[breakem]

I think many liberals will always revere LBJ. He was their last great push. Clinton couldn't hold a candle to him. I will never forget his address to the nation when he said he wouldn't run. Shakespeare would have taken pen in hand.

[aristeides]

In LBJ's time, it was still possible for people of some intelligence and honesty to believe in liberalism. Even the leaders of the movement, like LBJ, with half their minds believed in their cause, even if they were con men in the other half of their minds (And there were people like Hubert Humphrey who were almost entirely sincere, even if deluded.) Their followers were not really aware of their leaders' partial duplicity.

So it may be true that liberalism in LBJ's time was a more dangerous movement (because people could believe in it,) but liberalism in the Clintons' time has become a much clearly evil force. People who are both intelligent and honest can still be leftists, but I do not think that anyone who is both intelligent and honest can any longer support the palpably corrupt version of institutionalized liberalism that is Clintonism. I.e., you can tell whether a leftist is honest by whether he opposes Clintonism, even if only from the left.

I believe Caro's own politics are liberal, and the excerpts from the new volume that have so far appeared in the New Yorker suggest that the new volume may be more favorable to LBJ than its predecessors, perhaps because Caro is going to want to support the civil-rights and Great Society aspects of LBJ's presidency once he gets around to dealing with that.

Did Caro indicate whether his projected fourth volume will deal with both LBJ's vice presidency and presidency, or only with the vice presidency (or maybe the 1960-64 term, as another possible dividing line)?

Anyway, however favorably Caro may deal with the later stages of LBJ's political career, the man is irredeemably damned by the LBJ tapes that C-SPAN is running (at least on C-SPAN Radio -- I don't have cable, so I can't say whether they're also on one of C-SPAN's TV channels.) The sycophancy and duplicity on display in those tapes can never be erased.