If that were not enough, in the fall of 1963 scandal began to envelop the vice presidency. Caro shows us Johnson pitiably seeking to ingratiate himself with gifts of livestock (cows and ponies, to be precise) to a Kennedy family that held him in contempt sulking in hotel rooms and Cabinet meetings shuffling about the White House, hoping that the president, or even just a president's aide, might pay him some mind and then, at the peak of the Cuban missile crisis, when the president depended most on sure counsel, launching into long tirades about the inadequacies of the diplomatic maneuverings that would bring the nation back from the brink.

Johnson's vice presidency, perhaps more than any other in the nation's history, was defined by humiliation and indignity, both real and imagined. Kennedy promptly offered Johnson a spot on his ticket, Johnson's influence, and with it his self-regard, slipped into free fall.

Offered the opening, a sure-footed, debonair junior senator from Massachusetts seized the Democratic nomination for president, and he did so, to Johnson's great astonishment, on the very first ballot at the party's convention in Los Angeles. The man who, 12 years earlier, had snatched a Senate seat with several hundred forged votes would not even participate in the primaries for an office that, by all rights, was his for the taking. The political giant disavowed any interest in the presidency - to the great frustration of his closest allies. Johnson, however, gave them precious little with which to work. Reaching for this ultimate prize, however, Johnson's extraordinary skills and imposing presence failed him.įor most of the 1960 presidential campaign, he hoped that party elites and the larger public would take up his cause. In 1960, a final one to the White House stood before a Texan in full stride. Haunted by his father's failures, Johnson persistently sought out the next steps on a steep political climb. In this, the fourth of his majestic five-volume series on Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro covers a six-year period marked by withering decline and then, instantaneously, ascension to the very apex of world power.Ĭaro picks up, in 'The Passage of Power,' where he left off, with Johnson as Master of the Senate - the greatest majority leader in the nation's history, we are told - contemplating how he might scale higher still.

The passage of power by robert a caro