The Passage of Power

The Passage of Power is Robert A. Caro's fourth of five volumes of the life and times of Lyndon Johnson. It is one of American publishing most significant ongoing stories, some thirty-plus years in the making. I haven't read the first three volumes, but this one gets to the juicy part. It covers five years in Johnson's life: his run, such as it was, for the presidency in 1960, his selection as vice-presidential candidate by John F. Kennedy, his election to the same, his dispiriting term as vice president, and his succession as president on the death of President Kennedy. The book ends seven weeks into Johnson's presidency, with his State of the Union address, which launched the war on poverty.

All told there will be about five-thousand pages in Caro's biography, and Johnson deserves it, as he is one of the most fascinating men in American politics. The book refers back to some of the earlier volumes on Johnson's youth and beginning in politics, namely that he planned on being president when he was a teenager. Caro, as he did in his book on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, is interested in power--it's acquisition and uses, and Johnson, perhaps more than any other president, specialized in that. He was a master manipulator in the Senate, and then as President. The one black hole in that history is his three years as vice president.

The book begins with Johnson's foray into the presidency. In 1958 he was Senate majority leader, one of the most powerful men ever to hold that office. He seemed poised to be a natural candidate for the Democratic nomination. But Caro points out two flaws in the plan--Johnson vastly underestimated John F. Kennedy, and he didn't campaign. He entered no primaries, and resolutely said he wasn't running, all the while waiting to be approached as the consensus candidate.

 "All through 1958, Johnson wavered between his yearning for the prize and his fear of being seen to yearn for it," Caro writes. Johnson, because of the business failure of his father, had a deep fear of failure. If he didn't try, he couldn't fail. Fascinating stuff for a man who reached such a pinnacle of success.

Of course Johnson didn't win the nomination, Kennedy did, and Caro paints a fascinating portrayal of the process of the selection for vice president. Caro writes of how Kennedy and his brother, Bobby (who hated Johnson, and vice versa--their rivalry was a bitter and vicious one) climbing the back stairs of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to Johnson's suite. Bobby Kennedy tried to talk Jack out of giving it to LBJ, but Jack stuck with it. He knew what Johnson could do--give him Texas. Caro points out that the 1960 razor-thin election results usually focus on Illinois and the shenanigans there, but Texas and its voting irregularities are perhaps more suspicious.

"Since rumors and the reports of rumors, confusion and conflicting stories, are a staple of all political conventions, the questions surrounding Lyndon Johnson's acceptance of John F. Kennedy's offer to be his Vice President, and Kennedy's decision to make (or not make) the offer to him, might not warrant as much consideration--so much effort to resolve them--as they have, for decades, been given, except that, because of November 22, 1963, the events of that long afternoon in 1960 were to affect so profoundly the course of American history."

Johnson was miserable as vice president. He attempted to make the office more powerful, but was shot down by the Senate, the body he had just left, which was painful to him. He retreated like a wounded animal, pledging his loyalty to Kennedy but spent much of the time in a prolonged sulk. He was called "Rufus Cornpone" by Kennedy's best and brightest, and the joke around Georgetown was, "Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?"

Caro then, almost moment by moment, presents the trip to Dallas. It reads like a thriller. Johnson in a trailing car, the sound of the shots, the secret service agent throwing himself on Johnson, the trip to the hospital, where Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, awaited the news. When Kennedy aide Ken O'Donnell came into the cubicle where the Johnsons were waiting, stating, "He's gone," and moments later Johnson was called Mr. President for the first time, an amazing transformation came over him. "He looked, in fact, for the first time in three years, like the Lyndon Johnson of the Senate floor. Now he had suddenly come to the very pinnacle of power. However he had gotten there, whatever concatenation of circumstance and tragedy--whatever fate--had put him there, he was there, and he knew what to do there."

There is a long section on what happened next, as Johnson was whisked under guard to Air Force One. It was debated whether he should fly back to Washington to take the oath, but he wanted to do on the ground in the plane, and to have Mrs. Kennedy there. Caro recounts the bizarre phone call he had with Robert Kennedy, reeling with grief, as Johnson asked him about the protocol of taking the oath. Kennedy was Attorney General, but he could have asked anyone--why bother him at this time? A few nuggets of information are available--present on the plane at the time were eventual Johnson aides Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti, who was later the president of the MPAA and can be seen in the famous picture of Johnson being sworn in, the former First Lady at his side.

The remainder of the book isn't quite as gripping, as it gets into inside baseball. Johnson managed to retain all of Kennedy's cabinet, as well as key aides Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen. He worked hard to push through bills, using his connections to senators like Harry Byrd and Richard Russell (who were out and out racists). Johnson, who was viewed with scorn and suspicion in 1960 by northern liberals and blacks, would eventually be a big champion of civil rights, and would push through the landmark Civil Rights Act. Caro writes, "Strong as was Lyndon Johnson's compassion for the poor, particularly poor people of color, his deep, genuine desire to help them had always been subordinated to his ambition; whenever they had been in conflict, it had been compassion that went to the wall. When they had both been pointing in the same direction, however--when the compassion had been unleashed from ambition's checkrein--then not only Lyndon Johnson but the cause of social justice in America had moved forward under the direction of this master at transmuting sympathy into governmental action."

The next, and presumably last, volume, will cover Johnson's presidency. Vietnam, which will undoubtedly dominate, had hardly a mention in The Passage of Power.