The last third of The Passage of Power shows Johnson pulling off one bravura presidential performance after another. He knew that Kennedy’s murder demanded an official and authoritative investigation: “the atmosphere was poisonous and had to be cleared,” he later recalled. Caro does a fine job narrating how Johnson persuaded two key figures, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell, to serve despite their initial strong refusals to do so, playing on their sense of patriotism and, in Russell’s case, boxing him in with a fait accompli by announcing his appointment to the press, behind his back.

CARO’S MOST GRIPPING, even inspiring chapters detail how Johnson, surpassing his performance in 1957, began pushing long-stalled legislation forward while breaking down the formidable Southern resistance to the Civil Rights Bill which, against his advice, the Kennedy administration had sent up to the Hill. As Johnson predicted, the senior Southern senators were making trouble for most of what the White House had asked for, above all a tax cut bill designed to stimulate a sluggish economy. But with the Civil Rights Bill on the agenda, nothing would be done unless and until the administration removed it. So Johnson, suddenly and without preparation, was thrown into the battles over the budget and the tax cut. He fixed his attention on Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, a courteous, polite, but unyielding fiscal conservative. Caro’s account of how Johnson handled Byrd—with concessions wrapped in words and gestures of respect, designed to flatter the old man’s ego—is a small masterpiece of political history and political psychology from as close to the inside as Caro can get. In the end, Johnson “got” the ungettable Byrd—and with Byrd on board, he also got the tax cut bill through the Senate before the Civil Rights Bill came over from the House for debate.

The Civil Rights Bill, meanwhile, seemed to be withering on the vine, its supporters unable even to get it through the House Rules Committee let alone the full House and Senate. After backing the unusual strategy of forcing the bill out of committee with a discharge petition signed by the House majority, Johnson took the even riskier step of placing the full force of his office and his considerable political skills behind the effort, mixing appeals to conscience with promises of political pelf, including a grant of handsome government contracts to Purdue University, which happened to be in the district of House Minority Leader Charles Halleck.

By the end of January the bill had cleared the Rules committee, and eleven days later the House passed it and sent it to the Senate. The denouement involved Johnson marshaling liberal forces, led by Senator Hubert Humphrey, who were strong on oratory but weak on working the rules of the Senate, and an intense courtship of Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, which paid off when Republican votes broke the longest filibuster in Senate history. Finally the amended bill was approved by the House, taking until early July, well beyond the opening weeks that Caro says marked the passage of power to Lyndon Johnson. But as Caro notes, it all stemmed from Johnson’s decision, only ten days after President Kennedy’s death, to support the gambit of a discharge petition, the only possible instrument for saving the bill, and pressing forward with that gambit with every political tool at hand and every ounce of strength.

OF COURSE, as Caro would have it, Johnson’s dark thread did not disappear completely. Before the end of 1963, Johnson’s views on the deteriorating military situation in Vietnam were hardening, as were his linking of his thoughts on the conflict to the domestic political situation and his insistence on hiding his true intentions from Congress and the public. To John Knight of Knight Ridder newspapers, a skeptic on the war, Johnson remarked that he saw three options: to stay and fight, to try and neutralize North Vietnam (which he thought “totally impractical”), or to “run and let the dominoes start falling over. And God almighty, what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up compared to what they’d say now.” No one would ever accuse President Lyndon Johnson of “losing” Vietnam, but with an election coming in November, Johnson was not about to show his cards. Among these cards was a relatively minor escalation, which Johnson secretly approved on January 16, authorizing stepped-up covert operations in a variety of strategic sites—including a place, then known only to area specialists, called the Gulf of Tonkin. Alongside his early triumphs, Caro shows, President Johnson was quietly laying the foundation for disaster.

Meanwhile the feud with Robert Kennedy assumed new proportions, with Kennedy violently robbed of both the brother he adored and the power that had come with serving him. Completely shattered, Kennedy nevertheless stayed on at the Justice Department, if only to preserve some sense of continuity with his brother’s glory. But he bitterly resented how Johnson was getting the credit for achievements on civil rights that the Kennedy White House had initiated. And Johnson, always fearful that Bobby would one day try and reclaim the presidency, resented how, despite all of the achievements that were very much his, he still had to deal with the “snot-nosed little runt,” upholding the family honor and glamour. “Every day as soon as I opened the papers or turned on the television, there was something about Bobby Kennedy,” Johnson remarked years later. “Somehow or other it just didn’t seem fair.” For the time being, both men kept up a show of mutual allegiance, but the hatreds were unaltered—except that now Johnson held all the power.

Caro, who is fond of adumbration, is plainly hinting at his final volume to come. Crowding as much as he can of the “good” Lyndon and his landmark works into this volume—ascribing them to a fleeting few weeks, his “life’s finest moment,” when the “good” Lyndon managed to keep the “bad” Lyndon at bay—Caro enhances the moralism that underlies his entire approach to politics, history, and biography. Caro actually promises that the “bad” Lyndon—with what he calls “the elements of his personality [that were] absent during the transition”—is “shortly to reappear.” One gets the sense that the “good” Bobby, likewise already revealed along the way in The Passage of Power, will eventually emerge in counterpoint, the brighter and gentler angels of his nature finally overcoming his rude and ruthless passions.

But for the moment, the image that lingers is of Lyndon Johnson, in the political and spiritual culmination of his transition to the presidency, delivering the State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, plumping for the tax cut (and the reduction in federal spending that was part of Harry Byrd’s price for agreement), but also raising the stakes of social reform, moving beyond the Civil Rights Bill that still had yet to pass, moving beyond anything that any liberal Democrat could have imagined he would fight for, beyond anything any liberal Democratic chief executive, including the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, could have even proposed in earnest. “This administration,” he said—and then threw in, for emphasis, “today, here and now,” before he completed the vow—“declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” With those words, Johnson claimed the presidency as his own with the most sweeping call for social and economic justice ever uttered by an American president. The words would have meant nothing without what Walter Lippmann called, quoted by Caro, “the political gifts for which Lyndon Johnson is celebrated.”

VI.

WHAT MIGHT any of this have to do with our own times? It is obviously absurd to imagine that Caro designed The Passage of Power—a book ten years in the making—as a commentary on current events. In response to those liberals who see in Caro’s description of Johnson’s expert dealings with a difficult Congress a reproach, intended or not, of President Obama, Caro sharply denies it. “I happen to think he’s made great strides,” he recently told an interviewer about Obama; indeed, for all of the obvious differences in their political styles, he sees something of Johnson in his successor. “People find a lot wrong with [Obama’s] health care legislation, as do I, the bill that’s passed,” he observes, “but I keep remembering something that Lyndon Johnson said. Once we pass it, we can always go back and amend it. And I feel it was an accomplishment to get a health care bill.” Besides, he points out that LBJ’s civil rights reforms opened the way for an African American to be elected president: “Obama really is Lyndon Johnson’s legacy.”

But to adduce contemporary lessons from Caro’s story of Lyndon Johnson, especially from the triumphs of early 1964, and to understand why some liberals have for the moment come to assess Johnson more positively, it is not enough to seize on legacies or to dwell only on political tactics and style, important as they may be. It is more important to take account of the respective political situations in 1963 and 2009—and how Johnson’s historical understanding of and grappling with the immediate realities he faced in the presidency differed from Obama’s handling of his own situation.

Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington in 1937, a young New Dealer congressman—and the following year, he witnessed and survived a conservative revolution that redefined national politics. The recession of 1937–1938, along with the failure of FDR’s court-packing scheme and his effort to purge conservative Democratic candidates in favor of New Dealers, cost the Democrats a net loss of seventy-two seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate in the elections of 1938. Those results signaled the beginnings of a new bipartisan conservative working majority of Midwestern Republicans and Southern segregationist Democrats that would thwart liberal politics for decades.

Johnson made his way in the world of that majority, rising to the highest levels of the Democratic leadership by accommodating himself to its limits. As Senate minority and then majority leader in the 1950s, he learned to work with the so-called “Modern Republican” administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower to offset the rise of the hard Republican right epitomized by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and even, in 1957, to secure passage of the weak but symbolically important Civil Rights Bill. Elected vice president three years later, Johnson understood as well as anyone the power of the enduring bipartisan conservative coalition and the imperative of attacking it head on in order to win any reform legislation—and he understood how it might best be done. John Kennedy, who failed to pass a single important piece of domestic legislation in nearly three years in office, could have put that understanding to good use, but instead he froze Johnson out.

After Dallas, when he would turn a dead man’s program into a martyr’s cause, fastening once again on civil rights, Johnson was more than well-prepared. He would, in effect, need to create his own majorities in Congress—not in the name of an ideology, personal branding, or dream of some new fanciful bipartisanship, but piecemeal. He would do so as each ever-shifting political situation arose, relying on a thorough knowledge of the rules of both houses of Congress and just as thorough knowledge of the men he needed to persuade. Thus, to pass the tax cut bill and clear the way for the Civil Rights Bill, he picked the lock of the Senate Finance Committee by winning over Harry Byrd, the senior Democratic member of the venerable conservative majority; and to secure the Civil Rights Bill, with Humphrey’s help, he seduced the Republican leader, Everett Dirksen. And by the end of the year, thanks in part to the Republicans’ overreaction in nominating Barry Goldwater for the presidency, Johnson had obliterated the bipartisan anti-reform alliance and swept in the enormous, liberal Democratic majorities of the eightieth Congress that would swiftly approve, by lopsided margins, the Voting Rights Bill, Medicare, Medicaid, Project Head Start, and the other programs of the Great Society.

BARACK OBAMA came to the presidency with enormous gifts but only four years of indifferent government experience in Washington, which partly accounted for his perception of recent political history and the crisis he faced, above all his notion of the Republican Party. Since the departure of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and especially the House, had lurched fitfully further to the right, their caucus centered in the white conservative South that Johnson and the Democrats had abandoned when they fought for civil rights and which Goldwater first gathered up for the GOP. Like the conservative counter-revolution of 1938 and after, this had been the overriding reality of congressional politics after 1994.

Following the defeat of President Bill Clinton’s health care reform early in his first term, the Republicans regained the House majority led by the right-wing agitator Newt Gingrich; and after Clinton recovered to outfox Gingrich and then win re-election, the Republicans pushed ever further to the right, under the command of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who commandeered the impeachment farce and then forced Gingrich out. The conservative five-to-four majority on the Supreme Court placed George W. Bush in the White House, but Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” quickly gave way to the brutal and politicized methods of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. The DeLay-led right-wing Republican Congress was happy to go along, even after DeLay’s money-laundering corruption came to light, after which the Democrats regained the House majority in 2006. By then, most of the country had turned fiercely against Bush—and so would the irreducible hard-right base over his desperate effort to stanch the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression with a massive bailout of financial institutions. This right-wing revulsion against Bush as a secret “big-government” betrayer would in time explode as the Tea Party.

Looking back on this history, the impeccably centrist political scientists Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann have recently observed that the undeniable reality for decades—obscured by a cowed press corps intent on proving its objectivity—is that right-wing Republicans, especially in Congress, have been the cause of the intensified polarization in Washington, turning their party into “an insurgent outlier in American politics.” Yet in the face of this reality, Obama propagated the idea that both parties were responsible for the acidulous politics of the 1990s, that “politics as usual” and “the old Washington games with the same old Washington players” had produced stalemate. He offered instead a transcendent and “transformative” post-partisanship that would carry the country to the higher ground of peace, prosperity, and social justice. He would be the latest antidote to the kind of low political scheming that an earlier generation of reform Democrats had seen and detested in Lyndon Johnson and, in many cases, in Robert Kennedy as well.

Obama came into office in 2009 with a more favorable political situation than Johnson faced in 1963 and 1964. To be sure, Kennedy’s martyrdom gave Johnson enormous public sympathy, which he was unashamed about exploiting politically. And by the time Obama became president, the sort of right-wing revanchism and even paranoia that in Johnson’s day occupied the margins of American politics, in groups such as the John Birch Society, had become part of the mainstream inside the Republican Party as well as on cable television and the Internet. But unlike the longentrenched bipartisan conservative majority that Johnson confronted, Obama faced a fractured opposition party that was in public disgrace after the eight-year Bush regime and whose candidate, Senator John McCain, had just conducted the feeblest presidential campaign since the Michael Dukakis campaign in 1988. (Even Dukakis had not given America an indignity on the order of Sarah Palin.)

Johnson was an accidental president who had run on a ticket that barely squeaked by three years earlier; Obama had been elected to office with the first presidential popular majority that his party had enjoyed in more than thirty years and the largest in more than forty. On Inauguration Day, Obama enjoyed an astounding 69 percent public approval rating. More important, he enjoyed a seventy-nine-seat Democratic majority in the House and a eight-seat Democratic majority in the Senate—very close to a working party majority, which he would enjoy, briefly, during the summer of 2009, without the Southern-Midwestern conservative axis that Johnson confronted. Johnson, by contrast, began his presidency in political loneliness, detested by Kennedy liberals, alienated from Southern Democrats, and mistrusted by Republicans. And out of this isolation he produced a genuinely transformative presidency.

OBAMA’S LIBERAL CRITICS have complained that, despite his administration’s accomplishments, he did not make the most of his historic opportunity. To his credit, Obama salvaged the auto industry, and he addressed the financial and economic emergency with a modest stimulus plan that, despite his sweet reason, still won not a single Republican vote. He then turned to his signal effort, health care reform—and the White House handed the issue in the Senate over to the dilatory Senator Max Baucus of Montana and the so-called Gang of Six. By the time Obama, prodded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, finally signed what had become of the Affordable Care Bill, the White House had either backed off from early avowals, above all its support for a public option, or negotiated away important provisions to the big pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies. And still, after all the tussling, only a single Republican in either chamber voted for the amended bill.

Nor did Obama’s winning the historic if weakened health care act pave the way either for a closing of the partisan gap or a public endorsement of Obama’s achievement. Whipped up by Republican demagogy that health care reform proved Obama was a fearsome “socialist,” the electorate handed the House majority to the GOP in 2010 and whittled down to six the Democratic majority in the Senate. The White House and Senate leadership had the chance to alter the rules on filibustering, before the new Congress began its work—the kind of maneuver that Lyndon Johnson could have been counted on to pull off. Instead, boxed in, Obama pursued a “grand bargain” when the Republicans threatened to throw the already fragile economy into utter chaos during the debt-ceiling crisis last summer. Some influential Democrats urged the president to shut down the entire phony crisis by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment that prohibits shenanigans with the full faith and credit of the United States. It is, again, the kind of thing that Lyndon Johnson would conceivably have done, if only to show his opponents that the president of the United States—“your President,” he would have said, with an edge—would not put up with zealous, posturing partisans threatening the nation’s security.

It is at this intersection of past and present that The Passage of Power connects with our own political problems. But finally comparisons between Obama and Johnson—the sort of presentism that is always a temptation—are beside the historical point. In the last third of his book, Robert Caro sees the atrocious Lyndon Johnson getting a grip on his baser drives just long enough to pull the country through its trauma and undertake what would become his greatest political achievements. He leaves us assured that, like a golfer teeing up, he is preparing his readers for the full force of what he will undoubtedly show as the revived hateful Johnson ruining everything in Vietnam. But with this penultimate volume, he offers, perhaps inadvertently, a primer about the sources and uses of executive power as understood by one of the truly formidable presidents in our history. Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt all combined keen historical awareness with a gift for sizing up political situations inside Washington and pursuing their goals with deeply effective governing skills, tactical as well as strategic. These qualities are no guarantee of success, but they have been essential to securing the greater good. And these were qualities that Lyndon Johnson possessed in abundance.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday). This article appeared in the July 12, 2012 issue of the magazine.

Editor's Note: Due to an editing error, the original version of this review misstated that the Democrats enjoyed a ten-seat majority in the Senate on January 20, 2009. Continuing challenges to Al Franken's election delayed the Democrats' securing their ten-seat majority until July 7, 2009, which then reverted to a nine-seat majority upon Edward Kennedy's death the following August 25. TNR regrets the error.