The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power

The fourth volume in the ongoing, detailed, yet completely absorbing biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro was published recently. Caro is a titan of biography: his research is exhaustive, based on hundreds of interviews, examination of all relevant documents, and even substantial time living in places where Johnson spent formative periods. Caro famously spent more years writing Johnson volume III, than Johnson spent living it! Yet reading his prose is effortless - logically organized and lively, it's more like a yarn than a history.

Caro originally conceived this biography as three books - now four are out, with numbers five or, even, six in the works. I used to say that I hoped Caro (now 77) would live long enough to finish the series. Now I say that I hope I live long enough to finish reading the series!

Caro's invariable subject is power. His first book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, was a detailed study of the most powerful man in New York State for several decades. And power is the explicit subject of the Johnson series. The third volume, Master of the Senate, spent ~150 pages describing the history of the US Senate, convincingly demonstrating how the dictates of the Constitution, the historical traditions of the Senate, and the powerful and monolithic Southern Bloc of Senators made it impossible for any single man to wield power in that body - all to set the stage for the astonishing consolidation, almost creation, of power by the junior Senator from Texas. Johnson himself is quoted saying,

I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it."

The Passage of Power describes a new chapter in Johnson's search for power, describing how he failed to capture the Democratic Presidential nomination for the 1960 election and then decided to accept the Vice-Presidential nomination, strongly against the advice of his best friends and advisors, who argued forcefully that the Vice Presidency is a ludicrous, powerless office. Johnson believed he could alter that situation, telling one friend, "Power is where power goes." But he was wrong. He had misread and badly underestimated Jack Kennedy, who sidelined him completely. Johnson was regarded by the Kennedy inner circle ("the Harvards", as he called them) as a rube ("Uncle Cornpone" or "Rufus") and was personally snubbed and administratively excluded. In the absence of any meaningful role, with no opportunity to groom himself to replace Kennedy at the conclusion of his term, Johnson literally wasted away, physically and mentally.

The gripping part of this volume is the shocking assassination of Kennedy and the immediate transformation in Johnson; he came alive, overcoming enormous obstacles, to seize the reins of power and wield them with astonishing effectiveness. For example, the description of how he managed to steer a civil rights act through Congress is exceptionally impressive. Caro lauds Johnson's achievement in the highest terms:

The 1965 Act would be passed after another titanic struggle, in which, with men and women (and children, many children) being beaten in Selma on their way to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, singing "We Shall Overcome" as they marched into tear gas and billy clubs and bullwhips, Lyndon Johnson went before Congress and said, "We Shall Overcome," thereby adopting the cicil rights rallying cry as his own. (When Martin Luther King, watching the speech on television in Selma, heard Johnson say that, he began to cry - the first time his assistants had ever seen him cry). ..... To bring black Americans more fully into the political system, he had to break the power of the South in the Senate - and he broke it. It was Abraham Lincoln who "struck off the chains of black Americans," I have written, "but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their owndestiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life." How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink in history's eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

For me, this book provided new insight into Jack and Robert Kennedy, the incomparable speechwriter and Kennedy accolyte Ted Sorenson, and, through the masterful protrayal of the strengths and weaknesses of LBJ, new insights into the character of men.