December 8, 2012
Book Review: Robert A. Caro's 'The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson'
by David Greenberg (05-01-12)The Washington Post
When Robert A. Caro published "Master of a Senate" (2002), a third volume of his voluminous multi-part life of Lyndon B. Johnson, he said he would finish his labors with usually a single some-more installment. But obviously he wasn't being realistic.
"Master of a Senate" resolved in 1958. It left inexperienced a 1960 campaign, a clamp presidential years as well as a whole of Johnson's presidency a Civil Rights Act, a Great Society, Vietnam. Moreover, Caro is not usually partial to written economy. His books have been famous, or infamous, for regulating upon openly not usually because of a sheer mass of his research though additionally because of his overflowing literary style.
Caro strives for a epic. He will make a book, or chapter, or version as prolonged as it has to be to grasp his preferred outcome elongating even a singular sentence, if necessary, as well as then stitching it together with a passel of colons, semicolons as well as dashes, as if scooped by a handful from his handyman's belt. (No consternation he as well as his longtime editor have been well known to quarrel over punctuation.) Given all this, if a 1957 polite rights check used up some-more than 150 pages of Volume 3, how could a ancestral 1964 check weigh in during anything less?
Sure enough, Caro's fourth volume, "The Passage of Power," doesn't finish a tale of Johnson's presidency. On a contrary, it barely begins it. The book opens in a rump years of a Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, with our hero or should which be antihero? considering a presidential run. It chugs by a grand road of John F. Kennedy's reign, with LBJ sulking upon a sidelines. And it ends in a first weeks of Johnson's presidency, which has been thrust upon him by JFK's assassination.
Although these are, for Johnson, years of relations inaction, Caro infuses his pages with suspense, pathos, sour rivalry as well as ancestral import with Robert F. Kennedy in sold emerging as a scarcely co-equal, second lead in a psychodrama, regularly looming offstage as well as melancholy often to take a spotlight from his arch rival.
In Caro's account, LBJ comes across by turns as insecure, canny, bighearted, self-defeating, 
petty, brilliant, vicious and, of course, domineering. In a opening pages, he longingly eyes a presidency but, psychologically paralyzed, can't move himself to declare his candidacy or enter even a couple of primaries. Instead, he rages during a upstart Kennedy, who shows unforeseen proficiency in a aged game of locking down governors as well as state Democratic Party leaders for a convention as well as in a new game of winning over a rank as well as file around television.
When Kennedy claims a party's mantle in Los Angeles as well as searches for a regulating mate, a opposite Johnson unexpected appears: calculating, cagey, able of subsuming his contempt for Kennedy to a steely enterprise to place himself next in line for a presidency. LBJ has staff members look up how most presidents had died in office as well as then does a vicious math, admitting in most conversatio! ns as w ell as Caro recounts several of them which such a track is his best hope of apropos president himself.
With a clamp presidential years, Caro unveils still an additional LBJ: ill-tempered, self-pitying as well as feckless even in his aged Senate back yard. JFK cuts him out of vital decisions, as well as RFK (left) regularly humiliates him (sometimes, Caro suggests, during his brother's bidding). At a single party, he sticks pins in to an LBJ spell doll to most laughter. The young, urbane White House staff members gibe a folksy Texan as "Rufus Cornpone."
For a while, Johnson seems determined to dutifully fool around his rude part. But a slights as well as frustrations mount, as well as his skin is usually too thin. One poignant stage features Johnson, in his bathrobe, interrupting a director of his Texas ranch, who is milking a cow, to fool around dominoes during 4 a.m. By mid-1963, what is obviously clinical basin takes a earthy toll. Johnson's "belly [had become] enormous," recalled his help Harry McPherson. "He looked absolutely gross." Caro goes so far as to suggest which Kennedy was formulation to drop Johnson from a sheet in 1964, although he has usually a single unsubstantiated recollection, from Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary, to await which claim, against a majority of evidence upon a alternative side.
But a single some-more change is yet to come. When Kennedy is shot in a Dallas motorcade, Johnson is remade again in an instant, according to Caro. Facedown upon a floor of his car, a Secret Service member's feet planted in his back, Johnson is magically hexed by self-assured calm. Rising to a measureless hurdles before him, he guides a nation with a clever hand by a dim days of Nov regulating Kennedy's martyrdom to realize his slain predecessor's unfulfilled agenda, although not bu! t exacer bating already-miserable relations with Robert Kennedy.
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