01-05-2012, 07:05 AM
The New York Times
April 29, 2012
A Nation's Best and Worst, Forged in a Crucible
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE PASSAGE OF POWER
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
By Robert A. Caro
Illustrated. 712 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
.
On Nov. 22, 1963, when he was told that John F. Kennedy was dead, and that he was now president, Lyndon B. Johnson later recalled, "I was a man in trouble, in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe."
He said he realized that "ready or not, new and immeasurable duties had been thrust upon" him and that he could not allow himself to be overwhelmed by emotion: "It was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous. The nation was in a state of shock and grief. The times cried out for leadership. ... The entire world was watching us through a magnifying glass. ... I had to prove myself."
At the heart of "The Passage of Power," the latest installment of Robert A. Caro's magisterial biography of Johnson, is the story of how he was catapulted to the White House in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, how he steadied and reassured a shell-shocked nation, and how he used his potent political skills and the momentum generated by Kennedy's death to push through Congress his predecessor's stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation and to lay the groundwork for his own revolutionary "war on poverty."
It's a breathtakingly dramatic story about a pivotal moment in United States history, and just as Johnson used his accumulated knowledge of the art of power to push the nation along the path he'd envisioned, so in these pages does Mr. Caro use the intimate knowledge of Johnson he's acquired over 36 years to tell that story with consummate artistry and ardor, demonstrating a tirelessness in his interviewing and dissection of voluminous archives that rivals his subject's.
This engrossing volume (spanning 1958 to 1964) is the fourth and presumably penultimate volume in a series that began with "The Path to Power," published back in 1982, and it showcases Mr. Caro's masterly gifts as a writer: his propulsive sense of narrative, his talent for enabling readers to see and feel history in the making and his ability to situate his subjects' actions within the context of their times. Of all the chapters in Johnson's life, this is the one most familiar to most readers, but Mr. Caro manages to lend even much-chronicled events, like the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination, a punch of tactile immediacy.
The first and second installments of Mr. Caro's biography of Johnson could be gratingly Manichaean and moralistic, portraying him in judgmental and almost unremittingly negative terms as a ruthless, Machiavellian and power-hungry pol. This volume creates a more measured portrait. In these pages Johnson emerges as both a larger-than-life, Shakespearean personage with epic ambition and epic flaws and a more human-scale puzzle: needy, deceitful, brilliant, cruel, vulgar, idealistic, boastful, self-pitying and blessed with such titanic energy that Abe Fortas once remarked, "The guy's just got extra glands."
He was a man driven by a colossal ego and a genuine sense of compassion for the powerless and the poor: a man who, in the weeks and months after the assassination, was able, in Mr. Caro's opinion, to overcome his own weaknesses and baser instincts not for long but "long enough" to act in a fashion that was "a triumph not only of genius but of will."
As he did in the third volume, "Master of the Senate," Mr. Caro finds much to admire in the legislative ends to which Johnson used power, and he employs his insights into Johnson's personality his insecurities, his fear of failure, his need to ingratiate himself with those above him and dominate those below to examine the role that character plays in politics and policy making and hence in history.
Taken together the installments of Mr. Caro's monumental life of Johnson so far not only create a minutely detailed picture of an immensely complicated and conflicted individual, but they also form a revealing prism by which to view the better part of a century in American life and politics during which the country experienced tumultuous and divisive social change. Even as Johnson journeyed from the isolation and poverty of the Texas Hill Country to the corridors of power in Washington, the country evolved, in the course of his lifetime, from an isolationist nation with segregated schools and lunch counters into a cold war power that had landed a man on the Moon and was deep in the throes of a cultural revolution.
Mr. Caro shows how Johnson's impoverished childhood and modest education fueled his sense of inferiority and class resentment vis-Ã -vis the Kennedys and how it stoked his rage for social justice. He also explores how the enmity between Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy which he goes so far as to call "perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the 20th century" informed Johnson's relationship with President Kennedy and cast a shadow over his own presidency, causing him to worry that Robert Kennedy might run against him in 1968 or even contest his right to the Democratic nomination in 1964.
Other historians, like Robert Dallek, the author of a two-volume biography of Johnson, have suggested that Johnson's tendency to regard Vietnam as a personal test of his judgment combined with his perennial need to win and reluctance to become "the first American president to lose a war" contributed to his tragic mishandling of that conflict. Mr. Caro largely defers such assessments to what will be the next installment of his biography, which will deal with the escalation of the war and the ways in which the quagmire in Southeast Asia would undermine Johnson's presidency and his dreams of building a Great Society.
What Mr. Caro does say in these pages about Johnson and his early decisions on Vietnam (like not implementing a planned draw-down of forces) is that "the steps he took had, as their unifying principle, an objective dictated largely by domestic indeed, personal political concerns."
Although the account here of Johnson's tortured relationship with Robert Kennedy owes a decided debt to Jeff Shesol's compelling 1997 book "Mutual Contempt," Mr. Caro does a gripping (if still hole-ridden) job of recreating the much-debated events of July 14, 1960, when Robert Kennedy tried to maneuver Johnson out of the vice presidential slot on his brother's ticket. And while Mr. Caro's depiction of the miserable three years Johnson spent as vice president sometimes pales next to the bravura portrait of his years in the Senate, which left us with a vivid sense of his powers of prestidigitation in that intimate political arena, he deftly communicates how humiliating this experience was for the former majority leader, now cast to the sidelines by the Kennedys.
Mr. Caro's descriptions of Johnson and those of John and Robert Kennedy have a novelistic depth and amplitude. He gives us a rich sense here of how past experiences shaped their interactions, how one encounter or misunderstanding often snowballed into another, and how Johnson and Robert Kennedy evinced a capacity to grow and change.
Even more impressive in these pages is Mr. Caro's ability to convey, on a visceral level, how daunting the challenges were facing Johnson upon his assumption of the presidency and the magnitude of his accomplishments in the months after Kennedy's assassination.
Johnson had to instill confidence in a confused and aching nation, and he needed to give the world in the midst of a cold war that had turned dangerously hot with the Cuban missile crisis a sense of continuity. To do so he had to persuade key Kennedy administration members (some of whom had mocked him as "Rufus Cornpone" behind his back) to stay on and to rally behind him. He had to take on his many doubters, including skeptical Kennedy courtiers, liberals who questioned his commitment to civil rights and Southerners who sought to block his social initiatives. On top of that he had to prepare a detailed budget and a State of the Union address, laying out his own vision for the United States within two months.
Johnson's knowledge of Congress and the tactical and strategic levers he could press; his personal relationships with power brokers like Harry Byrd and Everett Dirksen; and his bare-knuckled willingness to bully, flatter, cajole, horse-trade, whatever it took to get what he wanted these were the qualities, Mr. Caro observes, that enabled him to overcome "congressional resistance and the power of the South" that had stood "in the path of social justice for a century."
Mr. Caro uses his storytelling gifts to turn seemingly arcane legislative maneuvers into action-movie suspense, and he gives us an unparalleled understanding step by step, sometimes minute by minute of how Johnson used a crisis and his own political acumen to implement his agenda with stunning speed: a test of leadership and governance that political addicts and more casual readers alike will find fascinating, given the gridlock in Washington today.
Commentators who have questioned the sincerity of Johnson's commitment to civil rights, Mr. Caro says, do not understand how deeply he identified with "the dispossessed of the earth." He had worked on a road gang as a kid in the isolated Texas Hill Country and had known the humiliation of his father's failure (a drought and fall in the cotton market left Sam Johnson, who had been a member of the Texas House of Representatives, in debt and a figure of local ridicule). Those experiences would shape Lyndon Johnson's ferocious determination to win "the passage of long-dreamed-of liberal legislation whose purposes," in Mr. Caro's view, "went far beyond any embodied in Kennedy legislation."
Advisers had warned Johnson against antagonizing the Southerners who controlled Congress, Mr. Caro reports in this revealing book, but when one aide told him to his face that a president shouldn't spend his time and power on lost causes, Johnson was quick to reply, "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?"
April 29, 2012
A Nation's Best and Worst, Forged in a Crucible
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE PASSAGE OF POWER
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
By Robert A. Caro
Illustrated. 712 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
.
On Nov. 22, 1963, when he was told that John F. Kennedy was dead, and that he was now president, Lyndon B. Johnson later recalled, "I was a man in trouble, in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe."
He said he realized that "ready or not, new and immeasurable duties had been thrust upon" him and that he could not allow himself to be overwhelmed by emotion: "It was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous. The nation was in a state of shock and grief. The times cried out for leadership. ... The entire world was watching us through a magnifying glass. ... I had to prove myself."
At the heart of "The Passage of Power," the latest installment of Robert A. Caro's magisterial biography of Johnson, is the story of how he was catapulted to the White House in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, how he steadied and reassured a shell-shocked nation, and how he used his potent political skills and the momentum generated by Kennedy's death to push through Congress his predecessor's stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation and to lay the groundwork for his own revolutionary "war on poverty."
It's a breathtakingly dramatic story about a pivotal moment in United States history, and just as Johnson used his accumulated knowledge of the art of power to push the nation along the path he'd envisioned, so in these pages does Mr. Caro use the intimate knowledge of Johnson he's acquired over 36 years to tell that story with consummate artistry and ardor, demonstrating a tirelessness in his interviewing and dissection of voluminous archives that rivals his subject's.
This engrossing volume (spanning 1958 to 1964) is the fourth and presumably penultimate volume in a series that began with "The Path to Power," published back in 1982, and it showcases Mr. Caro's masterly gifts as a writer: his propulsive sense of narrative, his talent for enabling readers to see and feel history in the making and his ability to situate his subjects' actions within the context of their times. Of all the chapters in Johnson's life, this is the one most familiar to most readers, but Mr. Caro manages to lend even much-chronicled events, like the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination, a punch of tactile immediacy.
The first and second installments of Mr. Caro's biography of Johnson could be gratingly Manichaean and moralistic, portraying him in judgmental and almost unremittingly negative terms as a ruthless, Machiavellian and power-hungry pol. This volume creates a more measured portrait. In these pages Johnson emerges as both a larger-than-life, Shakespearean personage with epic ambition and epic flaws and a more human-scale puzzle: needy, deceitful, brilliant, cruel, vulgar, idealistic, boastful, self-pitying and blessed with such titanic energy that Abe Fortas once remarked, "The guy's just got extra glands."
He was a man driven by a colossal ego and a genuine sense of compassion for the powerless and the poor: a man who, in the weeks and months after the assassination, was able, in Mr. Caro's opinion, to overcome his own weaknesses and baser instincts not for long but "long enough" to act in a fashion that was "a triumph not only of genius but of will."
As he did in the third volume, "Master of the Senate," Mr. Caro finds much to admire in the legislative ends to which Johnson used power, and he employs his insights into Johnson's personality his insecurities, his fear of failure, his need to ingratiate himself with those above him and dominate those below to examine the role that character plays in politics and policy making and hence in history.
Taken together the installments of Mr. Caro's monumental life of Johnson so far not only create a minutely detailed picture of an immensely complicated and conflicted individual, but they also form a revealing prism by which to view the better part of a century in American life and politics during which the country experienced tumultuous and divisive social change. Even as Johnson journeyed from the isolation and poverty of the Texas Hill Country to the corridors of power in Washington, the country evolved, in the course of his lifetime, from an isolationist nation with segregated schools and lunch counters into a cold war power that had landed a man on the Moon and was deep in the throes of a cultural revolution.
Mr. Caro shows how Johnson's impoverished childhood and modest education fueled his sense of inferiority and class resentment vis-Ã -vis the Kennedys and how it stoked his rage for social justice. He also explores how the enmity between Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy which he goes so far as to call "perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the 20th century" informed Johnson's relationship with President Kennedy and cast a shadow over his own presidency, causing him to worry that Robert Kennedy might run against him in 1968 or even contest his right to the Democratic nomination in 1964.
Other historians, like Robert Dallek, the author of a two-volume biography of Johnson, have suggested that Johnson's tendency to regard Vietnam as a personal test of his judgment combined with his perennial need to win and reluctance to become "the first American president to lose a war" contributed to his tragic mishandling of that conflict. Mr. Caro largely defers such assessments to what will be the next installment of his biography, which will deal with the escalation of the war and the ways in which the quagmire in Southeast Asia would undermine Johnson's presidency and his dreams of building a Great Society.
What Mr. Caro does say in these pages about Johnson and his early decisions on Vietnam (like not implementing a planned draw-down of forces) is that "the steps he took had, as their unifying principle, an objective dictated largely by domestic indeed, personal political concerns."
Although the account here of Johnson's tortured relationship with Robert Kennedy owes a decided debt to Jeff Shesol's compelling 1997 book "Mutual Contempt," Mr. Caro does a gripping (if still hole-ridden) job of recreating the much-debated events of July 14, 1960, when Robert Kennedy tried to maneuver Johnson out of the vice presidential slot on his brother's ticket. And while Mr. Caro's depiction of the miserable three years Johnson spent as vice president sometimes pales next to the bravura portrait of his years in the Senate, which left us with a vivid sense of his powers of prestidigitation in that intimate political arena, he deftly communicates how humiliating this experience was for the former majority leader, now cast to the sidelines by the Kennedys.
Mr. Caro's descriptions of Johnson and those of John and Robert Kennedy have a novelistic depth and amplitude. He gives us a rich sense here of how past experiences shaped their interactions, how one encounter or misunderstanding often snowballed into another, and how Johnson and Robert Kennedy evinced a capacity to grow and change.
Even more impressive in these pages is Mr. Caro's ability to convey, on a visceral level, how daunting the challenges were facing Johnson upon his assumption of the presidency and the magnitude of his accomplishments in the months after Kennedy's assassination.
Johnson had to instill confidence in a confused and aching nation, and he needed to give the world in the midst of a cold war that had turned dangerously hot with the Cuban missile crisis a sense of continuity. To do so he had to persuade key Kennedy administration members (some of whom had mocked him as "Rufus Cornpone" behind his back) to stay on and to rally behind him. He had to take on his many doubters, including skeptical Kennedy courtiers, liberals who questioned his commitment to civil rights and Southerners who sought to block his social initiatives. On top of that he had to prepare a detailed budget and a State of the Union address, laying out his own vision for the United States within two months.
Johnson's knowledge of Congress and the tactical and strategic levers he could press; his personal relationships with power brokers like Harry Byrd and Everett Dirksen; and his bare-knuckled willingness to bully, flatter, cajole, horse-trade, whatever it took to get what he wanted these were the qualities, Mr. Caro observes, that enabled him to overcome "congressional resistance and the power of the South" that had stood "in the path of social justice for a century."
Mr. Caro uses his storytelling gifts to turn seemingly arcane legislative maneuvers into action-movie suspense, and he gives us an unparalleled understanding step by step, sometimes minute by minute of how Johnson used a crisis and his own political acumen to implement his agenda with stunning speed: a test of leadership and governance that political addicts and more casual readers alike will find fascinating, given the gridlock in Washington today.
Commentators who have questioned the sincerity of Johnson's commitment to civil rights, Mr. Caro says, do not understand how deeply he identified with "the dispossessed of the earth." He had worked on a road gang as a kid in the isolated Texas Hill Country and had known the humiliation of his father's failure (a drought and fall in the cotton market left Sam Johnson, who had been a member of the Texas House of Representatives, in debt and a figure of local ridicule). Those experiences would shape Lyndon Johnson's ferocious determination to win "the passage of long-dreamed-of liberal legislation whose purposes," in Mr. Caro's view, "went far beyond any embodied in Kennedy legislation."
Advisers had warned Johnson against antagonizing the Southerners who controlled Congress, Mr. Caro reports in this revealing book, but when one aide told him to his face that a president shouldn't spend his time and power on lost causes, Johnson was quick to reply, "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?"