THE ABSORBING, SHOCKING, AND PUZZLING LIFE OF LYNDON JOHNSON: A Review of Robert Caro's The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

By Dan Durning June 2012

Robert Caro’s fourth installment of Lyndon Johnson's biography begins with LBJ's failed

effort to get the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1960, it continues with a

humiliating loss of power and drift to irrelevance as Kennedy’s vice president, then it takes him

to the brink of disaster as his shady personal finances are about to be revealed, and it ends in

triumph with LBJ's pitch-perfect performance following the Kennedy assassination. A recurring

element of the story is the hatred that LBJ and Robert Kennedy felt for each other. Throughout

this period, as during those covered in Caro's previous volumes, LBJ's behavior bounces

between astounding and appalling.

The best examples of his astounding behavior are found following the Kennedy murder

as Johnson capably and confidently filled the breach left by the president's sudden death. LBJ

far exceeded expectations in his post-assassination behavior, earning the admiration of the

nation. He then surprised many people with his whole-hearted support of civil rights legislation,

using his mastery of politics to help proponents overcome the opposition of Johnson's former

Southern allies, led by his mentor Richard Russell, to get the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act

through Congress.

The same man who performed so impressively following the Kennedy assassination

often behaved appallingly in other situations. Caro’s book discusses episodes of self-pitying,

dysfunctional behavior as a member of the Kennedy administration and, even worse, Johnson's

actions -- in some cases criminal -- soon after becoming president to enhance his personal

finances and punish his enemies.

In this volume, as in Caro’s previous books, the story of LBJ’s life is absorbing, shocking,

and puzzling. The first three volumes addressed LBJ’s early life and younger years (The Path

to Power, 1982), his election to the Senate (Means of Ascent, 1990), and his rise to a position

as one of the most powerful men in Washington (Master of the Senate, 2002). In all four

volumes, the reader encounters a contradictory, complex man whose political abilities and

personal behavior seem almost otherworldly.

The Personal Attributes of LBJ For those of us who were teenagers during Johnson's vice-presidential and presidential

years, this volume of Caro's biography covers a time when we had started paying some

attention to public affairs. Many of the events that Caro chronicles made a big impression on us,

and they made Lyndon Johnson a central figure in our lives as fledging citizens. Thus, with this

book, we are reading about events and people that were in our newspapers and on our

televisions. We can compare Caro's story with our impressions of happenings at the time.

With those years in mind, I have been looking forward to the final two volumes of Caro's

biography, hoping they will help me better understand (and judge) LBJ and the politics of era.

To me, Johnson was a puzzling political figure. Sometime after his first few months in office, I

began to feel that something about Lyndon Johnson was just not right: he tried hard to make a

good impression in his television speeches, but he failed. He made me uneasy.

Now, after I having read about 2,500 pages in Caro's four books, Johnson makes me

very uneasy. His personal characteristics were deeply contradictory, even spooky. Consider the

following list of adjectives and phrases that, based on Caro's books, I would use to describe

LBJ:

●Positive: Political genius, tireless, energetic, focused, effective, larger than life,

empathic to underdogs, persuasive, leader, superlative intuitive understanding of people,

master of strategy

●Neutral: Driven, great actor, relentless

●Negative: Crude, mean, thoughtless, scheming, liar, ruthless, shameless,

manipulative, cruel, corrupt, immoral

This list — other readers would likely add to it or subtract from it — shows a clashing

array of attributes that rarely would be used to describe one person. While we all have our good

and bad sides, Johnson's were Jekyll -and-Hydean. This unnatural combination of personal

characteristics was likely an essential element of a personality that could achieve monumental

political successes while often behaving in an uncivil, immoral, or destructive way.

Amassing and Using Power: A Mixed Legacy Johnson's strange mix of personal attributes apparently gave him a rare ability in key

situations to find, amass, and use power, usually to his own benefit. Caro documents this ability

well. Evidence of it could be seen when he was student at Southwest Texas State Teachers

College. He identified a small social club (the White Stars) on campus, used some questionable

tactics to become its president, then turned it into a political organization that gained influence

with students and college administrators. Based on his position heading the White Stars,

Johnson "persuaded the college president to give him a say over which students would get

campus jobs." (Caro p.159) This leverage made Johnson a very big man on campus.

Further evidence of his talent is the story of Little Congress, a debating society for

congressional aides that had become a mostly dormant social club. Soon after Johnson arrived

in Washington in the early 1930s to work as a congressional aide, he strived to get himself

elected chairman of Little Congress and in short order turned it into a highly visible forum with

high-level speakers. In transforming the organization, Johnson became widely known in

Washington's halls of power.

Using the same strategy many years later, LBJ was elected majority leader of the U.S.

Senate soon after his arrival there, and he used that position, which had for years been seen as

a weak one, to come to dominate the institution. Within a few years, Johnson was one of the

most powerful men in the United States.

Though his political talent was astonishing, LBJ's legacy is mixed. His uses of power

were admirable in some cases and contemptible in others. On the admirable side were, as

mentioned earlier, his adept handling of the situation immediately following the Kennedy

assassination and his use of his political skills to press successfully for the enactment of vital

legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Also, in his first months in office as president, he

laid out his vision of a Great Society achieved by a War on Poverty to improve the lives of the

poorest of this nation’s citizens.

According to Caro, "In the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, this period stands out as

different from the rest, as perhaps that life's finest moment, as a moment not only masterful but,

in its way, heroic." He did so well during a difficult time for the nation, according to Caro,

because he held in check the negative elements of his personality and had "in a way conquered

himself." (p. 618-619) The final volume of the biography will show that he was not able to keep

those negative elements in check for very long.

On the contemptible side of LBJ’s use of power, he amassed a fortune using dubious

methods. As he gained power as a congressman and senator, LBJ made friends with wealthy

businessmen who helped him become a millionaire in spite of the fact that he earned only a

government salary for most of his life. Even worse, LBJ, usually through his operatives, traded

political favors for money that was delivered either in the form of kickbacks or the purchase of

advertising time on LBJ’s Austin television station.

And even when Johnson was helping the nation through the trauma of the Kennedy

assassination, he was up to mischief. At his ranch for Christmas vacation in 1963, barely a

month after the assassination, LBJ spent his time not only successfully wooing favorable

coverage from America’s best known reporters, but also illegally conferring with the trustee of

his “blind trust, ” directing him on how to manage his money. In addition, while presenting a

humble face to the American people during this vacation break, LBJ made calls, using

presidential powers as a threat to get a negative story about his finances squelched, a Texas

reporter removed from his job, and a newspaper owner -- who had previously not been an ally --

to pledge editorial support for him.

Also on the negative side of his use of power was his devious treatment of the Vietnam

War issue in the year between the Kennedy assassination and the 1964 election. Although

Johnson was clearly planning to escalate the pursuit of the war, he hid those intentions from

supporters and voters to help insure his election to a full term.

What Motivated LBJ? Caro biography has laid bare the life of a deeply flawed but superbly talented man

whose achievements changed the nation and whose faults were too great to be excused.

Wrestling with the contradictory facets of LBJ’s life is difficult not only for a reader, but also is

clearly a struggle for Caro, who has spent more than two decades chronicling LBJ’s life. Caro

wants not only to describe, explain, and put into context the important elements of LBJ’s life, but

also to understand why LBJ did what he did.

While Caro is superlative in the carrying out the core tasks of telling Johnson’s story and

its context, he is less convincing when theorizing why his complicated subject behaved as he

did. With an implicit psychological stance, Caro suggests the existence of a cause and effect

linkage between certain aspects of Johnson’s younger years and his later dysfunctional

behavior.

According to Caro, the main cause of many of Johnson's failing, including his reticence

to jump fully into the 1960 presidential race in a timely way, was the humiliation and poverty

caused by the failure of his father as a rancher in the early 1920s. His father, Sam Ealy

Johnson, had been an important member of his community during the first years of LBJ's life,

serving six terms in the Texas state legislature. However, after he bought the Johnson Ranch in

1920 (when his son was 12), everything went wrong, and by 1922, he had to sell the ranch at a

loss. Deeply in debt, he and his family moved back to tiny Johnson City (population 323 at the

time). Because he could not find a job that paid well, more debt followed and the family had

meager resources . According to Caro, the Johnson were "the laughingstocks of Johnson City"

during Johnson's teenage years.

(Caro p. 19)

Caro asserts that this painful episode on Johnson's life caused problems in his later life,

including a "fear of failure. Caro quotes several people who grew with Johnson, and others who

knew him well, on the effects of his father's failure and his horror at the thought of being seen as

a failure like his father. Because of this fear of failure, Caro suggests, Johnson dawdled and

delayed actions necessary to get the Democratic Party's nomination of president in 1960,

denying -- until it was too late -- that he was running for the nomination because if he did not

run, he would not fail.

Caro goes further to suggest that Johnson's misery as vice president came at least in

part from fear that he was being perceived as a failure and his own fears that he might be one.

Furthermore, Caro suggests that the slights of the Kennedy men -- Ivy League educated and

sophisticated -- stung Johnson by reminding him of how he was treated by his peers and

neighbors who looked down on him when he was a poor teenager in Johnson City. Caro

mentions, for example, that the father of a high school girl friend, one of the richer men in town,

forbid his daughter to date Johnson because of his circumstances.

Also Caro speculates that LBJ’s strong embrace of civil rights and anti-poverty

legislation was attributable to the poverty of his early boyhood, his need to work in the fields

during early adulthood, and his job, at the age of 20, teaching poor students, mostly Mexican, in

a south Texas high school. He suggests that Johnson's empathy for the poor came from his

experiences as a teenage and young man.

Caro's explanation of Johnson's motivations may be true, but who knows? The trouble

with such psychological explanations of behavior is that they can only be asserted, not proven

or disproven. Though these explanations of behavior are vaguely related to a Freudian

framework (e.g., the relationship with the father leads to problems in adulthood), Caro does not

use the language or draw on key tenets of Freudian psychology. Instead, he presents his

assertions about LBJ's motivations as a common sense explanation that is backed by the

evidence he provides.

Of course there are competing theories of psychology and not all of them emphasize so

strongly the link between events in childhood and later behavior. In these theories, things that

happen to people after their childhood are also influential on their actions, as are the culture and

social structure within which they live at different times in their lives.

Caro's theorizing about the cause of Johnson's behavior is likely persuasive to some

readers. He provides great descriptions of the cause (the circumstances of Johnson's later

childhood) and the putative effects (his dysfunction behavior). Nevertheless, Caro's casual

psychoanalysis is for me the least convincing part of the book.

Final Verdict Despite my quibbles with Caro's journeys in psychoanalysis of Johnson, I think this book

is a marvelous biography with an absorbing subject, exhaustive research, and engaging writing.

If a person wants to understand fully the history of the United States in the first half of the

1960s, it is necessary to read this volume. I hope that Caro is writing the last volume quickly. I

am eager to find out why things went so badly for Johnson and for the U.S. in the last half of

that decade.