The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)

by Robert A. Caro

If the story of the five years is a story of failure, the story of the seven weeks is a story of what rose out of failure: triumph. So on one level, the bio-graphical level, the recounting of the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the two stories in this book are really one story: a narrative with a single, sweeping arc. It rises from the depths of a man’s life, a period in which utterly without power he stands naked to his enemies, a period in which a man who dreads above all else what he calls “humiliation” suffers what he dreads day after day. It sweeps up to the heights of that life, as he is catapulted in an instant, in a gunshot, into the power he had always wanted—and he proceeds to demonstrate, almost in the instant he attains that power, how much he is capable of accomplishing with it.

Failure to triumph