When Kennedy claims the party’s mantle in Los Angeles and searches for a running mate, a different Johnson suddenly appears: calculating, cagey, capable of subsuming his contempt for Kennedy to a steely desire to place himself next in line for the presidency. Instead, he rages at the upstart Kennedy, who shows unforeseen proficiency in the old game of locking down governors and state Democratic Party leaders for the convention and in the new game of winning over the masses via television. In the opening pages, he longingly eyes the presidency but, psychologically paralyzed, can’t bring himself to declare his candidacy or enter even a few primaries.

In Caro’s account, LBJ comes across by turns as insecure, canny, bighearted, self-defeating, petty, brilliant, cruel and, of course, domineering. ‘The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ by Robert A. Kennedy in particular emerging as a nearly co-equal, second lead in the psychodrama, always looming offstage and threatening frequently to steal the spotlight from his arch rival. And it ends in the first weeks of Johnson’s presidency, which has been thrust upon him by JFK’s assassination.Īlthough these are, for Johnson, years of relative inaction, Caro infuses his pages with suspense, pathos, bitter rivalry and historic import - with Robert F. Kennedy’s reign, with LBJ sulking on the sidelines. It chugs through the grand detour of John F. Eisenhower administration, with our hero - or should that be antihero? - contemplating a presidential run. The book opens in the rump years of the Dwight D. Sure enough, Caro’s fourth volume, “ The Passage of Power,” doesn’t complete the tale of Johnson’s presidency.

(No wonder he and his longtime editor are known to fight over punctuation.) Given all this, if the 1957 civil rights bill consumed more than 150 pages of Volume 3, how could the historic 1964 bill weigh in at anything less? He will make a book, or chapter, or anecdote as long as it has to be to achieve his desired effect - elongating even a single sentence, if necessary, and then stitching it together with a passel of colons, semicolons and dashes, as if scooped by the handful from his handyman’s belt.

His books are famous, or infamous, for running on profusely - not just because of the sheer mass of his research but also because of his overflowing literary style.Ĭaro strives for the epic. Moreover, Caro is not exactly partial to verbal economy. It left untouched the 1960 campaign, the vice presidential years and the whole of Johnson’s presidency - the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society, Vietnam. “Master of the Senate” concluded in 1958. Johnson, he said he would finish his labors with just one more installment. Caro published “ Master of the Senate” (2002), the third volume of his voluminous multi-part life of Lyndon B.

Caro master of the senate