Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Passage of Power

They said well, you love biography but you never read Robert Caro? So the very last time I was in Waterstones (when will you reopen, my oasis?) I saw they had all of Caro’s vast 4 volumes (& the world waiting for the fifth) of Lyndon Johnson, and he is my second favourite US president, such a fascinating character, so I got the first volume and jumped in and read 70 pages – it was brilliant.
And it seems that Mr Caro is the greatest of the biographers-who-hated-their-subjects. Well, he described LBJ as having

A hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will… a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself – or to anyone else – could stand before it

During his early political career LBJ had

a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal

And this kind of stood out for me – there was an early election in his career

Johnson still behind by a few votes… Jim Wells Country suddenly announced that its return had somehow not been counted, and the two hundred new votes for Johnson from this precinct – votes cast by people who had all written their names in the same ink, in the same handwriting, and who had voted in alphabetical order – gave Johnson the lead in an election he won by 87 votes.

Now being a very impatient kind of reader I wanted to skip to the good bits. In the case of LBJ that was the massive drama of 1963 and what followed. So I ditched the first volume and got a copy of volume 4. This goes from 1959 to January 1964.

HOW TO READ ROBERT CARO

First, it doesn’t matter which volume you pick up. I never met an author who was so happy to repeat himself – but in this case it’s a good thing. Caro does not expect you to have earnestly ploughed through (and remembered) his every word in chronological order. So he quotes himself from earlier volumes frequently to remind you about older stuff. He circles in the air, he backtracks, he waits for everyone to get on the bus before driving onwards. It’s a great technique.

Second, for all his beautiful clarity and patience with his readers, Caro is deadly serious and when he describes how LBJ got a bill through the Senate in the teeth of conservative opposition, he is going to take 30 pages of granular hair-tearing detail to do it. This is 29 pages more than your average reader can take. So a LOT of the pages of this biography will be …er…. will be…. can I say this?... hmmm… skippable! Yes! I think Caro fans will already be taking a contract out on me, but I can provide evidence.

It's possible that some readers of the flimsier variety like me will wish to jump over sentences like this one :

His solution would require two far-from-routine rulings from the committee chairman, rulings that would in fact fly in the face of the committee’s vote that morning : first, that the Dirksen amendment could be brought back that afternoon and voted on again; and second, that it be brought back by a motion that lumped in with it all remaining amendments before the committee, even those that had not yet been debated, so that a single vote by the committee – a vote to defeat the Dirksen amendment – would be a vote to defeat all the remaining amendments as well, thereby concluding the committee’s work on the tax cut bill and removing the last obstacle to its release to the Senate floor.

One sentence. There are lots more like that. For American politics students, this is like hardcore porn. You see everything, I mean, everything. For the other 99.99% of us, hmm, these pages can be a slog and you know what, you get the sense of what was going on even if you don’t follow the precise rules of compound motions to the floor in the Senate in 1963. Whole pages can be skipped. Don’t look at me like that, they can.

WHY LBJ?

He’s Shakespearean. In his great story you can see scenes from Coriolanus, Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear and Julius Caesar. Not so much the comedies.

This guy came from the back of beyond, with poor education, and he used every crooked device to get himself into the Senate, and he used every crooked device to make himself Senate Majority Leader, and then found he was really good at it, then came 1960.

He wanted to be president, he had been working his 16 hour days, he was in charge of legislation, he was “the second most powerful politician in the country”, and he had a big problem.
Could a guy from the South become president?

Here’s where you run into American prejudice, which is not obvious from a British point of view. Everyone knows about racial prejudice, but we’re talking about white-on-white hatred here. A century after the Civil War it appears, in the 1950s and 60s, Americans from the Northern states still feared and distrusted the South, and vice versa. So no Southerner had been president for one hundred years. LBJ wanted to be the next guy from the south in the White House. But there was another problem.

Kennedy.

LBJ figured Kennedy was a do-nothing lazy-ass playboy whose daddy had bought him a senate seat and who was mostly absent from Senate sessions and who never introduced any legislation, and so who cared about him.

But as soon as JFK woke up and decided to run for President, everything changed. It was like someone switched on the light all over America. LBJ was in denial, all through 1960. Then when the Democratic convention happened, he did some head counting, and he realised Kennedy had the whole thing sewn up. That smile had charmed the birds right out of the American air.
LBJ could have stayed Senate Majority Leader, second most powerful man in the country. Instead he decided to run with Kennedy and be his Veep if Kennedy won. As every child of five knows, the Vice President is a joke, does nothing, says nothing of any consequence. Why did he do it? From 1960 to 1963 LBJ became Uncle Cornpone, the contemptuous name given to him by the glittering brains of the Kennedy cabinet. He was the stooge from Texas, the useful guy who got Kennedy some essential votes from the southern states, and could now be safely stowed away until 1964. LBJ went from hero to zero so fast he got a nosebleed.

Why did he do it?

He had made a calculation, which is frankly chilling. One part of his mind saw that he could be the candidate in 1968 when JFK had had his 8 years – fair enough. But another part of his mind saw that seven previous presidents had died in office.

So LBJ taking this stupid nothing Veep position was a gamble.

Enter stage left : Lee Harvey Oswald.

A REMARKABLE TRANSFORMATION

It is fantastic to see how a guy who seemed all his life to be a block to social progress, a typical Southern politician really, threw off the ugly carapace and emerged as the reforming president who passed the Civil Rights bill and declared war on poverty.
One old Kennedy cabinet member wrote in 1978 :

For all his towering ego, his devastating instinct for the weakness of others, his unlimited capacity for self-pity, he was at the same time a man of brilliant intelligence, authentic social passion and deep seriousness.

This is such a great story. Now I have to go back to volume one, and also hope Robert Caro stays alive long enough to finish volume five. He’s 84.