The Federal Lawyer this month ran my review of the fourth volume in Robert Caro's ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson, the 36th president of the United States.
I discuss aspects of the volume not discussed much in the other reviews I've seen, including Johnson's dealings with Bobby Baker and (through Bobby Baker) with insurance salesman Don Reynolds.
Here is a quote from the book (I don't quote it, though I allude to it, in my review):
Reynolds told Williams that in 1957, having been advised that a 'political connection' would be helpful in building up his insurance business, he contacted Bobby Baker, a fellow South Carolinian, and they entered into an agreement under which he would make payments to Baker 'because,' as Reynolds was to put it, 'of his social contacts and his wide knowledge of people [whom he] could present to me.' Baker had shortly thereafter introduced him to Walter Jenkins. Johnson, that same year, had mentioned to Baker that he was having difficulty obtaining life insurance because of his heart attack, and Baker, as he would recall, 'told Senator Johnson about my partnership with Don Reynolds, and we agreed to seek the policy through him.'
From the point of view of the Reynolds of the world, this is just being realistic. Even "pragmatic" in a rather debased use of that fine coin.
'Everybody else uses political contacts, I have to use political contacts,' is how one might fairly paraphrase the thought.
It didn't end well for Reynolds, since the oh-so-useful contacts turned into bloodsuckers over time, which is why he was happy to rat out Baker, Jenkins, and Johnson himself to Senator Williams. For the curious, here is a link to the whole review. Actually, it's a link to a pdf that includes the whole books section for this month, so you'll have to go to p. 9 of the pdf to find this review in particular. After which you may find that other reviews in the section, including the one on abolitionism are very much worth your attention too.
But what I mean to say here in particular is that pragmatism in the proper philosophic sense does not mean that one is condemned forever to the day-to-day rat race, prohibited from ever poking one's mousey nose above the barriers in order to try to see the maze as a whole. Indeed, James' famous expression, "the bitch goddess success" should itself hint that James wasn't one of that goddess' lovers.
Pragmatism is itself precisely about poking one's nose above the maze that the bitch goddess creates. This is that meta-right I've been talking about, the right that aims to reconcile the other rights, the loyalty to loyalty itself.
Caro portrays Johnson's devotion to the bitch goddess, and the lengths to which he went to serve her, and he excels in this portrayal.
I was a teenager during the Johnson presidency. I was amazed at how the press was kind to him. His ruthless Texas corrupt side, on which Caro has shone much light, was brushed aside as "effective" and a source of humor. But the national press corps was likewise very kind to JFK and is ruttish side. 50 years ago, journalists and their ilk were seldom religious. They were as ideological then as they are now. They politely disdained Eisenhower as a philistine. They deemed Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater completely beyond the pale. The same was true of any true leftist, altho' the aging Norman Thomas was treated kindly. They laughed at Harold Stassen. But they loved mainstream Democrats, including Senator Fulbright from Arkansas. These people thought Adlai Stevenson was the cat's meow. These people were flummoxed by the election of Reagan in 1980, the emergence of a powerful GOP in Congress in 1995, after 64 years in the wilderness, and the rise of the Tea Party. Journalists don't know the Real America in which I came of age, a world with its share of authoritarian fascists, worshippers of force, and de facto anarcho-capitalists. These people are deeply angry because they feel that the ideological consensus underlying TV and print journalism kept their viewpoints out of the public domain, at least before Fox News was clearly a business success. But all this brings to my mind Hostadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
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