Robert Caro and History, ctd

On Twitter Alec MacGillis graciously responded to my previous post, making the appropriate point that I had not addressed Caro's support for the filibuster. Here's the quote, from a WSJ profile:

In 2004, when Senate Republicans were threatening to end Democrats' filibustering of judicial nominees by implementing "the nuclear option," Kennedy called Mr. Caro "out of the blue" and asked if he would come to Washington, D.C., and explain to the freshman senators the importance of preserving the filibuster. After their joint lobbying effort succeeded, Kennedy asked Mr. Caro to introduce him for a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

I agree, that's a foolish speech in hindsight, but I'm not sure we can take this at face value.

Here's the thing. Caro says his books are about power, and he is well known for having an extremely realistic view of how power actually operates in this country. His portrayals of Johnson and Robert Moses are utterly unsentimental. And while he eventually concludes that Moses was a monster who devastated New York, he is grudgingly respectful of Johnson's Great Society accomplishments, even though on the way he betrayed some of his best friends, repeatedly broke the law, stole elections, used government contacts to make himself rich, and so on. One of the most important things Johnson did, actually, was rewrite the Senate rules on seniority to give himself more power and make the body more functional (so that he could accomplish more).

Check out the next graf of that profile:

In exchange, Kennedy offered to help Mr. Caro with the book. Mr. Caro recounts: "I said, 'If you really want to help me, you can get the instructions from your [1960] campaign headquarters about what you did in the different states.'" John Kennedy's presidential campaign had sent Teddy, a 27-year-old political neophyte, to the Western states to win over delegates. Why? "Because they thought it was lost." To his credit, Kennedy delivered the instructions.

So Kennedy got Caro to help maintain his power in the Senate, and in return Kennedy helps him with some important documents. Did Caro really believe what he was saying, or was he engaging in a bit of logrolling? I find it hard to believe that he at least wouldn't have understood the subtext. I haven't seen him pressed on this point, but I find it very hard to believe that if he were faced with the standard argument against the filibuster he wouldn't concede the point. Anyone know of an interview with that question asked?

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog