Passage of Power by Robert Caro (1 Viewer)

[Combat]

The fourth book in Caro's LBJ series will be released next week. These are unsurpassed histories of LBJ and American politics.

Caro’s Pulitzer-winning multivolume biography reaches a magisterial climax (though not its Vietnam era denouement) in this riveting account of Johnson’s vice-presidency in the Kennedy administration and early presidency through 1964. It’s a roller-coaster narrative as Johnson plummets from the powerful Senate majority leader post to vice-presidential irrelevance, hated and humiliated by the Kennedy brothers, then surges to presidential authority with the crack of Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle and forces a revolutionary civil rights act through a recalcitrant Congress. Caro’s penetrating study of competing power modes pits Kennedyesque charisma against Johnson’s brilliant parliamentary street-fighting, backroom arm-twisting, and canny manipulation of personal motives, all made vivid by rich profiles: JFK, the polished, amused aristocrat; Bobby, the brutal, guilt-haunted zealot; Johnson, the uncouth neurotic—egomaniacal, insecure, sycophantic as an underling, sadistic as a boss, ruthless and corrupt yet possessed of an empathy for the downtrodden (he picked cotton in his penniless youth) that outshines Camelot’s noblesse oblige. The author’s Shakespearean view of power—all court intrigue, pageantry, and warring psychological drives—barely acknowledges the social movements that made possible Johnson’s legislative triumphs. But Caro’s ugly, tormented, heroic Johnson makes an apt embodiment of an America struggling toward epochal change, one with a fascinating resonance in our era of gridlocked government and paralyzed leadership.

 

[jazzeum]

I'm looking forward to this. There was an excerpt recently in the New Yorker and a profile in the Times' Sunday magazine. I read the first two books but never got around to reading to Master of the Senate so I am reading it now. I will probably pick up the Passage of Power later this summer.

The first two books were positively brilliant, with his look at the Hill Country where LBJ grew up a fantastic piece of writing.

I would also recommend his Power Broker about Robert Moses and how he used power to build New York. An absolutely fantastic look at the use and abuses of political power.

 

[Combat]

I'm about 100 pages into this book and can't recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in this era. There are many themes here including how power is obtained and used in American politics, but the interaction of personalities and political interests in forming history is most fascinating to me. The story of how JFK picked LBJ to be his VP and the effort of Robert Kennedy, who hated Johnson, to derail that process is great stuff. Particularly when you consider the implications that LBJ would become President and make the decisions involving the "Great Society" and conduct of the Vietnam war. It's a chain of small decisions that leads to events that would implicate the lives of millions. And it easily could have gone a different direction. Most expected LBJ would have declined and remained in the Senate. But LBJ realized that, as a Southern, he might never get a chance to become President by remaining in the Senate. Only with national exposure would he have a chance. And nearing 60 he was concerned his opportunities were running out. JFK needed to win the south and LBJ was his best choice. At only 43 JFK never considered the possibility that he might die in office and be picking the next President. He was concerned solely with winning the election. An interesting tidbit is that before accepting LBJ asked his staff to look up how many VPs became President and how many Presidents had died while in office. The odds were something like one in six at the time. He considered those better than staying in the senate and running in '64 or '68. A bit of cold blooded calculating that paid off for him.