![]() ![]() With each volume (a fifth is promised on Johnson’s final decade), the biography gains a cumulative richness that mostly justifies its length and Caro’s fondness for emphatic repetition, as well as frequent digressions into wonderful background material. Caro combines the skills of a historian, an investigative reporter and a novelist in this searching study of the transformative effect of power - its possession, its loss, its restoration - on the character and destiny of a man who from his teens had one overriding goal: to be president of the United States. ![]() ![]() Most of all, it is a triumphant drama of “political genius in action” as Johnson smoothly took up the reins of office in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, made his predecessor’s liberal agenda his own, and bent Congress to his will as Kennedy had never been able to do. It is a painful depiction of “greatness comically humbled” when Johnson gave up his unbridled authority as Senate majority leader to becomeJohn F. ![]() It is a searing account of ambition derailed by personal demons in Johnson’s unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. “The Passage of Power,” the fourth volume in Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, encompasses the period of LBJ’s deepest humiliation and his greatest accomplishment. ![]()
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