Perhaps I overreached a bit branding him a “leftist”. I have not researched Caro enough for that. Just wanted to get that rant off my chest.....I personally won’t read any more Caro works, not after seeing him (a “biographer”) insert that opinionated garbage, which tends to make me question every subsequent assertion in the book.
Biographers have a hard path. They are a type of historian. For historians, they can chose to be scholarly historians, following every rule of citation and technical accuracy, and end up dry and difficult, or they can chose to write a narrative history easily consumed by an interested reader.
Biographers almost always have to chose the narrative form which forces them to add interpretative vignettes to paint in the details. I know that I will hit that sort of item and assume I see the author’s bias and it can turn me off. Philbrick did that for me in his book on the history of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Read Caro’s multivolume biography of LBJ. Caro definitively proves that LBJ and his allies stole the 1948 Senate election and details much corruption and rotten behavior by LBJ. Caro is a liberal, but even more than that, he is an old style reporter and a determined digger of facts.