Customer Reviews

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

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This latest in Robt. Caro's series on LBJ is a wonderful, must-read book. I couldn't put it down -- a first for me. Having lived in the US during the Kennedy White House years, it was like reliving JFK's assination all over again. This may be the best of Caro's books on LBJ, and I eagerly await his next one. You don't have to be an LBJ fan to enjoy this one!

Reads like a political thriller. Great prose. It was well worth the 10 year wait. Hope the last part is not too far down the road!

Talk about a man with a self-centered vision and the determination to make it happen! Lyndon Baines Johnson is one of those political characters whose ambition for political power in post-war America knew no limits. Pulling himself up, as he claimed, by the bootstraps from the humblest of beginnings to become America's thirty-fifth president is a story worth reading, especially when the author is the sharp-minded, analytical biographer, Robert Caro. His research allows him to address the critical question of how Johnson, a relatively obscure Texas congressman from Hill country, back in the forties, was able to make it all the way to the White House, with such enormous odds stacked against him. In this volume, Caro looks at the evolving world of this consummate politician as he took on a run for the presidency, the Kennedys, his southern base, historical change, and his own mortality and sense of destiny and came out a winner. What distills from this in-depth examination is a man who became skilled at manipulating, bullying, holding grudges, and adapting to circumstances beyond his immediate control. When compared with his arch-nemeses, the Kennedy brothers, in their pursuit of power, LBJ looks no better or worse. All three of these men were good apprentices in the trade of Machiavellian politics that encouraged its adherents to always use disarming tactics and strategies that would gain them short- and long-term advantage. Johnson, like Kennedy, knew how to charm and eat crow as the need arose. In effect, they needed each other to cement their place in history. As vice-president, Johnson reluctantly chose to become JFK's doormat in order to keep alive the notion that he could very well succeed him and create his own cherished legacy. Like in the other two earlier volumes, this one is loaded with anecdotal evidence that goes behind the scenes at conventions, private meetings, and cabinet sessions to get at the truth.

Let me begin this way: I love Robert Caro. I believe that Caro is the best political biographer alive today, and that he's even better than David McCullough, who is a titan. And, I'm already counting the days until his fifth (and reportedly, final, though you never know with Caro) book about Lyndon Johnson's life finds its way to bookstores.

With that said, I found The Passage of Power disappointing in some ways. It wasn't wanting for research and context (as usual, Caro shone). Caro did a great job of undermining many of the prevailing myths about the Kennedys, particularly Bobby, and Caro's brutalization of toadish hack-ademic Arthur Schlesinger was both complete and admirable. Caro accurately captured the challenges and choices political staff face when their patron falls from power (I can speak knowingly of this because I have walked in those shoes myself), and also did a good job of conveying the blinding speed with which Johnson grabbed the reins or power and spurred the horse of executive office to a gallop. Where the book disappointed was in maintaining the drama of Johnson's efforts to get movement on civil rights and his budget passed. Now, this isn't necessarily Caro's fault: it's his role to recapitulate the doings and identify the lessons in wielding power, not to inject phony drama into the narrative for the sake of his readers. But you knew - you just knew - that once Lyndon started working over the Senate's octogenarians, that he would get his way, which is why reading the chapters devoted to these matters was a tough-ish slog. If anything, Caro created this problem himself in Master of the Senate; no reader could finish that book and not know that Johnson with or against the Senate, Johnson was unstoppable, no matter the circumstances or the odds. The facts of Johnson's work on these files, and our built-in expectations of what he was capable of, left me feeling that I could safely set the book down and walk away for days at a time without regret, which was not the case with the first three volumes.

Notably underexplored by The Passage of Power was Johnson's personal transition from serving as a life-long legislator - a knower of secrets, a friend and judger of peers, a cutter of deals - to wielding executive authority, which is solitary and requires a very different set of skills. Legislators tend to have difficulty time winning the presidency (relatively few US Senators have made the jump, although many governors - executives - have), and fewer still have used the office of the Presidency to great effect; as The Passage of Power makes clear, Kennedy - a legislator - repeatedly failed to advance his policy agenda through Congress. (The most successful legislator/President is, arguably, Barack Obama, who spent barely any time as a US Senator, but has been ruthlessly effective at using the executive power bestowed on him by the Presidency to advance his policy goals.) Perhaps this is a theme Caro will explore in depth in his next book.

Should you read this book? Absolutely - after you read the first three. If you are new to Caro and choose to read all four, be sure to budget plenty of unbroken reading time for the first three, because the Johnson's story and the electricity of Caro's writing force you to race through them. You'll be able to take The Passage of Power at walking pace.