least not in the antagonisms detailed by Caro in this book.
Incidentally, I do not understand why Caro repeatedly refers to Robert F. Kennedy as Bobby. Caro does not use that kind of nickname to refer repeatedly to anyone else in the book. Caro’s repeated use of this nickname strikes me as a put-down of Robert F. Kennedy.
Not to speak for Caro, but “Bobby” was a pretty routine way to refer to the attorney general. The press and popuEdward spent a long time being “Teddy” in public thought and prints, too. And then he became “Ted.” (P.S. Nixon spent years trying to get people to call him “Dick,” but he was “Richard” from start to finish.)
Oops, I somehow lost something in transmission above. The second sentence should read “The press and populi didn’t start to call him “Robert” until he was elected to the Senate. Then the sentence starting with Edward is OK.
Sorry about that.
If RFK hated LBJ so much why did he decline to run against him in 1968 after being asked and begged by Dems [Lewinstein?] who showed him data that he could prevail?? Hate never seems to be put off by fear or cautious calculation.. A not timid, RFK waited for Eugene McCarthy to show that LBJ was vulnerable before he ‘jumped in’ .. a too slow and cautious move for a hater , I would surmise.
It seems to me that this thread has gotten a little too hung up on the work ‘hate.’ I’ve read two of Caro’s previous volumes, and have just started this latest. Johnson could be mean, vindictive and ruthless — and so, I believe, could RFK. They were certainly political enemies, and had a grudge against each other from when they first met. They may not have wanted to actually murder the other, but I don’t think wishing each other dead is too far fetched.
Regardless, two fascinating characters — both ‘great men,’ rather than ‘good men.’
Tom Farrell deserves thanks for his brief but significant notes on the book.
(I have long been an admirer of Caro -”the Power Broker” reminded me not only of my youth when Robert Moses strolled the promenade of Carl Schurz park telling who’d ever listen of his great plans, to my days driving home from the Bronx Courthouse and reminded frequently of the evils of the Cross Bronx Expressway that still is a harbinger of a borough hurt and divided.
Moses comeuppance from Nelson Rockefeller had lots of personality dynamics -but the poltical outcomes of the power struggle were what was really pertinent.)
LBJ had been a master in the use of power as Senate Leader (Master of the Senate is a great reading on his manipulations, prejudices and accomplishments) using his “reading” of his colleagues to maximim advantage.
Then came the conventions of “56 and ’60 and the Kennedys.
What may be grist for this thread and the media of the”wages of hate” in the personal rancor then, but ISM that the real issue for Caro continually is the wages of’power used/misused.
Power is so much more supplemted IMO today by money and spin that we need to look at his lessons carefully not only in poltics but religion and their intermix.
Way too much emphasis is placed on personal ideology in understanding those worlds today and those who haven’t learned the lessons of history…..
Perhaps if Robert Caro would just devote a bit of time to researching the life of Lyndon Johnson he would realize that Johnson and Bobby Kennedy really didn’t hate each other.
I was struck by these words in Wills’ review:
This reminded me of a passage in a book I assign in a course I teach in a study abroad program here in El Salvador. The book, El Salvador’s Civil War: A Study of Revolution, was written by Hugh Byrne. In 1980, as the war began, Byrne had left a doctoral program to be a full-time organizer on El Salvador, and eventually became the national political director for CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), a militant group which opposed U.S. policy in El Salvador and was quite sympathetic to the guerrillas. When the war ended in 1992, he went back to finish his degree. During the years of researching and writing his dissertation –the basis for his book – something happened. Let him explain:
Given the direction he seemed to be moving in, I wasn’t surprised to learn, years later, that Byrne had gone on to become a teacher of Buddhism and, at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a founder of the Washington Buddhist Peace Fellowship. If you’d like, take a look at these:
http://www.hugh-byrne.com/about.shtml
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dMfMXcnmVG8
http://www.districtchronicles.com/buddhism-in-the-city-1.2445673#.T69Ez1JrZnM
It is always interesting to get a glimpse into these background relationship dynamics. It appears, though, that Caro is overdramatizing the dynamic. Wills definition of hate did not appear to play itself out in any concrete way. Civil rights legislation was eventually passed. Johnson did his thing and exercised his leadership. Kennedy retreated (metaphorically) to the hills to regroup and emerge later.
I imagine it probably stung Kennedy that he was suddenly on the outside after being so intimately connected to the levers of power. That is a very seductive force. But Johnson did not need him. He did not appear to be of any real use and at the end of the day Johnson appeared to be committed to passing the legislation he needed passed. He needed allies who could advance that agenda in the legislature. It just doesn’t seem personal on Johnson’s end although he may have felt Kennedy was an entitled, shallow, rich, brat without a clue as to how to actually make change happen in real life and not the never, never Camelot world (correct) and Kennedy saw Johnson as looking like an older, crotchety man and not the kind of charismatic, youthful, hopeful, face of the new America that Johnson himself envisioned (correct).
But at the end of the day, it is not about either of those things. From a legislative point of view, Johnson delivered and the Kennedy’s didn’t.