The Passage Of Power

I've just finished reading The Passage of Power by Robert Caro.  This is the fourth volume of his planned five volume biography of the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson.  I had not slogged through the three prior volumes which together weight in at around 2,500 pages.  The Passage Of Power is "only" 600 pages and is a magnificent book and I look forward to the final volume.  Caro started work on the first volume in 1975 and is now 76 years old so let's hope he works quickly.

The Passage of Power starts in 1958 with Johnson's hesitation over whether to run for the Democratic Presidential Nomination (his life long goal) in 1960.  It ends on July 2, 1964 with the signing of the Civil Rights Act. At the beginning of this period, LBJ is at the height of his political power as the most effective Senate Majority Leader of the 20th century.  Then, after losing the nomination and agreeing to become John Kennedy's Vice-President, he finds himself powerless and humiliated (and according to Caro, likely to be dumped from the ticket in 1964) and then finally and unexpectedly he becomes President.  The first half of the book covers 1958 to November 21, 1963.  The second half of the book takes us through the next 7 1/2 months and more than a third of the book is about the seven weeks from JFK's assassination to January 8, 1964 when LBJ gave his first State of the Union address to Congress. It is this seven week period that makes for the most compelling reading in the book.  From the events in Dallas and LBJ taking charge, to his successful efforts to keep JFK's staff on board, to providing stability while the nation was in shock and then, in the midst of this transition to coming up with the strategy to unlock the Congressional stalemate on JFK's entire legislative agenda makes for gripping and fast-paced reading.  LBJ's legislative experience and ability to read people united with his will to action meant passage for the long-stalled tax cut bill (JFK's top domestic priority) and the civil rights bill (LBJ's top priority).


The book is an amazing character study.  Caro paints a detailed and convincing picture of a complex man who could sometimes be crude, corrupt and repellent and at other times one of the most persuasive politicians in American history.  However, beyond the character study, what makes it essential reading for anyone interested in politics and history is that Caro is telling us about how political power is effectively created and wielded.  He's less concerned about high aspirations and general policy than  in taking us through the details of how politics works and how power is accrued and used and in what made LBJ, at his peak, so effective.  It's clear that Caro's personal political views are those of a typical post-60s liberal but that's irrelevant whatever your own political proclivities may be - this book is a learners' manual on political power and I guarantee you will enjoy it.

The storm of action unleashed by Johnson when he became President is captured in quotes from the book from two of the leading political columnists of the day, Joseph Alsop and Scotty Reston:

"Lyndon Johnson resembles an elemental natural force of some hitherto undiscovered sort"

 "President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think:  President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act."

Another theme running through the book is the relationship between the Kennedys and LBJ and, in particular, between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The two men hated and loathed each other.  "Hate" is a word that seems (unfortunately) to be used more casually today but these men deeply despised each other.  Caro lays out the origins of these feelings which predate this volume of the series but they became much worse from 1960 to 1964.  Caro's provides a stunning description of the events at the 1960 Democratic Convention when JFK offered the Vice-Presidency to Johnson and Bobby Kennedy made three visits later that day to LBJ's suite in an effort to get him to withdraw his acceptance creating enormous bitterness in Johnson.  After the election, RFK used every opportunity to emphasize Johnson's lack of political clout as Vice-President and to publicly humiliate him.  And finally, of course, there is JFK's murder, which alone would have been traumatic for Bobby but then to also see his worst enemy take his brother's place was too much.  In the weeks after the assassination it seems like each of them went out of their way to place the worst possible interpretation on every interaction they had.

To others they made no pretense of their feelings.

This is RFK describing LBJ in an interview for the Kennedy library in 1964:

"He's mean, bitter, vicious - an animal in many ways."

Here's LBJ after his retirement and RFK's death:

"a snot-nosed, little runt". 

This relationship poisoned Democratic politics in the mid-1960s and impacted the 1968 election.

The book is also fascinating as a window onto a long gone era of politics when convention nominations were decided by the power brokers in each state since there were very few primaries (this may have resulted in a better quality of Presidential candidates than the current system).

Kennedy's proposed tax cut bill also shows what has, and hasn't, changed in the thinking of our political parties over the past fifty years.  This is Caro writing on why the tax cut bill was so critical:

"Liberals wanted a larger role for government, wanted bigger, and new, government social welfare programs and therefore a larger budget.  They believed the $11 billion tax cut [the Federal budget at this time was about $100 billion] would, by putting more money into people's pockets, stimulate the economy and thereby increase tax revenues, and the money the government would have available for these programs.  Conservatives, uneasy about an expansion in government's role and about the proposed new programs, were opposed to the deficits that would be produced by higher spending, and believed the deficits would be increased by the tax cuts."

 
As President, LBJ left a complicated political legacy and I'll be very interested to see how Caro handles the remaining years of his Presidency and his fall from the heights he had reached by the summer of 1964.

Lyndon Johnson is directly responsible for the two greatest pieces of legislation enacted in the U.S. during the 20th century - the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  LBJ plotted the strategy to defeat the Southern senators who had successfully obstructed bills for decades, directed the tactical action in both chambers and persuaded, cajoled and arm-twisted everyone he needed to in both the House and the Senate to get these bills passed.  For Johnson, the civil rights agenda was not just a political calculation but something that Caro shows he had felt passionately about for decades.  He had often compromised on civil rights while the Senate majority leader (though the relatively weak Civil Rights Act of 1957 which he maneuvered through the Senate was the first Civil Rights legislation enacted since 1875) but had vowed to when he had the chance to push through a bill providing blacks with full access to the rights of American citizenship.  When he became President that time had come.  Within two weeks he had met individually with the leaders of the five leading civil rights organizations, including Martin Luther King.  Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, until then a doubter of LBJ's commitment to equality, later wrote after meeting with Johnson that he was:

 "struck by the enormous difference between Kennedy and Johnson . . . Where Kennedy had been polite and sympathetic on all matters of basic principle, more often that not he had been evasive on action.  Kennedy was not naive, but as a legislator he was very green.  He saw himself as being dry-eyed, realistic.  In retrospect, I think that for all his talk about the art of the the possible, he really didn't know what was possible and what wasn't in Congress . . . When it came to dealing with Congress, Johnson knew exactly what was possible . . . Johnson made it plain he wanted the whole bill."

He also took personal action.  Within three weeks of becoming President he hired the first black secretary at the White House and took a further step in December 1963 while at his ranch with his staff in Texas.  On New Year's Eve, Johnson attended parties in Austin, including at the elite Forty Acres Club to which blacks were not allowed entrance for any purpose.  The President showed up at the club with his black secretary on his arm.  LBJ stayed for an hour and no one at the club dared to say anything about his guest.  Someone asked Bill Moyers (an LBJ aide), "Does the President know what he's doing" and Moyers responded "He always knows what he's doing".   The next day, a club member called to ask if he could bring a black guest and was told "Yes, sir.  The President of the United States integrated us on New Year's Eve".

The critical role played by LBJ in the passage of the civil rights legislation has been downplayed over the years.  Part of it is due to how unpopular he was by the time he left the Presidency in 1969.  It's also now become part of our modern political minefield (for instance, see the trouble Hilary Clinton got into during the 2008 Democratic primaries when she talked about how important LBJ's role had been).  It's also partly due to the Kennedy family's determination to wrest credit away for LBJ for civil rights.  In the late 1980s, when I lived in Massachusetts I often took the T from Cambridge to downtown Boston.  I remember that for several months the subway cars had big advertisements for an exhibit at the Kennedy Library.  The ad's text and pictures referred to JFK working on an issue - civil rights - something even more important to him than the Cold War.  This is just rank revisionism - for JFK the Cold War was his top priority.  As Roy Wilkins noted, JFK had proposed a civil rights bill (and his Justice Department under Bobby supported integration efforts while at the same time the Kennedys agreed to Hoover's request for FBI wiretaps on Reverend King) but there is no question that while he believed in equal rights, as a political matter he mostly saw it as a distraction from his primary focus on foreign policy.  To portray him, in contrast to LBJ, as the "civil rights" President is a shameful distortion of history.  

Yet LBJ was also the President who made the fateful decisions to escalate our military involvement in Vietnam with our troop commitment rising from 18,000 in 1964 to over 500,000 in 1968 and then saw the war spin out of control, divide America and end his Presidency.

Domestically, the War on Poverty and Great Society programs, while well-intentioned, for the most part were ill-conceived, poorly managed and showed little in the way of sustainable results, yet many linger on to this day.  And, as part of his efforts to fund the war and the social programs, LBJ planted two time bombs in the U.S. budget which have since gone off.  He took Social Security, which at that time was running a surplus, and put it into the unified budget to help minimize the impact of his spending and he took Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which at that time were losing money (hey. just like now!), out of the budget.  We are paying the price for these decisions today.