Means of Ascent

"I’m always fascinated by people from humble beginnings in our country who rise up to do great things, whether that’s Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or even Jesse Jackson. It’s almost a common trope that you have kids who grow up in very humble, hard backgrounds, who in our country can rise to become tremendous champions. Exactly. And so I’ve always been fascinated by Lyndon Johnson’s achievements, which were towering – though somehow overshadowed by John F Kennedy’s presence, which was blinding. I wanted to have a better sense of how it was that the person who really delivered on the Kennedy vision got to have that opportunity, and this particular book does an extraordinary job of explaining just how crafty and deceptive Johnson was in trying to get one of the early civil rights bills through. The bill was a toothless tiger, it was a civil rights bill in name only, but it did break the ice after 100 years, or however long it had been, for everything that began to flow through Congress. His description of Johnson is arresting, complex, entertaining, very educational, and I don’t think Washington will ever work that way again because it really required a lot of secrecy. The push towards transparency is very important and I support it. But you can see, by comparing the way the senate operates today to the way it operated then, that the push for more transparency, and more intense and robust media saturation of the political process, tends towards spectacle. The good side is that the secrets get chased away in some respects, but the spectacle ends up capturing the conversation. Johnson was able to go and talk to lots of different people, say very different things to all of them, and eventually land the plane where he wanted to. That probably wouldn’t have been possible with people blogging every 13 seconds and tweeting every five seconds. I think that you have to have both of the qualities that you see in the Democratic party in the 1960s. At the end of the day, the ideal is probably a Bobby Kennedy, the pragmatic idealist. You need to be grounded in the deepest values and to aspire for the highest ideals of the country, which you also have to be tough-minded about. So I think that Bobby is my favourite American politician by far in some ways, because he is somehow able to accommodate both."