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During Johnson’s frustrating years as vice president, years in which he was deliberately sidelined by the Kennedys, Caro puts us subtly to the outside of major events.

Adam guso 57th street event series#

There seem to be fewer but more powerful moving parts in this volume, almost a series of bravura set-pieces. In The Passage of Power, the world around Lyndon Johnson grows in importance, in part because for the first five years it recounts, from 1958 to 22 November 1963, its subject is very much on the periphery of power. Each volume includes fascinating sidetracks, a history of the Texas Hill Country, of the Senate or a mini-biography of the Kennedys. This mixture of the psychological, the historical and the philosophical is almost as much a Caro trademark as the doggedness of his research - from the first page I remembered what I had been missing since his last book. It is simultaneously a biography of a complex and contradictory man, a history of the eventful years in which he lived and, like Power Broker, Caro’s extraordinary biography of Robert Moses, a study of “the acquisition and use of various forms” of political power. It is worth remembering that this work is called The Years of Lyndon Johnson, not Lyndon Johnson: A Life. There will be plenty of space for “ruthlessness, secretiveness, deceit,” the worst aspects of Johnson’s character, in the Years to come. The first 47 days of the Johnson administration, in which the best version of the man took charge, culminate this volume and are well worth the several hundred pages Caro devotes to them. Immense as Caro’s project is, The Passage of Power demonstrates the logic of his decision to extend the project to a fifth volume (he originally planned only three). Throughout The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and most particularly in his fourth and latest volume, The Passage of Power, Caro zooms in and out without ever losing the complex whole he has so carefully built up. Whether or not this is true for architecture, Robert Caro demonstrates how well such an approach works for writing history. I had a professor in architecture school who said that you couldn’t draw up a building properly at 1:100 scale until you had worked out all the details at 1:20. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, Knopf, 2012

Aboard Air Force One in Dallas, 22 November 1963.