Caro examines people getting power, losing power, exercising power, and abusing power. But it is power that is the true, and, I think, the enduring, subject of Caro’s grand work-power in all its guises and forms, illusions and apparitions. Lyndon Johnson is the subject of these wonderful books-indeed, Caro’s portrait of Johnson’s portrait is rich in substance and overflowing in telling detail. When Caro eventually shifts gears to tell the breathtaking story of Johnson’s ascension to the Presidency in the immediate wake of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas it becomes a “passage of power” in the sense of moving “to” rather than “from” a position of strength and action.Īnd it is power that primarily interests Caro. Caro painstakingly narrates LBJ’s near complete loss of power upon becoming John Kennedy’s vice-president, a 3-year odyssey in the wilderness for Johnson who was-and still is-a prime exhibit for anyone wishing to demonstrate the emptiness of the role of the American Vice-Presidency. In the beginning of the book, Caro documents LBJ’s initial passage from power in 1959-60 he then shifts to describing Johnson’s dramatic passage back to power in 1963-64. Volume four is entitled “Passage of Power” and that is precisely what it recounts, but in two distinct senses.

By 2002, when volume three entered my reading life, I was working as an assistant United States Attorney at the Department of Justice.Įach volume has been a milestone-for me, and for American literature.

I devoured volume two in 1990, reading much of it while patronizing various locations of the now departed Hamburger Hamlet restaurants of Los Angeles. I, for one, read volume one as a vacationing college student on the sandy beaches of Cape Cod in 1982. The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson has arrived with all the fanfare befitting a major publication coming ten years after 2002’s volume three, “Master of the Senate,” and a full 30 years after volume one, “The Path to Power.” Readers of all four volumes who got started upon publication of the first can use the books to trace the arc of their own lives just as Caro traces the grand arc of Johnson’s career.

The path to power by robert caro