Matt's Reviews > The Passage of Power

Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson might be the great historical project of our time. These days, publishers seem to prefer everything to be contained in one volume. Thus, even topics as grand as the Second World War get crammed into a single book. But Robert Caro cannot be contained between two covers. His legendary expansiveness requires the clearing of entire forests. His scope and breadth and novelistic detail hearken back to Gibbon, Sandburg or Foote.

The Passage of Power is the fourth book in The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The first three entries have provided some of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had. The third book in the series – Master of the Senate – is one of the great works of history ever written. (Or so I would humbly submit).

The incredible quality of the preceding volumes, along with the excruciating ten-year wait between book three and book four, have created almost impossible expectations for The Passage of Power. Accordingly, I was ready to be disappointed.

And I was.

To be clear, my disappointment is relative. The Passage of Power is as good as any history book published this year. Taken alone, in a vacuum, it is highly commendable. Moreover, when placed into the project as a whole, it fits seamlessly. However, when you compare Passage to the other individual volumes, I found it lacking.

I had numerous small quibbles, but overall, Passage’s main failing is a surprising one: a lack of space. This is an odd critique for a series that is now past two thousand pages; still, I think it’s apt. Caro needed 1,000 pages to take on LBJ’s years in the Senate. Volume two, Means of Ascent, was only around 400 pages, but it was laser-focused on a single topic: Johnson’s run for U.S. Senate, and his stolen electoral victory over segregationist/crypto-fascist/Texas legend Coke Stevenson.

In The Passage of Power, Caro covers Johnson’s decision not to run for the presidency in 1960; his ascension to the vice-presidency; his role in John F. Kennedy’s election; his time as vice-president (and all the Cuban excitement that entailed); Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas; Johnson becoming president; and finally, LBJ’s grand push to pass a Civil Rights Bill with real teeth. Given the full Caro treatment, Passage needed to be at least as long as Master of the Senate. Instead, all this is shoehorned into a measly 600 pages of text.

This is not enough room for this story to breathe. Caro has famously decided not only to write about LBJ, but about his times. That’s why this endeavor is titled The Years of Lyndon Johnson. As such, Caro has done a remarkable job in earlier volumes at creating the context of Johnson’s world. In volume one, The Path to Power, Caro delivered a masterful chapter on Sam Rayburn that is the best biography ever done on the man. In volume two, Means of Ascent (often noted as the lesser volume in the series), he embarks on a careful prosecutor’s brief that shows how Johnson’s men stole the election from Stevenson. In volume three, Master of the Senate, he includes an entire chapter on Senator Richard Brevard Russell’s inquiry into General Douglas MacArthur’s firing during the Korean War. This had little to do with Johnson, yet was included because it was of Johnson’s day. (And it added greatly to the rich depth of that book).

There is no such generosity in The Passage of Power. Here, the previously-omniscient point-of-view retracts, until we only see what Johnson sees. I don’t know who is to blame. Is it Caro, getting old, running out of steam? Or is it his editor, who (in)famously forced him to remove the Jane Jacobs chapter from The Power Broker, Caro’s mammoth biography of Robert Moses?

In any event, this is a drastically reduced addition to Caro’s saga. With that said, certain segments still rise to the high level to which Caro-fans have become accustomed. To better explain, I’ll briefly go through each of The Passage to Power’s main sections.

Johnson’s Decision Not to Run/Kennedy’s Decision to Pick Johnson as a Running Mate

The opening chapters, covering LBJ’s tortured decision not to seek the presidency in 1960, as well as his choice to be Kennedy’s running mate, is vintage Caro. The historian Michael Beschloss has called Caro an “interpretative” biographer, and though I’m not entirely sure Beschloss meant this as a compliment, the term is apt.

Most biographers take a dry, academic approach to their subjects. They tell you exactly what happened and when. Caro is more concerned with why. Moreover, he is one of the few (and brave) biographers willing to seek the human dimension in historical settings. His portrait of Johnson struggling over whether to seek the Democratic nomination builds upon the work he did in his earlier volumes, carefully assembling LBJ’s character from his extremely humble roots to his entrance into the corridors of power. When Caro delivers his verdict, you believe him, because you believe he has found the essence of Johnson’s being.

Unfortunately, part of this section’s “vintage” comes from the fact that Caro relies heavily on his previous work. By this, I mean he literally quotes himself in long block passages from earlier books. I don’t mind an author referencing himself, but in this case, I found the manner of recycling employed by Caro to be extremely awkward. Furthermore, his greatest hits selection only served to remind me that The Passage to Power is a bit of a shadow of Caro’s former entries.

Things get a bit better when it comes to the Los Angeles Convention. Caro is renowned as a researcher, the guy who turns every last page. Even though the JFK/RFK/LBJ clusterf**k has been well-documented, I appreciated Caro’s exacting approach, in which he sets out every recollection and comes to a considered opinion as to what most closely approximates the truth.

Johnson the Vice President

I had mixed feelings on the treatment of LBJ as Kennedy’s vice-president. On the one hand, I appreciate Caro finally showing a bit of sympathy for his subject. Unique among biographers, Caro has managed to maintain a fairly persistent disdain for Lyndon Johnson, even to the extent that he amplified the virtues of the distasteful Coke Stevenson to Johnson’s detriment (causing a minor academic kerfuffle upon the publication of Means of Ascent).

Caro nicely dramatizes Johnson’s remarkable fall from the unrivaled “master of the Senate” to marginalized Vice-President, mocked and derided by the “best and the brightest” of the New Frontier. (The smug, condescending likes of Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, and Dave Powers derided him as “Rufus Cornpone.” Of course, had they taken a pause from reminiscing about Boston Common, Harvard Yard, and yachting sweaters, and asked the most famous alum of Southwest Texas State Teachers College a few questions, they might actually have passed some legislation).

My problem, though, is that the events of the Kennedy Presidency – ostensibly occurring during the “years of Lyndon Johnson” – are given a cursory treatment. In Means of Ascent, Caro devotes nearly an entire book to proving that Lyndon Johnson stole an election. In Passage, he levies the same charge – voter fraud – against Johnson and his Texas compatriots. Here, though, he only gives the subject about three pages. In The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, Caro expends an extraordinary amount of energy describing Johnson’s superhuman campaign efforts. Here, in detailing LBJ’s important contribution to Kennedy’s 1960 election, there is only one short chapter.

Big, momentous events, such as the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, are handled expeditiously. Yes – I understand that these are well-trod historical pathways. But this is Caro! I don’t want expeditious. I want detailed. I want long-winded. I want page-long paragraphs with a half dozen semicolons. I want these burnished historical moments brought to me by an author I have come to see as inimitable. That LBJ didn't play a huge role in these events is not the point; the point is that Caro (or his editor) has decided to withdraw from the epic stage that has already been set, as though this is a Hollywood movie gone way over-budget.

In other words, in many places, The Passage to Power plays as a shadow or echo of former books.

Four Bloody Days in November

Caro takes 5 chapters – and less than 100 pages – to cover what William Manchester famously belabored in his 674-page The Death of a President. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas by Castro the Mob the CIA the FBI the Secret Service the Soviet Union the U.S. Military Lyndon Johnson some combination of all of these Lee Harvey Oswald is told strictly from LBJ’s perspective from his limousine.

Despite the brevity of the coverage, Caro does a good job of making his ultimate point: that Lyndon Johnson was placed into an absolutely untenable position vis-à-vis the Kennedys. Even though he Constitutionally became acting president the moment Oswald’s first bullet punched through JFK’s neck, and ascended the Presidency in the instant the top of Kennedy’s head blew off from the force of a beveling bullet fired from the Texas School Book Depository, Johnson had to walk a tightrope: if he took power too swiftly, the New Frontier would recoil in distaste; if he took power too slowly, America would look weak and shiftless in the midst of the Cold War.

During this section, it is instructive to have read The Death of a President. Manchester was a Kennedy worshipper, and though he toned down criticism of LBJ (since his book was published in the midst of Bobby’s push for the Executive Office), he could barely find a kind word for Johnson (the closest he comes is “complicated”). The Death of a President presents a rough-edged, uncouth LBJ, blundering about with his hangdog face and big ears, committing such faux pas as deigning to fly back to Washington in Air Force One. Caro provides a nice corrective, helpfully reminding Kennedy worshippers that the United States Presidency is not hereditary (though it sometimes feels that way) and that Johnson was not obligated to clear every move with Robert F. Kennedy.

The huge trouble I had with this section is Caro’s handling of the conspiracy theories swirling around Kennedy’s death. And by “handling,” I mean how Caro ignores the subject altogether. To be sure, he does fill almost a single page in his conclusion that LBJ had nothing to do with the assassination because Caro didn’t find any evidence of it in his research. That’s fine. This isn’t the time or place to be dealing with the clinically paranoid charlatans conspiracy enthusiasts who just can’t cotton to the simplest, most reasonable explanation. However, if Caro doesn’t believe that LBJ played any role, it was completely irresponsible of him to intercut the scenes of Kennedy and Johnson in Dallas with the simultaneously-occurring Washington hearings on the Bobby Baker scandal. Frankly, Caro spliced this sequence together like Oliver Stone, and it left a really foul taste in my mouth.

To Exercise Power, One Must Show True Greatness

The best part of The Passage to Power, the pages that closest resemble the glorious heights of earlier volumes, is Caro’s description of the way Johnson grasped the power he’d pursued so long. In doing so, we come to a very important truth: that the true measure of a man is not how he gains power, but in how he uses it. Robert Caro has often been incredibly hard on his subject, but there is no denying that when LBJ got the power in his hands, he used it in ways that are profoundly moving, even to this day.

Using this rare historical moment, Johnson – starting with his post-assassination address to Congress – took Kennedy’s stalled Civil Rights legislation and, using tactics he perfected as one of the great Senate leaders in history, broke down the dam:

"We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

Caro chooses (or if forced) to go into less depth in his description of Johnson’s backroom dealings than he did in Master of the Senate. Still, this is an inspiring, detailed story of how power can be used for an absolute good.

When it comes to Caro, I am hardly unbiased.

Shortly before my wedding, my good friend Jake wrote to Caro, asking him to send me a congratulatory letter. Caro obliged on his heavy-stock letterhead. I’m staring at the letter – in glass – as I write. In short, I think he’s the best biographer ever in the history of the known universe. If I could hang his poster over my bed, I would.

Thus, if my feelings on The Passage to Power seem lukewarm, it is all relative. This book is only a comedown from previous entries, which had set the bar exceedingly high. Still, I hope for a return to form in the next, concluding volume. It needs to be a thousand pages long and cover in detail all the major events of the Johnson presidency.

And it needs to end with the man who’d spent his whole life scheming, working, and cheating his way to power finally voluntarily giving up the most powerful office on earth.