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

by Robert A. Caro

But although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power; if men recognized the traits or realized the aims, they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins.

“I always ordered the egg sandwich, and I always wanted the ham and egg.” Nor was it financial factors alone that accounted for his empathy for the poor, for people of color—for the identification he felt with them. Respect was involved, too—respect denied because of prejudice. He had understood those kids in Cotulla, “the disappointment in their eyes … the quizzical expression on their faces: ‘Why don’t people like me? Why do they hate me because I am brown?’ ” They had been denied respect for a reason, the color of their skin, over which they had no control; so had he—for him the reason was his family, his father. “Never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.” He had “swore then and there that if I ever had the power to help those kids I was going to do it.” And now, he was to say, “I’ll let you in on a secret. I have the power.” “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” He could use only a modicum of presidential power as yet; he couldn’t—daren’t—rage and threaten and bully as yet. But whatever power he had, he was going to use—and no one knew how to use power better than he. If there was only one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to push it.

It was Abraham Lincoln who “struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.” How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history’s eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

The presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson would be a presidency marked by victories: his great personal victory in the 1964 election, and his great victories for legislation that are the legislative embodiment of the liberal spirit in all its nobility. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Medicare and Medicaid; Head Start; Model Cities. Government’s hand to help people caught in “the tentacles of circumstance.”