It is amazing how each of Robert Caro’s four (so far) books on the presidency of Lyndon Johnson manages to create its own distinct identity, interlinked to the others yet separate.
In The Passage Of Power, LBJ’s story finally moves to the White House, where he is trapped for years as forlorn vice president playing stooge to the man who beat him for the Democrat nomination in 1960, only to win the office he craved for so long as the result of an assassin’s bullet and then do things with that office that would amaze detractors and allies alike.
Passage isn’t perfect, but it’s a fascinating, detailed account of and about flawed greatness.
The three previous Caro tomes on “The Years Of Lyndon B. Johnson” each have their unique qualities. The first and best, The Path To Power, was an warts-and-all bio that introduced Johnson as an unprincipled but dynamic rogue. Means Of Ascent carried this forward in the form of a mystery-suspense tale of a missing ballot box. Master Of The Senate examined Johnson from an institutional perspective, his rise in and domination of the U. S. Senate.
So now it’s on to the White House, scene of Johnson’s greatest triumphs and turf wars. The latter come early, and mostly involve Bobby Kennedy, the ruthless Attorney General and brother of the President both work for, John F. Kennedy:
“Jack Kennedy’s just as thoughtful and considerate of me…as he can be,” he told [his former assistant] Bobby Baker. “But I know his snot-nosed brother’s after my ass.”
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| John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson outside the White House. Kennedy asked LBJ to be his running mate over the objections of his brother: "I always suspected that Jack didn't tell Bobby everything about LBJ
because Jack figured Bobby would try to stop him," Kennedy adviser Fred Dutton told Caro. Image from https://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-releases-presidential-briefing-papers-from-john-kennedy-lyndon-johnson-eras-1442426456 |
Caro doesn’t dispute this characterization. While he is fuzzy about the reasons for the feud (apparently while serving his brother in the Senate, Bobby heard of comments LBJ had made about his father, and was unable and/or unwilling to forgive them), Caro makes clear a mutual hatred existed. Much of Passage Of Power is centered around the clash of LBJ and Bobby, both admired by Caro, if as cracked vessels.
Was LBJ on his way out of the Kennedy Administration in 1963? Caro advances the idea, not only on account of Bobby but two other matters which blew up on Johnson that year. One involved his former aide Bobby Baker, exposed in the press for years of influence-peddling, some of it done on behalf of Johnson. The other was a feud between two Texas Democrats, Senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor John Connally, which LBJ was not managing to get under control in time for the 1964 elections.
It was hoped a trip to Texas by President Kennedy would be just the thing to settle the latter issue. If that didn’t work, well, Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln told Caro her boss was thinking of replacing Johnson with Terry Sanford, the young governor of North Carolina:
…in 1961, according to Mrs. Lincoln’s detailed diaries of the President’s activities, Johnson had spent only ten hours and nineteen minutes alone with the President, a meagre enough figure; in 1962, the figure had been smaller; in 1963, the Vice President was alone with the President for a total of one hour and fifty-three minutes.
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| November 22, 1963: On Air Force One, Johnson consoles Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, her outfit still soaked in her husband's blood. Caro describes what happened on that flight moment-by-moment, including Johnson's first orders as the new President. Photo by Cecil Stoughton from https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24834/flight-from-dallas-1013/ |
Seven seconds in Dallas would give Johnson all the time he could want with the President. As Caro writes, Johnson’s assumption of power under the most tragic of circumstances showed him – characteristically, as revealed in prior volumes – at his best in the worst of times. “During this whole period, there was no trace of the ugly arrogance which had made him so disliked in many quarters…” George Reedy, a longtime aide and future press secretary, recalls.
Make no mistake, Johnson was still a bully. Only in the second half of Passage Of Power, we see him throw his weight around for causes like civil rights and what he came to call “the War on Poverty.” Caro sees this as personal for Johnson, who grew up poor. He showed sympathy for Mexican children whom he taught in Cotulla, Texas in 1928-29, and also for the family of a Latino soldier killed in war whom a Texas funeral home refused to accommodate.
Black Americans knew a different Johnson, one who had backed the Southern Caucus and Jim Crow. But Master Of The Senate shows how Johnson misled his Southern allies and got a small but significant civil rights bill passed in 1957. He planned to do more, and did, as President:
Hidden though it had been for years – twenty and more – because during those years compassion conflicted with the ambition that was the force that drove Johnson more than any other, when, in 1957, compassion had, for the first time, coincided with ambition, the compassion had been released. And it was released now.
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| Among the key Kennedy staffers who viewed Johnson's compassion with suspicion was Arthur Schlesinger: "Policy for Johnson has always been determined by the balance of
political pressures," he wrote in his diary, and spurned LBJ's overtures to be part of his team. Image from https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/us-historian-arthur-schlesinger-dies-at-idUSN0119524220070301 |
Using the national outpouring of grief that accompanied his predecessor’s murder, Johnson pressed for a Civil Rights Act in 1964. It would not have happened under another president; certainly not Kennedy, whose own effort had been stalled in the Senate. Johnson knew who to play and got busy playing them, in what makes for a very engaging and colorful tale.
Caro’s Johnson is a man of many facets. He could dole out the country charm hosting West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard at a Texas barbecue, which Caro relates in delightful detail.
That same week, LBJ leaned on the Houston Chronicle for its “lung,” i. e. editorial support, by threatening as President to harm its publisher’s financial interests. Johnson’s vast trove of recorded telephone calls made as President shed a gruesome light on the hard depths of his character; Caro makes ample use of them in his book with plenty of quotes.
Does Caro like Johnson? Politically I think he admires the guy, as a strong progressive leader badly needed on the American scene. This comes through most strongly as Johnson moves to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, which effectively ended legal segregation.
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| LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act into law, July 2, 1964. Just behind him, Martin Luther King Jr. looks on. Johnson got King and other black leaders to rally national support for the bill when it was stalled on Capitol Hill. Image from https://www.britannica.com/event/Civil-Rights-Act-United-States-1964 |
LBJ speaks movingly to a black journalist of the injustice of Jim Crow laws, and, after Dallas, surprises one of President Kennedy’s more liberal economists by saying: “If you looked at my record, you would know that I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.”
In time, Johnson would prove this with his Great Society program that threw untold sums at social problems and everything else, for better and worse. But in the time period covered by Passage Of Power, Johnson was cutting his budget, not increasing it.
Another aspect of Johnson’s presidency not covered much in this book is Vietnam. We sit in on his first meeting, where he talks about what it will take to maintain the status quo between our South Vietnamese ally and their North Vietnamese foe, but little is decided.
Caro writes: So close to his vest was Johnson holding his cards on Vietnam that even McGeorge Bundy, who was carrying out his strategy, wasn’t sure what it was.
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| LBJ's early days as President got great press, including this May 1964 Time cover story on his "whirlwind" presidency. Wrote James Reston of The New York Times: "Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done
for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new
Administration, but it works…" Image from http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19640501,00.html |
By the end of the book, Johnson seems to be coming into his own as a recognized leader, not an accidental President but a decisive one. Caro’s tone verges on the adulatory as he relates the amazement of liberal doubters at Johnson’s gains (“He is a pragmatist and a man of pragmatic compassion,” Martin Luther King tells aides. “It just may be that he’s going to go where John F. Kennedy couldn’t.”) But it is a story of amazing achievement, begun under great duress.
Even before the assassination, Johnson suffered enormously. Caro relates how he was jeered as “Cornpone” by snobbish Kennedy elitists, whose Ivy League credentials Johnson could never match. They needed him as running mate to unlock the South in 1960 and get Kennedy the Presidency, but many of them didn’t like him and let him know it.
Caro expertly works this into an underdog story. Even as he tells of Johnson’s corrupt dealings as the hidden boss of an Austin television station (owned in name by his wife, Lady Bird), Caro elicits a degree of sympathy for his subject by detailing the ways Bobby and others pricked his ego, literally at one event when an LBJ voodoo doll was brought out.
So you are almost primed for a comeuppance, which is what happens after Johnson allows for a period of mourning, wasting little time letting Bobby know which president he works for now.
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| Relations between Bobby and Lyndon were visibly tense even while Bobby's brother was still in the picture. "He lies even when he doesn't have to lie," was the younger Kennedy's verdict on the vice president. Image from https://twitter.com/beschlossdc/status/1150265367392083968 |
“He couldn’t bear to think of him sitting in his brother’s place, a satyr to Hyperion,” Caro writes of Bobby.
A drawback to Passage Of Power is Caro’s self-regard does get in the way. He is often quoting from his other three books, sometimes for very long stretches. In other places, he raises a question only to add it must be answered his next work, presumably arriving on Amazon sometime in 2028 (Caro started this project in 1982 and averages a book a decade; reportedly he will go to Vietnam for research when COVID-19 ends.)
Caro is also become a bit of a shill for the establishment view of things. That is not to say he hasn’t done his homework, he just has rooting interests. He paints Republicans as villains and praises the Warren Commission not for getting at the truth of the Kennedy murder, but for deflecting public blame long enough to avert global war. An annoying Peggy Noonan-ish habit for perorations has grown, too. Objectivity is not that important when the writing is this good, though.
Ultimately, Passage Of Power is
a solid, skillful tome that adds nuance and zest to Caro’s portrait of Johnson,
and makes me hopeful that at 86 as of this writing, he has enough gas in the
tank for another volume. He still knows how to tell a story.
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