Robert Caro, a journalist and historian, is interested in power, its accumulation, its use and abuse in the hands of two American men of the first half of the 20th century: Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Moses, the man who transformed New York City and who had, in the estimation of those around him, more power than any elected official of his time, got only one volume.  Lyndon Johnson has now been the subject of four of a planned five.

There are many reasons to read Caro on Johnson: the history of the times, its broad sweep and small details; the biography of the man Lyndon Baines Johnson,with revealing looks at those he moved among, friend and enemy; an inside look at the dynamics between Legislative and Executive branches as ideas are moved into law, or thwarted.  For many, the most fascinating will be the details he reveals of the exercise of power in American governance, particularly as practiced by first Senator, then Vice President and finally President Lyndon Johnson; how the exercise of power grows out of a personality, and how the successful exercise of power increases power and continues to shape that personality.  Vividly he shows that, in Lyndon Baines Johnson — and by extension, many others–  the urge to have power is linked to the experience of deep humiliation, and the determination not to re-experience it.

As Caro elicited from Johnson’s brother, Sam Houston, expressing a near unanimous belief among their long-time friends, the most important thing for Lyndon was “not to be like Daddy because Daddy failed and Daddy was a laughing stock and Lyndon Johnson had this horrible childhood. I think everything was very rooted in that.”

For years I have wondered at the lack of attention paid to the effects of shame, humiliation, retribution and revenge in the literature of history, of human interaction in war and peace, in neighborhoods and even marital relations.  Caro does a good job of beginning to overcome that void.

I had the chance to read, actually to listen to, The Passage of Power on a long road trip my wife and I took through the American South West.  We didn’t get as far as Texas, though some days the heat gave us that illusion.  It was a great way to immerse ourselves in a book we wouldn’t have otherwise found the time for. “Wait!” Stop right there! He did what?” or “Where were you when that happened?” or “Did you know about that?”  Our enjoyment and understanding were greatly enhanced by the reader, Grover Gardner.

The scope of Volume Four is less than eight years — from Johnson’s sudden two-day push to be nominated as the candidate for President at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1956 to the summer of 1964, 7 months after the assassination of John F Kennedy. The narrower, core of the book, are the 74 days which Caro calls the Passage of Power, between the bullets in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and Johnson’ first State of the Union Address, January 8, 1964

For those who experienced these years, as we did, Caro’s re-creation of them will not only resuscitate long damped memories but add vivid details of fact and description which no one person could have experienced alone, beginning with that which was seen by all — the assassination itself– recreated now from Johnson’s experience of it, to the most intimate moments of phone calls, personal pleadings and insider recollections.  For those not alive or too young to have known the years you couldn’t get a better set of pictures of at least a part of the great memory palace of the time.   Caro interviewed hundreds, if not thousands.  He took his wife, Ina, to live for three years in the Texas Hill Country of Johnson’s youth.  They lived in Washington DC for another three.  In addition to his original research Caro seems to have read every book written about both Kennedys, Johnson, the assassination The research and writing of The Passage of Power took 10 years — following 26, beginning in 1976,  spent on the first three volumes.

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Descriptions of the months of early 1960 when Johnson, hungering for the presidential nomination, underestimated the Kennedys and would not allow his own operatives to set up state organizations, leading to his too little, too late tactics at the convention,  give us a picture of Johnson few could have imagined, and of politics as it is played out on the largest of American stages.

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A generous chapter on John Kennedy brings together the then-little-known facts of how ill he had been for much of his youth, how he refused exemption from naval service, even demanding rigorous PT boat duty despite severe back pain and  Johnson’s suspicion of this ill-health and his attempt to derail the Kennedy run for the 1960 nomination with a public revelation of his Addison’s disease.

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The blood feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, well known to those around them, but less visible on the outside, is revealed in multiple encounters over the course of the book.    It began, at least visibly, in a 1953 Senate lunch room encounter between the two men —  Kennedy the young (22), brash assistant to Joseph McCarthy, there by request of Joseph Kennedy Sr., and Senate Majority Leader Johnson who despised both McCarthy and Kennedy Sr.  Robert refused to stand and acknowledge the Leader as everyone else at the table did.  Johnson, executing the intimidating persona he had perfected in the Senate, would not let the disrespect pass without notice, and forced a reluctant hand-shake from the younger man. It’s a classic scene, emblematic of much that allowed Johnson, years later, to pass the heretofore impassable Civil Rights Act of 1964, along with Kennedy’s “Tax Reduction Act” just weeks after the assassination, both of which had been bottled up in Congress until Johnson took hold.

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At the 1960 convention, after John Kennedy, nomination secured, asked Johnson to be his running mate — Bobby seems to have gone out of his head.  We read of his running up and down flights of stairs trying to get Johnson off the ticket; phone calls between Senator Richard B Russell, who had warned Johnson against accepting, and John Kennedy, assuring him that Bobby was out of the loop, not speaking for him. It must have been a wild scene and Caro brings it to us in all its human messiness.

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As Air Force 1 lands in Washington, Robert boards the plane and pushes his way past everyone to get to Jackie, with no acknowledgment of Johnson who was standing near the coffin.

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The delicacy of the five days of the funeral, the sheer numbers of people involved, from the arriving heads of state [19 heads of state and 220 foreign dignitaries] to the hundreds of thousands in the streets;  the mourning line outside the capitol three miles long well past midnight.  And amidst all this Johnson was trying to discover and take hold of the reins of power — without being able to occupy the White House itself, still home to the widow and her children.   Whatever one thinks of Johnson in the long run, to imagine ourselves in his shoes during these days is to be amazed at his ability to gather up his own strengths and that of others.  He used every skill he had learned as a master of men in the Senate to reason with, beg, cajole and arm-twist the Kennedy people to stay with him, in the interest of uninterrupted government.

One of his principle weapons was expressing an abject humility, telling many of them, and often, that he was not as smart or knowledgeable as Kennedy and that he, Johnson, needed their services much more than Kennedy had.  It worked.  To a person the top staff — O’Brien, O’Donnell, Sorenson, Salinger, Schlesinger, Robert McNamara at Defense, Rusk at State, Dillon at Treasury and even Robert Kennedy as Attorney General for a few months —  stayed.

Again and again Caro shows us the up-close people powers Johnson used. His threat one month after he became President, backed up by signature gathering and ruthless vote counting, to file a discharge petition to get the Civil Rights bill out of the House Rules Committee where it had been stalled by Virginia Congressman Howard Smith was not only the first demonstration of Johnson’s power and his deep interest in civil rights, it is a quick lesson for today’s politics when we have again heard of the need for discharge petitions in a Congress determined to stall any and all Presidential initiatives.

The account of Johnson’s arm twisting Senator Richard Russell of GA, his long-time mentor and friend [Johnson referred to him as his ‘daddy’] to be on the not-yet-named Warren commission is flabbergasting.  Russel hated Earl Warren with a passion because of the Brown v The Board of Education ruling in 1954.  He was sick with emphysema and told Johnson he could not and would not serve.  Yet he did.  As a person who can’t imagine prodding people’s weaknesses and shamelessly calling in favors to get something I want, it is eye opening stuff.

Close ups of the Kennedys, Robert more than John, and including much of the senior Administration staff, as they related to Johnson are damning.  At the purely human level, their contempt for his ‘corn-pone’ ways, their exclusion of him from meetings, their exclusion of him and Lady Bird from social gatherings, or making him grovel to be invited, are distressing enough.  The danger this exclusion from high level decisions for three years created for the country when he became President without a clue as to current initiatives, likely dangers, major players was unforgivable.  That Johnson made it through was due in part to luck — the assassinations in South Vietnam a month earlier had not brought in the whirlwind– and in part to his sure grasp of power, including a preternatural calmness, the complete contrary of his better known arm-flailing intimidator persona,  that calmed those around him and the country at large.

It’s a fine, fine book.  As one whose youth was spent in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson’s war, I have not been quick to modify my feelings about his decisions, his lies and his edicts.  There have been those before Caro who have said that had the Vietnam war not been on his watch Johnson would be considered one of America’s greatest presidents — The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, education bills, the Teaching Corps, VISTA, the Job Corps, Upward Bound, and Model Cities.    Mebe so, I’d mutter, but I can’s see it through the bodies.

These were the very years of my life.  I had stood in the snow at the inauguration in January of 1960. I had sung in the Naval Academy Catholic Choir on the lawn facing the White House as Kennedy’s caisson rolled by on the way to Arlington.  I was on a ship off the coast of Vietnam the fall of 1965 as the Johnson buildup began.  By the end of December there were some 200,000 US troops in country, not even counting the off-shore US Navy or the supply ship I had chosen in the first of many acts of opposition to the war.  When Johnson declared on March 31, 1968, that he would not seek a second nomination for President, I had been discharged from the Navy after an anti-war fight, and cheered until hoarse with other resisters at a bar in San Diego.

But age and Robert Caro have improved my image of the man.  Age because I now appreciate the complexity of men and women, indeed myself,  in ways I did not in my youth.  Johnson may have been an extreme example of such complexity but Caro shows in fine detail that there was more good in the man, and willingness to use his power to advance it, than I understood then.   He stood up to, and rode-over if necessary, his oldest friends and colleagues in the Senate to start the curtain coming down on 100 years of legal and cultural racial discrimination in the United States. The legislation he pushed and signed into law both reflected and strengthened the changing values  of Americans — even as his closing act, the war in Vietnam, tarnished the presidency, and the people’s relationship to government, in ways still not recovered from.  Indeed, as more than one reader of the book as observed, this is the book President Obama should have read when he came into office: how to gather and collect the forces of the Presidency to advance policies and legislation for the common good against a recalcitrant opposition — which by the way, despite a change in party name, comes from the same regions and electoral districts as it did in Johnson’s time.

The one area where Caro doesn’t have it right, in my opinion, is his crediting Johnson with a willed overcoming of his own worst traits, during the time of transition, to smoothly and masterfully keep the country from skidding into uncertainly and crisis — as it easily might have done.

If for a period of time, a brief but crucial moment in history, he’d held these elements [of his personality] in check, had overcome them, had in a way conquered himself, and by doing so, by overcoming forces within him that were very difficult to overcome, he not only held the country steady during the difficult time  but had set it on a new course, a course towards social justice…”

I don’t deny that the ‘elements’ of vainglory, self-pity and bellicosity disappeared for a while to later reappear.  What I do not think, and Caro does not show us, is that this was a deliberate effort of will, an ‘overcoming.’

Rather, it seems to me, in a world well described by Darwin, that given new circumstances and surroundings, creatures adapt. In Johnson’s case, he understood the urgency of adaptation, but as a gestalt, not a calculation.  Without power during the early days of transition, he shed the behaviors that had been successful in times of power to revive those which had been useful in times before power.  Not consciously.  No midnight ‘notes-to-self’ about what to do; simply that his whole being understood the change in the environment and adapted to it, as a runner changes behavior when mounting a bicycle: no thought needed.   As he gained power — admiration from those around him and the major media discovering it to him– he reverted to behaviors that had served him while previously holding power in the Senate, but now enlarged even more, as the presidency is enlarged over Majority Leader.

It is likely very true that in Johnson these instinctual changes were far more fluid, and executed with less indecision than in others who might find themselves in similar circumstances. [See Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine as a fine example of someone who can not adapt to changed circumstances.] Caro is right that the Johnson’s ability to find new strengths in himself  came at the right time.  It steadied the nation and led to profound changes in a short period of time.  When power returned to him the traits exercised in previous times of power returned to him:  the bullying, the lying and above all the deep concern for ‘manhood.’ 

His constant images of loss of testicles representing loss of power go unremarked by Caro.  From his telling visitors at his Texas ranch that a steer is a bull which has “lost its social standing” — while holding up the tail to emphasize his point, to telling an aide to unzip his pants and see if his penis wasn’t missing,  because Arkansas Senator McClellan had just taken it from him in a meeting and he didn’t even know it was gone, Johnson had an idea he couldn’t shake: power was the antidote to humiliation; humiliation was physical and sexual as well as emotional;  power was physical and sexual as well as emotional.  Caro mercifully didn’t write a psychobiography but the drives at the core of Johnson’s being are there for us to see.

Prior to and following our trip, and  itslong hours of listening to the LBJ book, we were immersed in the Netflix offering, called House of Cards.  I had originally resisted watching as political cynicism is an highly contagious disease and I prefer to keep looking forward to the possible.  By the end of the second show, however, I was hooked, along with my wife.  At least once an hour we would turn to one another and say: “LBJ.”  The raw mechanisms of power and the means with which Johnson veiled it, as written by Caro, were appearing in modern, televised dress.  Perhaps a bit hurried up, a bit compressed and made more dramatic, some prostitution and a murder added to the mix, but very much a truly seen and well written series on how power is played where it had home field advantage around the world: the lobbyists, the favors, the debts owed, the money raised, the advice given, the misdeeds covered up — part of the Darwinian struggle for power to the fittest.