The battle for civil rights was the moral struggle at the core of American history, and the stakes in the Cold War were nothing short of the survival of mankind. 11, 2001, and for all the personal devastation caused by the economic collapse of 20, the issues that dominated the 1960s were larger. For all the horrors of the terrorist attacks of Sept. But we will have to wait until all the official papers are released, all the oral histories are recorded and once-loyal aides realize that there no longer is a risk to telling the full truth.īut it may be more than just a question of a biographer’s access, knowledge and style. Maybe someday talented writers will bring us this close to an Obama, a Romney, a George W. So much has been prologue that it seems strange to finally be there-in Volume 4, on -in an overheated Air Force One on the ground at Love Field in Dallas when Lyndon Johnson, with Jackie Kennedy in her bloodstained dress standing on his left, takes the oath of office on Nov. Much of this sense of emotional immediacy is a tribute to Caro’s masterly portrait of Johnson, whom he has been pursuing with Ahab-like persistence through four volumes and three decades. Describing their relationship after John Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, Caro writes in Shakespearean terms, “The President, the King, was dead, murdered, but the King had a brother, a brother who hated the new King.” The presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney seems like a factory-produced miniature compared to titanic and maddeningly complex historical figures like Johnson and his nemesis, Robert Kennedy. It’s the pictures that got small.” That’s the way I feel after losing myself in Caro’s stirring re-creation of early 1960s politics in “The Passage of Power,” published Tuesday.
During a lost weekend with the latest volume in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, I was reminded of Gloria Swanson playing the forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.”
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