The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most
frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career -- 1958 to
1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he
had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the
wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that
disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the
presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in
the moment it took an assassin's bullet to reach its mark. For the first
time, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson's eyes. We
watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely
loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its
power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We
see how within weeks -- grasping the reins of the presidency with
supreme mastery -- he propels through Congress essential legislation
that at the time of Kennedy's death seemed hopelessly logjammed and
seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on
Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson
had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his
own. This was without doubt Johnson's finest hour, before his
aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap
of Vietnam. It is an epic story told with a depth of detail possible
only through the peerless research that forms the foundation of Robert
Caro's work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman's verdict that "Caro has
changed the art of political biography."
