The drama of Johnson being offered the vice-presidential nomination by John F.Johnson’s dithering about joining the presidential race in 1960.I figured that some of the same thinking was behind Caro’s decision to publish “The Passage of Power” before dealing with Johnson’s presidency, and, on the face of it, the book appeared to be a catch-all of material that needed to be addressed but didn’t quite fit into the examination of LBJ as Chief Executive: So he wrote it as a stand-alone installment in the series, covering mostly a single year in LBJ’s life. Yet, after researching Johnson’s successful - and successfully stolen - election to the Senate in 1948, Caro decided that the story was too good and needed too much space to be included in the volume on the Senate years. Senate, particularly as the immensely powerful Majority Leader and a third about his presidency, focusing on his triumphs for civil rights and against poverty and on his failures in Vietnam. “The Passage of Power” is the fourth of what is now planned to be five volumes of Caro’s biography “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” - an astonishing and unprecedented in-depth look at the life of a public figure and his era, passionately researched and written, a work of great literature, among the best non-fiction works ever.Ĭaro has been working on LBJ since 1974, and originally, he did not envision the need for “The Passage of Power.”Īs initially laid out, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” was to comprise three volumes - one on his rise from poverty in the Hill Country of Texas a second about his years in the U.S. Instead, he has made his case, brick by brick by brick, slowly, inexorably, pulling together many disparate stories involving sometimes world-jarring events, and laying them out in great detail and with great insight.
And it is a word that, up until this moment in the book, Caro has avoided using. It is a word that has rarely, if ever, been used in American discourse about LBJ. On the final page of “The Passage of Power,” Robert Caro sums up the 604 pages that have come before with a single word.
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