The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon
Johnson
By Robert A. Caro
(Knopf, 736 pages, $35)
THIS IS THE FOURTH FAT VOLUME in Robert Caro’s series on a
failed president who inherited a failed presidency, made it worse,
then quit and dumped the whole mess into his successor’s lap. This
one, which took Caro 10 years to write, covers the end of the 1950s
to 1964, with special focus on Lyndon Johnson’s tenure as John F.
Kennedy’s vice president, most of which he spent trying
unsuccessfully to expand the powers of his office (something all
vice presidents try to do), and learning to eat dirt at the hands
of Robert Kennedy and assorted New Frontiersmen.
“During the administration of John F. Kennedy,” writes Caro,
“Washington was Camelot [not really, as Bob Tyrrell reminds us,
until Mrs. Kennedy dubbed it that post-assassination], and in
Camelot, the political world included parties.” LBJ wasn’t on the
A-list and often had to finagle an invitation. Caro describes a
dinner dance, with music by Lester Lanin, the debutantes’ delight,
who introduced “a new, hip-swiveling dance called the twist.
Johnson asked the scintillating Helen Chavchavadze (who, as it
happened, was one of the president’s mistresses) to dance—and
slipped and fell on her, knocking her to the floor.”
“‘He lay on her like a lox,’” said one attendee. “By noon the
next day,” writes Caro, “word of Johnson’s fall…had reached
Camelot’s most distant frontiers—as Johnson was well aware.”
He was treated with extraordinary cruelty by the New
Frontiersmen, “in love with their own sophistication… a witty
bunch, and wit does better when it has a target to aim at, and the
huge, lumbering figure of Lyndon Johnson, with his carefully
buttoned-up suits and slicked-down hair…made an inviting target.”
(Caro is big on hair, especially Kennedy hair—“an unruly forelock,”
“unruly hair,” “shining hair”—so much so, that instead of
“Camelot,” it might be called “Hair-a-Lot,” or with all that
Aquarian behavior at the Kennedy court, just “Hair.”) The Kennedy
courtiers made fun of his clothes—“for one white-tie dinner dance,
he wore, to the Kennedy people’s endless amusement, not the
customary black tailcoat but a slate gray model especially sent up
by Dallas’ Neiman- Marcus department store.” And of course, there
was the Texas accent. “When he mispronounced ‘hors d’oeuvres’ as
‘whore doves,’ the mistake was all over Georgetown in what seemed
an instant.” And, as Caro points out, LBJ knew it.
Caro accomplishes something here that few others would dare to
try. He actually makes us feel sorry for LBJ—like JFK a serial
womanizer, and a bullying, venal politician who, as Tyrrell put it,
“turned the purchase of a $17,500 radio station into a vast media
fortune through the manipulation of such federal agencies as the
Federal Communications Commission.” Nevertheless, the treatment of
him by that effete corps of impudent snobs, as someone once put it
in a different context, was unconscionable.
Pre-assassination, the question was why such a man, one of
history’s most powerful and influential senators, would have sought
the vice presidential nomination. He didn’t respect JFK, a “little
scrawny fellow with rickets,” and the Kennedys reciprocated the
feeling— especially Bobby, who loathed him. Caro quotes Joseph
Kennedy on his son: “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.” LBJ,
for his part, held Bobby in contempt, calling him “Sonny Boy,” and
the antagonism between the two runs through the book as a subplot,
with no resolution until Bobby is assassinated in Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, despite the mutual hostility, the Kennedyites
believed that LBJ could deliver Texas in 1960, which he did, just
as Mayor Daley delivered Illinois. And for his part, LBJ, having
tried and failed to beat Kennedy out for the presidential
nomination, and convinced that “no southerner would be elected
President in the foreseeable future,” had come to believe his best
and only path to the presidency ran through two terms as vice
president.
AND THE PATH could well be shorter. LBJ had his staff research
the figures, writes Caro. Seven presidents had died in office.
“Since thirty-three men had been President, that was seven out of
thirty-three: The chances of a Vice President succeeding to the
presidency due to a president’s death were about one out of five.”
And if you handicapped it over the past 100 years before 1960, five
out of eighteen presidents had died in office, “and five out of
eighteen were odds of less than one out of four.”
According to Caro, Clare Boothe Luce asked LBJ why he had
accepted the vice presidential nomination. His reply: “Clare, I
looked it up: one out of every four Presidents has died in office.
I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin,’ and this is the only chance I
got.”
In short, he decided to roll the dice, he hit it, and the odds
paid off, big time. And in a way, this poses a unique problem for
Caro and his work.
In great part, it’s the extraordinary research into the most
mundane matters that gives Caro’s work its verisimilitude. True,
his sources often lie buried in an inscrutable bibliographic
apparatus that would seem to require a magic decoder ring to
decipher. Nevertheless, what he gives us is impressive in its
thoroughness. He describes what people were wearing, their stances,
gestures, and the minor asides to and from the most obscure actors
in the drama, whom he’s taken care to track down over the years,
often just to verify a sentence.
He fleshes out his descriptions with a wealth of detail—he
provides the exact measurements of the Oval Office, for instance,
and he describes the fatal motorcade in Dallas in precise
detail—the route, the makes and sizes of the vehicles, the seating
arrangements (neither Senator Ralph Yarborough nor Governor John
Connally wanted to ride with LBJ, who it was increasingly rumored
would be dumped from the ticket. And Connally, just as he would do
as a Republican in 1972, was lobbying to replace a sitting vice
president).
Combined with this attention to detail is Caro’s use of the
techniques of fiction to move his narrative and generate suspense
while telling a tale told many times before. His use of such
devices can be highly effective, as when he delivers a dramatic
rendering of the events leading to the assassination in Dallas.
During the long ride in the motorcade, he takes us on an extended
interior exploration of what LBJ must have been thinking in that
lonely limousine—his treatment by the Kennedys, his exclusion from
policy decisions, the likelihood that he wouldn’t be on the ticket
in 1964.
And LBJ could have well been thinking those thoughts. But for
all we—and Caro—know, he could have been thinking about huevos
rancheros, Ellie the barmaid, or a good glass of Rebel Yell
bourbon.
Literary techniques can be effective. But they can also raise
questions when used in writing history. In a novel or drama, they
help maintain a measure of suspense, setting up a series of
expectations that lead to a satisfactory conclusion. Viewed in that
way by a reader who has no special knowledge of the events of the
period (it all happened, after all, half a century ago) The
Passage of Power might well seem to have accomplished just
that—a vivid narrative that, by dramatizing Johnson’s lust for the
presidency, seems structured to lead us to one inescapable
conclusion: LBJ had something to do with bringing on the act that
brought him the presidency.
BUT THAT, OF COURSE, is not what Caro wants at all. He intends
to write history, not drama, and the deus ex machina, the
assassination that allowed LBJ to get on with his career and Caro
his chronicle, having served its purpose, is wheeled quickly
offstage. There’s a dutiful bow to the work and composition of the
Warren Commission and its conclusion that the assassination was the
work of a lone gunman, a washed-out Marine who had worked and
married in the Soviet Union and had ties to organizations like the
Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a mediocre marksman who just managed
to qualify on the rifle range, but who apparently decided to take a
difficult shot with an unfamiliar rifle at a moving target.
But these are not details that Caro, uncharacteristically, is
interested in exploring, although he does seem to feel, perhaps
belatedly, that he’s opened a box that needs to be closed. In one
extraordinarily long paragraph running for two pages, and tacked on
to his chapter on the Warren Commission, he briefly summarizes
alternative theories and acknowledges a lack of public confidence
in the commission’s findings. A report of a House Select Committee
to restudy the assassination, he tells us, released in 1979,
“concluded that John Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result
of a conspiracy, but…said it was unable to identify who had been
involved in it.”
He reviews the polls taken on the subject, in which the
percentage of Americans who don’t accept the lone gunman theory has
remained steady, at about 75 percent. “In no poll was there
consensus about the conspiracy’s origins or members: in a 2003
Gallup Poll 18 percent of Americans felt Lyndon Johnson was indeed
involved.”
However, having unintentionally but in dramatic fashion provided
the grounds for a potential reairing of the whole assassination
debate, and in the process giving LBJ a powerful motive, Caro
assures us that “nothing that I have found in my research leads me
to believe that whatever the full story of the assassination may
be, Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with it.”
He leaves it at that, and it’s perfectly understandable that he
does so. If there were any sort of LBJ involvement, the four
volumes he’s devoted his life to producing would have no historical
credibility.
He concludes this volume with LBJ’s elevation to the presidency;
success in persuading the Kennedy advisers to stay on, arguably his
first major mistake; and adoption of the Kennedy agenda as his own,
his second mistake. By so doing, he set the government off on a
disastrous spending spree (the War on Poverty has now morphed into
the War on Obesity, and the bills are still rolling in) and an
adventure in southeastern Asia that got totally out of hand, and
which would require a tough new realistic president with a grasp of
geopolitics, Richard Nixon, to put it right.
The observation by Theodore Draper on the Kennedy Bay of Pigs
fiasco, quoted by Caro, might well also be applied to Vietnam: “one
of those rare events in history—a perfect failure.”
Caro’s final volume, advertised as the last in the series, will
cover Vietnam in depth; the 1964 campaign and the defeat of Barry
Goldwater, who ran against a ghost; the indiscriminate wash of
legislation LBJ pushed through Congress; and the last dismal days
of the Johnson presidency—a failed one, fast fading from public
political consciousness.
Will he get it done? And will there still be people sufficiently
interested to plow through it? It took 10 years to finish this one,
there’s a great deal more to write about, and Caro will turn 77
this year.
In the end, as with LBJ, it may all hang on a roll of the
dice.
