Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power" Brett Warnke Review for Providence Journal

By BRETT WARNKE

Robert Caro’s massive trilogy of biographies on Lyndon Johnson is unfinished.  Yet, the follow-up to this masterful book will not come soon enough.  After a generation of tax cuts and deregulation punctuated by Congressional deadlock, Lyndon Johnson’s legacy demands scrutiny, especially by those who still believe in the relevance of the public sphere.  How did a modern President accomplish so much and so swiftly?  And what was bred in Johnson’s bones that allowed him to self-destruct with equal haste?  Johnson’s tragic commitment to Vietnam will forever disfigure his legacy—the millions dead, the environmental devastation, the financial waste, the deferred dream of the Great Society—but his domestic legislative accomplishments, which Caro so brilliantly explores in this volume which covers 1960-64, can be fitted within the presidential top tier.  

As Vice President, Johnson was ignored and ultimately outflanked by his nemesis, Robert Kennedy.  The one-time Majority Leader Johnson had been called the “master of the Senate,” but as a Vice President who had won Kennedy Texas (and therefore the election of 1960) had so little clout that he was not even told about the backroom deal that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis!  VP Johnson felt his career had short-circuited by 1962.  But Kennedy’s assassination and the seamless transition of power showed Johnson’s administrative savvy and a command of the details. 

“I do understand power,” he once told an aide, “Whatever else may be said about me…I know where to look for it, and how to use it.”  Caro vividly captures Johnson’s contempt for the kiss-up cabal, those worshipers at the altar of Camelot, who would spend a generation hooking every one of Johnson’s legislative successes to Kennedy’s unimpressive two years.  And Caro’s seemingly endless narrative engagingly explores little-remembered figures like the segregationist and reactionary, Senator Harry Byrd, who set the fiscal terms through which Johnson would accomplish his seminal legislative triumph, The Voting Rights Act of 1964.  Caro’s Johnson is difficult to love; he is petty, pouty, and vacillates to the point of inaction in some scenes.  But Johnson’s hatred of poverty, a condition he witnessed in the Texas hill country, allowed him his most useful gift:  The ability to differentiate between the little guy and the small man.  Johnson’s legislative commitment to fairness and results-driven programs (like the little-praised community action and Fair Housing Act of 1968) allow us to still feel the impact of this man’s mighty legacy.