Q. Your book, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960, follows a bitter controversy over biographer Robert Caro's dramatically negative view of Johnson. How do you differ with Caro's view of Lyndon Johnson as an amoral opportunist?
A. Mr. Caro sees Johnson as an utterly unprincipled man. The view is unrelenting. He believes Johnson wasn't a committed New Dealer but an opportunist who supported Roosevelt to get elected. Johnson is a monster. I don't agree. I see what the French call a monstre sacre ((holy monster)). Johnson was a scoundrel. He broke laws at every level of politics and once even had sex with a White House secretary on her desk. But he was also a brilliant politician and a visionary who married his ambition to his country's interests.
Q. But Caro describes "two threads, bright and dark, ((that)) run side by side" through Johnson's life. Isn't he calling him a sacred monster too?
A. If you read both ((of Caro's)) volumes, you'll find it very difficult to locate the bright thread.
Q. What bright threads do you find?
A. Primarily, Johnson's extraordinary vision. Early on, he understood that his native South must join the mainstream of American life. Racial segregation, he realized, also segregated the South ((from the rest of the U.S.)). Johnson's role in the South's development was historically important.
Q. If he was such a visionary, why as a Congressman did he support poll taxes and vote against antilynching laws?
A. Otherwise he couldn't have stayed in office. But a different Johnson worked behind the scenes. As head of the National Youth Administration in Texas in the 1930s, he stayed overnight at black colleges to see NYA programs at work. If that had been known, he couldn't have been elected to Congress. Once there, he raised what one Washington bureaucrat called "unshirted hell" because black farmers in his district weren't getting federal loans equal to those offered white farmers. When he brought public housing to Austin, he insisted that the units be opened to blacks and Latinos.
Q. And what else did you discover?
A. During 1938 and 1939, Johnson secretly helped Jewish refugees from Europe enter the U.S., through Galveston. I don't know of any other Congressman who did that. Out of 400,000 constituents, his district had only 400 Jewish voters. Something deep in this man's psyche, probably harking back to his Texas hill-country boyhood, made him identify with the underdog.
Q. If this is a "balanced" portrait, surely not all of what you found was positive.
A. During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson. I found this in an oral history from one of Johnson's opponents, Polk Shelton, who was offered the same, but declined.
Q. Anything else?