This installment chronicles the 3 years he spent in the most desolate wilderness of them all: The vice presidency. For those of you who have gone thorough the entire series as I have, you know that LBJ's life contained periodic reversals. I stumbled onto the series a couple of years ago after seeing Robert Caro on a television program and began my exploration of the series with 'Master of the Senate.' Since the first two installments have not been made into audio books yet, I purchased 'The Path to Power' & 'Means of Ascent' on my Kindle and found both to be riveting. The fourth installment of Robert Caro's majestic and sweeping biography of LBJ is a mammoth achievement and ranks favorably with all prior installments. 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.” This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam. 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.Ĭaro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. 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. 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.įor the first time, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. 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. The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career - 1958 to 1964.

National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography, 2013

The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro