Purchase
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
Alfred A. Knopf
May 2012
On Sale: May 1, 2012
Featuring: Lyndon Baines Johnson; John F Kennedy; Robert Kennedy
736 pages
ISBN: 0679405070
EAN: 9780679405078
Kindle: B0062B0844
Hardcover / e-Book
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Paperback (May 2013)
Non-Fiction Biography
Book Four of Robert A. Caro’s monumental The Years of Lyndon
Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating
insight that led the Times of London to acclaim it as “one
of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.
A masterpiece.” The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the
most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his
career—1958 to 1964. It is a time that would see him trade
the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate
Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness
of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and
distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the
presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust
upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach
its mark. By 1958, as Johnson began to maneuver for the presidency, he
was known as one of the most brilliant politicians of his
time, the greatest Senate Leader in our history. But the
1960 nomination would go to the young senator from
Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Caro gives us an
unparalleled account of the machinations behind both the
nomination and Kennedy’s decision to offer Johnson the vice
presidency, revealing the extent of Robert Kennedy’s efforts
to force Johnson off the ticket. With the consummate skill
of a master storyteller, he exposes the savage animosity
between Johnson and Kennedy’s younger brother, portraying
one of America’s great political feuds. Yet Robert Kennedy’s
overt contempt for Johnson was only part of the burden of
humiliation and isolation he bore as Vice President. With a
singular understanding of Johnson’s heart and mind, Caro
describes what it was like for this mighty politician to
find himself altogether powerless in a world in which power
is the crucial commodity. For the first time, in Caro’s breathtakingly vivid
narrative, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon
Johnson’s eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency,
inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor;
a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive
branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how
within weeks—grasping the reins of the presidency with
supreme mastery—he propels through Congress essential
legislation that at the time of Kennedy’s death seemed
hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program
to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear
how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the
Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his
own. This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before
his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and
eroded by the trap of Vietnam. In its exploration of this pivotal period in Johnson’s
life—and in the life of the nation—The Passage of Power is
not only the story of how he surmounted unprecedented
obstacles in order to fulfill the highest purpose of the
presidency but is, as well, a revelation of both the
pragmatic potential in the presidency and what can be
accomplished when the chief executive has the vision and
determination to move beyond the pragmatic and initiate
programs designed to transform a nation. It is an epic
story told with a depth of detail possible only through the
peerless research that forms the foundation of Robert Caro’s
work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman’s verdict that “Caro
has changed the art of political biography.”
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