The Passage of Power
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 4
By: Robert A. Caro
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 4
Length: 32 hrs and 45 mins

Reading The Path to Power and The Means of Ascent back to back was extraordinarily revealing. Together, they begin the story of a man consumed by the pursuit of power, not merely as a means of accomplishing something, but almost as a fundamental need.

What repeatedly shocked me in The Path to Power was the amount Johnson was willing to do for even the smallest advantage. Caro describes a political culture in which a degree of corruption and manipulation was expected, but Johnson continually pushed beyond what others accepted as normal. Even as a congressional secretary, he transformed the Little Congress, expanded its electorate, and maneuvered himself into its speakership. It was a minor organization with little actual authority, yet he pursued control of it with the same intensity he would later bring to national politics.

That intensity is one of the great contradictions in Johnson. He was capable of driving himself into sickness in pursuit of his goals. He worked with an almost frightening determination, and he possessed a remarkable ability to understand people, institutions, weaknesses, and opportunities. When there was a gap in the system, he found it. When there was someone who could open a door, he knew whom to call. He knew how to grease the wheels because he understood both the machinery and the people operating it.

At times, he used that ability to accomplish genuine good. He could help people in his district obtain electricity, employment, assistance, or access to a government that otherwise seemed impossibly distant. He knew how to make institutions function for people who lacked power of their own. Yet even here, Caro leaves the disturbing question of motive. Johnson wanted to help, but he also wanted gratitude, dependence, loyalty, and advancement. His public service and his hunger for personal power were so intertwined that they become difficult to separate.

As a legislator, he was not principally a creator of laws or ideas. His gift was not authorship but manipulation. He knew how to move people and systems until they produced the result he wanted. That ability would eventually make him enormously effective, but these early years show why effectiveness alone is not virtue. The capacity to get things done is dangerous when it belongs to a man who believes almost any method is justified by victory.

Caro presents someone fascinating, energetic, gifted, and deeply troubling. Johnson could accomplish things that other men could not, partly because resisting him was often more exhausting than surrendering. He was the kind of man people moved aside for, not necessarily because he was right, but because standing against him required more strength than many possessed.

I do not look at Johnson primarily with hatred. Grief seems closer to the truth. He possessed abilities that might have made him a great servant, but from an early age he appears to have trained those abilities toward domination. He wanted to stand above men, to receive their admiration, and to make himself indispensable. The Path to Power is therefore not merely the story of a man rising. It is the story of a man learning how much of himself and others he was willing to sacrifice in order to rise.