Download The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson AudioBook Free
National E book Critics Circle Award, Biography, 2013 The Passage of Power comes after Lyndon Johnson through both most annoying and the most triumphant intervals of his job - 1958 to 1964. It is a time that would see him operate the extraordinary vitality he had designed for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President within an supervision that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, enough time in which the presidency, the target he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it got an assassin's bullet to attain its mark. For the very first time, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson's eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting an employee fiercely faithful to his slain forerunner; a Congress identified to retain its power within the professional branch; and a land in surprise and mourning. We observe 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 looked like hopelessly logjammed and seizes over a dormant Kennedy program to set-up the revolutionary Conflict on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the politics genius with which Johnson possessed ruled the Senate now allowed him to help make the presidency wholly his own. This is without doubt Johnson's finest hour, before his aspirations and achievements were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam. It is an epic history told with a depth of fine detail possible only through the peerless research that sorts the building blocks of Robert Caro's work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman's verdict that "Caro has transformed the fine art of politics biography."
