Presidential incarnations
Feb. 9th, 2014 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThis morning there was an interview with Bryan Cranston in the NY Times, about playing Lyndon B. Johnson in All The Way. It's a good interview, and I knew this was his upcoming project, but somehow I'd missed out on the fact this was a theatre play, not a movie or tv miniseries. Which is great for theatre goes in New York but sad for transatlantic me, who thus won't get to watch Cranston in said role. And I'd love to: Cranston bringing out all the ambiguities, the flaws and virtues of Johnson surely will be awesome to behold.
The other reason why I'd have been looking forward to watching the film or tv product this isn't: it wouldn't, couldn't fall into the two categories American dramas seem to when featuring a President in a prominent role: if Nixon, then a tragic villain, if Lincoln, then a noble saint. Johnson's reputation has had its ups and downs, but seems to have settled for "Great Society Awesome, Vietnam Bad" as far as his presidency is concerned, and "Most efficient Senator and Democratic Leader in the Senate Ever/Totally Not Above Stealing If He Needed To" for the decades before that. I remember Ted Kennedy in his memoirs calling him the best American President post-Roosevelt, but even his enemies seem to agree that Johnson, for good or ill, got things done. The Cranston article summarizes: But in 2014, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty, with anniversaries of two other Great Society triumphs, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, a year away, Johnson endures as something far more interesting and even inspiring: the last and perhaps greatest of all legislative presidents, with his wizardly grip on the levers of governance at a time when it was still possible for deals to be brokered and favors swapped and for combatants to clash in an atmosphere of respect, if not smiling concord. And before that: The story of a ruthless president who got things done — without blinking at the costs and compromises — reminds us that partisan gridlock doesn’t have to be a permanent condition.
There is a pointed if unspoken comparison here to the current President. In all the non-Republican criticisms of Obama (and non-foreign: in my part of the world, he and the entire US government are currently under fire for something else altogether), the constant red thread seems to be that he's too aloof and hands-off to mingle with anyone in Washington outside his inner circle; that something like "the Johnson Treatment" (which, Wikipedia tells me, was the nickname for Johnson's tried and true method of cajoling, intimidating, flattering and terrorizing - whatever worked - Congressmen and Senators alike) would be unthinkable. (Ditto for Clinton-style arm-pressing and socializing.) To which the defense in the recent New Yorker profile of Obama was that in the current climate, with the Republicans so dead set to object to anything from the government, it wouldn't be of use anyway. Which is probably true, but it strikes me that one reason why types like Johnson wouldn't even make it to the presidency these days (except the way LBJ did, i.e. as Vice President taking over from a suddenly dying incumbent) is that both Republican and Democrat candidates harp on presenting themselves as outsiders to the Washington scene. No matter how accurate or not, every candidate spins it like he/she is the noble saviour from outside, untainted by poisonous inside politics and corruption, and voters reward that. That the result isn't change but even more obstruction and inertia isn't really surprising, if you think about it.
Now, the recent Lincoln did show some political manoeuvring and cajoling and showed Lincoln as savvy in addition to being noble, but it still couldn't resist te occasional half profile shot where you expect him to have a halo because of the way he's lighted, and also, being the President who ended slavery and was assassinated means you don't have to convince the majority of the audience he was a good guy. Johnson, otoh, has the Vietnam albatros around his neck, and that's before you get into conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination or more reliable tales about his intimidation tactics which make him sound like the Gene Hunt of Presidents. (Phlipp Glennister for Johnson if the play is a success and comes to London?) And then, it's impossible to end his story on a triumphant note for anyone: he leaves office, Vietnman gets even worse, America gets Nixon, and the days of major liberal laws being passed and being put into practice, are over for the next few decades. In conclusion and back to the beginning, I'm really curious about this play, and endlessly frustrated I won't get to see it.
The other reason why I'd have been looking forward to watching the film or tv product this isn't: it wouldn't, couldn't fall into the two categories American dramas seem to when featuring a President in a prominent role: if Nixon, then a tragic villain, if Lincoln, then a noble saint. Johnson's reputation has had its ups and downs, but seems to have settled for "Great Society Awesome, Vietnam Bad" as far as his presidency is concerned, and "Most efficient Senator and Democratic Leader in the Senate Ever/Totally Not Above Stealing If He Needed To" for the decades before that. I remember Ted Kennedy in his memoirs calling him the best American President post-Roosevelt, but even his enemies seem to agree that Johnson, for good or ill, got things done. The Cranston article summarizes: But in 2014, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty, with anniversaries of two other Great Society triumphs, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, a year away, Johnson endures as something far more interesting and even inspiring: the last and perhaps greatest of all legislative presidents, with his wizardly grip on the levers of governance at a time when it was still possible for deals to be brokered and favors swapped and for combatants to clash in an atmosphere of respect, if not smiling concord. And before that: The story of a ruthless president who got things done — without blinking at the costs and compromises — reminds us that partisan gridlock doesn’t have to be a permanent condition.
There is a pointed if unspoken comparison here to the current President. In all the non-Republican criticisms of Obama (and non-foreign: in my part of the world, he and the entire US government are currently under fire for something else altogether), the constant red thread seems to be that he's too aloof and hands-off to mingle with anyone in Washington outside his inner circle; that something like "the Johnson Treatment" (which, Wikipedia tells me, was the nickname for Johnson's tried and true method of cajoling, intimidating, flattering and terrorizing - whatever worked - Congressmen and Senators alike) would be unthinkable. (Ditto for Clinton-style arm-pressing and socializing.) To which the defense in the recent New Yorker profile of Obama was that in the current climate, with the Republicans so dead set to object to anything from the government, it wouldn't be of use anyway. Which is probably true, but it strikes me that one reason why types like Johnson wouldn't even make it to the presidency these days (except the way LBJ did, i.e. as Vice President taking over from a suddenly dying incumbent) is that both Republican and Democrat candidates harp on presenting themselves as outsiders to the Washington scene. No matter how accurate or not, every candidate spins it like he/she is the noble saviour from outside, untainted by poisonous inside politics and corruption, and voters reward that. That the result isn't change but even more obstruction and inertia isn't really surprising, if you think about it.
Now, the recent Lincoln did show some political manoeuvring and cajoling and showed Lincoln as savvy in addition to being noble, but it still couldn't resist te occasional half profile shot where you expect him to have a halo because of the way he's lighted, and also, being the President who ended slavery and was assassinated means you don't have to convince the majority of the audience he was a good guy. Johnson, otoh, has the Vietnam albatros around his neck, and that's before you get into conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination or more reliable tales about his intimidation tactics which make him sound like the Gene Hunt of Presidents. (Phlipp Glennister for Johnson if the play is a success and comes to London?) And then, it's impossible to end his story on a triumphant note for anyone: he leaves office, Vietnman gets even worse, America gets Nixon, and the days of major liberal laws being passed and being put into practice, are over for the next few decades. In conclusion and back to the beginning, I'm really curious about this play, and endlessly frustrated I won't get to see it.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 01:36 pm (UTC)As for other castings of LBJ, no, no, no; his brother's the one who can manage accents convincingly.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 08:15 pm (UTC)THE PATH TO POWER will hook you. It has a brilliant account of where Lyndon Johnson came from -- one of the legitimately good things he did was rural electrification. Nowadays, it gets less attention than his civil rights work, so we tend to overlook just how big an impact it had. Caro provides a vivid life of just how horrific rural life was before electricity, and how brutal handwork was on men and women.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 02:14 pm (UTC)In fact, the central drama of The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been the unpredictable, fascinating evolution of Caro's opinion of the man—and, therefore, of his own work's ultimate purpose and point—from one installment to the next. The 960 pages of 1982's The Path to Power don't leave much doubt that he started out despising Johnson and everything he represented in American political life, let alone 1990's comparatively haiku-like (592 pages) Means of Ascent. To the virtual exclusion of any positive qualities, LBJ's opportunism, unscrupulousness and zestily coarse personality were on massively documented display in both. (...) Caro's ongoing self-revisionism manifested in earnest with Master of the Senate, his humongous (1,167 pages) portrait of Johnson's legislative prime as the Senate's Democratic leader in the 1950s. Means of Ascent had been so eager to blacken LBJ for his (very real) corrupt practices on the way to winning his Senate seat by 87 stolen votes in 1948 that Caro idealized his opponent to the point of absurdity. Among other things, he left out that the other guy was a rabid segregationist.
Being criticized for that omission clearly stung Caro. Besides, it may have belatedly crossed his mind that a biography of the president who did more for civil rights than any other could probably use some ameliorative foreshadowing along the way. Anyway, in Master of the Senate, Caro snuck in ways to revisit Johnson's early career so as to emphasize his concern for minorities, all the way back to LBJ's gig in his twenties as the Texas director of FDR's National Youth Administration. Hence my favorite footnote ever in any biography: "For an account of Johnson's work with the NYA that does not touch on its racial aspects, see Chapter 19 of The Path to Power."
Master of the Senate also reflected a new respect for Johnson's legislative guile, coupled with a recognition that idealism has its feckless side when it comes to actually getting anything done in government. That may seem like an elementary insight, but to readers of Caro's previous volumes—led to believe that only rock-ribbed integrity counts, by which standard Johnson was unredeemable—it was like watching an earnest civics prof discover the delights of heroin. All of a sudden, stratagems and opportunistic poses we'd have expected the biographer to paint in the blackest light were treated admiringly instead (...) In The Passage of Power, he's come all the way around to damn near identifying with Johnson—above all in his empathetic portrait of the humiliations Johnson suffered during his three years as JFK's veep, not only deprived of influence but ridiculed and marginalized by the Camelot crowd in ways that plainly tap something deep in Caro.(...) Even though his umbrella title is The Years of Lyndon Johnson, its unwritten subtitle could easily be The Education of Robert A. Caro.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 02:39 pm (UTC)The first volume alone puts the lie to the "only rock-ribbed integrity counts" reading (seriously, did this reviewer even read the same books as me?!). In the first volume, Caro goes into detail about how nasty and corrupt Johnson was from the beginning, and then into more detail about how being just that sort of asshole enabled him to get remarkable work done on behalf of rural electrification. For that matter, the reviewer's take on Caro's take on power also suggests that he's not familiar with Caro's earlier THE POWER BROKER -- Caro does not hate power; he's fascinated by it; that's literally all the dude writes about.
Caro, as a liberal historian, unquestionably has a lot of respect for Lyndon Johnson and likes him way more than I did after reading Caro's books. Caro also has a frank view of him that doesn't change a whole lot over the books: he keeps using bright threads and dark threads in the tapestry of Johnson's life as a metaphor, and it's pretty apt.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 02:54 pm (UTC)BTW, re: the segregationist views of the guy Johnson stole the vote from, reading this in the review gave me a sudden flashback to the Battlestar Galactica; in the s2 finale, you had Laura Roslin stealing the votes from Gaius Baltar at the presidential election. Now Roslin was a good and capable president and Baltar a bad one, but the show's narrative still made it clear it was wrong of her to steal the votes. (It also backfired since it was found out.) Stealing votes, I should think, is wrong no matter whether your opponent is a racist or Martin Luther King.
ETA: further googling also made me find this: