Leinsdorf’s Second Law - Stolen Elections Lead to War: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

Robert Caro has written four books over the past 30 years, one better than the next.  The first, The Power Broker, was about the New York City Parks Commissioner and urban planner named Robert Moses. 

The next three have been the first three volumes of a biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson, with more to come.  Each volume has taken Caro seven years to write.  So basically, Caro has devoted his life to the study of Lyndon Johnson’s.

The third volume of the biography “Master of the Senate” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.  The second volume, “Means of Ascent”, published in 1990, is almost unobtainable.  “Means of Ascent” is a more than 300 page book that documents, in irrefutable detail, how Johnson stole the 1948 election that put him in the United States Senate.  It is almost a blueprint for the techniques that George W. Bush used to steal the 2000 presidential election.

Lyndon Johnson led the United States into a war in Vietnam, and George W. Bush led the United States into a war in Iraq.  They were both from Texas, the only state that was ever an independent foreign country.

Politicians who steal elections lack the diplomatic skills to conduct foreign policy.  In the end, just as they have no respect for the judgment of the people they purport to lead, their negotiating skills are lacking so, in the end, they resort to the same kind of brute force that they used to achieve power in the first place.

The seeds of the Iraq War were sown in the stolen 2000 presidential election, just as the seeds of the Vietnam War were sown in the stolen Texas Senate race in 1948.  In an ass backwards way, this is also circumstantial evidence that Kennedy did not steal the 1960 election, because he had the negotiating skills and respect for the lives of his people to negotiate his way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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Contact: Joshua Leinsdorf