In an interview on Power and Ideas

Your last book, Robert A Caro on Lyndon Johnson. This is this unfinished four-volume life’s work?

Yes. Perhaps it’s only for the true believers. It is quite an enterprise to read, but compelling partly because Lyndon Johnson was such a beautifully unattractive character. He was a horrible bully who humiliated his staff and who found a way of endearing himself to the oil barons of Texas by launching a McCarthyite campaign, before McCarthy, against the electricity regulator. He ruined this guy’s life by accusing him of being a communist when he was nothing of the sort. So, on the one hand he was an ogre, but on the other hand he was the first person to get any civil rights legislation through the senate since the Civil War. The question is: do the ends justify the means? In his case the means were unspeakable but until Lyndon Johnson the Southern Democrats (some of whom were white supremacists) used the filibuster to stop any civil rights legislation getting through. He convinced them that he was on their side.

Do the ends justify the means?

I don’t particularly think so. I ended up not admiring him even though this book is an attempt to rehabilitate him. He left office completely discredited after his part in the Vietnam War. Caro has him as the Bevan and Attlee of America, but his means were unspeakable and he would never get away with it now. He wouldn’t survive a week in modern politics. This goes back to Marshall Ganz and Bobby Kennedy – Kennedy was, like Obama, campaigning for something he really believed in and when he was shot it broke the hearts of the American left and they have only really got the belief back now with Obama.