LBJ BIOGRAPHY

Robert Caro's latest volume on President Lyndon Baines Johnson is out.  This article deals with what Romeny and Obama could learn from LBJ.  Some of the comments:

During his nearly three years as Kennedy’s vice president, Johnson's public life was filled with petty humiliations: minimal staff, exclusion from major meetings, a dinky 10-seat plane for most of his official travels and near total isolation from the Oval Office. Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s personal secretary, kept meticulous records: Johnson spent fewer than two hours alone with JFK during the final 11 months of his presidency.

At Saturday night’s White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, Obama tweaked Romney over the de facto Republican nominee’s charges of elitism: “We both have degrees from Harvard. I have one; he has two. What a snob.” These elite educational pedigrees have become the norm in campaigns for the White House. In the past quarter-century, only two presidential nominees (Bob Dole and John McCain) have lacked a degree from Harvard or Yale.


Johnson’s gift was his preternatural ability to find that weak spot in the ego where flattery would be the most compelling. With economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Johnson adroitly suggested that he could be a White House insider like his friend Arthur Schlesinger. With United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been twice defeated for the presidency, Johnson said, “I know, and you know, that you should be sitting behind this desk rather than me.”
 
When Johnson confronted someone who had double-crossed him, he would often threaten his political demise. Sounding like a Mafia don, LBJ told one errant politician, “I’m going to give you a three-minute lesson in integrity. And then, I’m going to ruin you.” As Caro demonstrates with dozens of examples, Robert Kennedy, when his brother was president, reveled in humiliating Johnson almost for the sheer tearing-wings-off-flies sport of it. Rahm Emanuel sending a dead fish to a pollster early in his career does not measure up to the 1960s standards for hardball.

Here is the New York Times review.  It appears to be more a study of hate than power.