Volume 30, Number 2 · February 17, 1983
The Great Lobbyist
By Murray Kempton
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power
by Robert A. Caro
Knopf, 882 pp., $19.95
Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir
by George Reedy
Andrews and McMeel, 159 pp., $12.95
Edmund Wilson observed that the works of Theodore Dreiser are like a newspaper full of 'commonplace scandals and crimes and obituaries of millionaires, in which the reporter astonishes the readers by being rash enough to try to tell the truth.' Robert Caro is the most Dreiserian of our chroniclers. He proceeds in the same plodding, laborious, heroic way, which makes The Path to Power's arrival at fashion something of an astonishment. For Dreiser seems fated always to be the least fashionable of great novelists, because he too much oppresses us with the weight of how capital is accrued and careers made.
Review, 7254 words
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