The Passage of Power is Robert Caro's fourth installment in his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. It follows perhaps the most interesting part of Johnson's political career, from 1958 until 1964. During this time, Johnson served as Senate Majority Leader, Vice President and finally President of the United States. The book also discusses Johnson's role as a powerless Vice President in an administration that didn't like him and trusted him even less.
More than half of the book is focused on the assassination of then-president John F. Kennedy in November of 1963 and the aftermath as Johnson became president. Other books, movies and documentaries have shown us the JFK assassination through the vantage point of Kennedy family members and even those involved in the subsequent Warren Commission investigation. The Passage of Power, though, is a biography of Johnson so we get to look at the circumstances surrounding that November afternoon from Johnson's point of view for the first time.
The Passage of Power details the first weeks of Johnson's presidency in-depth. This includes every step of the way, from the controversy surrounding his swearing in before ever leaving the ground in Dallas to his work with congress on pushing through legislation to begin the War on Poverty. It ends just after Johnson's first State of the Union address in January 1964.
Robert A. Caro is best known for his political biographies, primarily those of Robert Moses and the series about Johnson. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography and the National Book Award, among many others, for his work.
The Passage of Power is the fourth of five planned books in the The Years of Lyndon Johnson series. Caro has been working on the volumes since the mid-1970s, completing almost a decade o f research between each book. The previous volumes were released in 1982, 1990 and 2002. The Passage of Power was published in 2012.
"Without a doubt one of the greatest biographies I have ever read and one that completely changed my view of the "Flawed Giant" Lyndon Johnson. Caro's writing is a brilliant mixture between eruditely explicating even the most obscure, minute details of legislative battles while also providing truly inspiring writing on the cause for civil rights and other causes. Caro is unabashedly liberal, which actually makes him a perfect biographer for one of the most contradictory and powerful (personally and politically) men in American history. Just like the trade unions, civil rights leaders, and other left-leaning groups during Johnson's rise to power and early presidency, Caro's prose renders excellently the mixed, suspicious view we are meant to take of Lyndon Johnson. This is the same man who indulged the very worst of anti-Communist paranoia and served the interests of Big Oil, destroying the career of liberal hero Leland Olds and his pursuit of providing cheap electricity to even the most rural areas of America (What is even worse, he himself did not even believe Olds was any sort of threat to the United States, but taking him down would ensure greater power for Johnson, see the previous, equally brilliant volume Master of the Senate). However, this is also the same man who, once he had power, became "the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed." Caro's riveting, inspiring, prose engrosses anybody who possesses even a measure of sense of social justice, so vividly does he portray the fight for civil rights and the roots of Lyndon Johnson's compassion and LBJ's visceral, burning hatred of poverty, ignorance, and inequality.
One piece of the book that particularly stands out is Caro's analysis of Robert Kennedy and his bitter feud with Johnson. Caro captures quite well not only Robert's personality but also brilliantly compares it to the urbane, unflappable John Kennedy and the larger than life, elemental Johnson. Though one thing that I find interesting about Robert and Lyndon is that Caro never points out how very similar these two were. As becomes clear through not just Passage of Power but the earlier volumes of the Years of Lyndon Johnson, Johnson was capable of both immense compassion and astounding cruelty and callousness. Robert Kennedy was precisely the same way, a man so ruthless, driven by his utter loathing of corruption and dishonesty, especially in causes he believed in (like labor), that in his crusade to root out mafia elements in unions (and specifically his vendetta against Jimmy Hoffa) he became known as "Capitol Hill's resident fascist." However, he could also be capable of an incredible amount of kindness (his visit to Jackie Kennedy after her miscarriage, for instance, even though they hardly knew each other before then, an act Jackie never forgot.). Johnson and Kennedy were two people where the Democratic Party and indeed Washington were just too small for the two of them. It is towards the Kennedys that Johnson showed some of his very worse traits: His sycophancy, cruelty, insensitivity, etc. But it was his insecurity about the Kennedys, indeed his fear, that also inspired him to achieve a truly miraculous presidential transition that was so smooth that we might forget how easily Kennedy's assassination could have led to global catastrophe. These two men brought out the best and worst in each other, and Caro paints a portrait of these two complex but monumental figures of mid-century liberalism.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and, along with Caro's other equally outstanding volumes of the Years of Lyndon Johnson, received a far more nuanced, complex picture of Johnson than I had ever had before. It was said of LBJ that there were as many Lyndons as people who knew him. That may be true, but Caro does an incredible job discovering the real Johnson, the ambitious, sometimes ruthless politician who also possessed a massive compassion for the dispossessed, "The Johnsons of Johnson City," a compassion beat into him by the sun and iron of his days working on the railroad tracks in the Hill Country of Texas, working alongside blacks, Mexicans, and the others left out of the American Experiment at that time. Kennedy, Roosevelt, and other icons of the American Left came to their liberalism through intellectual study; Johnson came to it through the blisters in his hands and teaching the children of Mexican immigrants English in a run down schoolhouse. Caro understands this better than anybody, and this monumental work made me far better understand this most enigmatic and conflicted giant of the 20th Century."
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Andrew (5 out of 5 stars)