The Passage of Power

Among other slights, LBJ humiliated Robert Kennedy when the former reigned as majority leader and the latter served as a Senate aide. Later, the men feuded as Robert Kennedy sought to renounce the offer of the vice presidency extended to Johnson at the 1960 convention. Caro makes a persuasive case that such a move would have devastated the campaign. Without Johnson and his ability to sway Texas and other Southern states, Republican Richard Nixon would likely have become president in 1960.

None of that resonated with the new attorney general, who enjoyed repaying Johnson with all manner of slights in the vice presidency. Caro dubs the back-and-forth animosity, destined to take yet another turn when John Kennedy dies, “one of the great blood feuds in American political history.”

Despite more than 30 years spent researching and writing thousands of pages about every aspect of Johnson’s career and life (with at least one more entry remaining), Caro maintains a balanced perspective. He hammers Johnson and praises him when merited, all without falling into the biographer’s trap of celebrating too much of one or the other and remaining vigilant to his subject’s blend of outsized traits on both ends of the spectrum. LBJ, much like Robert Kennedy, can be cruel and ruthless, only to pivot into breathtaking acts of empathy and graciousness. Caro never lets his subject charm him beyond clear-eyed assessment, at one point reminding readers (and himself): “Ruthlessness, secretiveness, deceit – significant elements in every previous stage of Lyndon Johnson’s life story.” And, as we all know, few people change much, if at all.

Caro long ago mastered his subject – Johnson and power – the way LBJ gleaned all he could in political calculation. Thus, when the historian describes how and why Johnson responded to the ultimate challenge of replacing a slain, beloved president, he has all of the telling anecdotes, feuds, strokes of legislative genius, and both the bullying and the charm of his subject at the ready.

Context counts for everything when it comes to analyzing Johnson’s plight in November 1963. The deadlines and intractable problems LBJ inherited when Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy in Dallas included:
 
 •Making decisions on and finalizing a new federal budget due in two months. That would be difficult enough, but was exacerbated by the fact that Kennedy and the cabinet had excluded LBJ from the decision-making and planning in prior weeks and months, leaving the new president to start from scratch. Here, as in other circumstances, Johnson’s extensive and encyclopedic understanding of how Washington works, a product of his decades in Congress and the Senate, made him perhaps the only man capable of handling the task.
 
 •Persuading the Kennedy men to remain part of the White House and, in turn, continue their fallen president’s work. Johnson had to retain these men who had ignored and scorned him and thought him beneath the office. If they left in droves, as many expected, LBJ could never hope to gain credibility with Congress or the nation as a whole. (Said one JFK admirer in the aftermath of the assassination: “A Texas murder had put a Texan in power.”) Defying the odds, he pleaded, cajoled, and played on the vanities of Ted Sorensen, Robert McNamara, and others to keep the cabinet intact.
 
 •Convincing the liberal faction of the Democratic party, the wing that would determine the next nomination, of his commitment to Civil Rights. As a Texan and Southerner, and the driving force behind two watered-down Civil Rights bills, Johnson remained suspect in the eyes of many. Self-interest in the form of political angling, combined with a passion for equality eventually praised by the likes of activists Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, among others, propelled Johnson to adamantly go farther than Kennedy would have.

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