# The Passage of Power ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51pQ7T3lOiL._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Robert A. Caro]] - Full Title: The Passage of Power - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. When Lyndon Johnson had accumulated enough power to do something—a small something—for civil rights in the Senate, he had done it, inadequate though it may have been. Now, suddenly, he had a lot more power, and it didn’t take him long to reveal at least part of what he wanted to do with it. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=181)) - Baker says, “his attitude was, ‘I’m not running, but I’m gonna win.’ ([Location 1711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=1711)) - Harding in 1923 and of course Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. During that time span, in other words, a President had died in office approximately every twenty years. There had been eighteen Presidents during that time, and five out of eighteen were odds of less than one out of four. ([Location 3029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=3029)) - Theodore White wrote (after trying to reconcile them): “It is a trap of history to believe that eyewitnesses remember accurately what they have lived through. ([Location 3403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=3403)) - In the election, on November 8, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket carried Texas, 1,167,932 votes to 1,121,699; Kennedy won by 46,233 votes out of 2,311,670 cast, winning 50.5 percent of the votes to 48.5 for Nixon (1 percent were cast for candidates of two minor parties). Hardly had the votes been tallied when Texas Republicans charged that tens of thousands of them were fraudulent—and that tens of thousands of other votes, legitimate votes, had fraudulently been invalidated, and not counted. The GOP complaints dealt not primarily with the state’s big cities—Nixon carried Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston by almost 100,000 votes—where voting machines were used, but rather with the scores of counties in which voting was still by paper ballot, and in which voters had to sign numbered “poll lists” which made it possible for officials to know for whom they had cast their ballots, making a mockery of the concept of the secret ballot; well over half the ballots cast in Texas in 1960 were paper. GOP complaints about most of the state centered on a technicality. Under a new state law—the 1960 election was the first time it was in effect—voters who used paper ballots were required not only to mark the candidate of their choice, but also to cross off the candidates they opposed, not only the candidate of the other major party, but the candidates of the two minor parties as well. Although one of the law’s other provisions allowed judges to count votes (even if this requirement was not complied with) if the voter’s intent was clear, the GOP, ([Location 3932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=3932)) - noting that the longtime Democratic dominance in the state meant that the election machinery—from precinct judges to the State Board of Elections canvassers—was overwhelmingly Democratic, charged that in pro-Nixon precincts many ballots were invalidated, in pro-Kennedy precincts far fewer. Republicans said that a spot check of just ninety-four precincts showed that fifty-nine thousand ballots had been invalidated; in some precincts, heavily pro-Nixon, the disqualification rate was 50 percent, they said. About certain areas of Texas, however—the sprawling Mexican-American slum in San Antonio that was known as the “West Side” and the impoverished Mexican-American counties south of San Antonio in the Lower Rio Grande Valley that formed the border between Texas and Mexico—the Republican complaints were not about technicalities. ([Location 3943](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=3943)) - Between 1948 and 1960, little had changed. In the latter election as in the former, George Parr counted them for Lyndon Johnson. The first sign was the pace of the counting. By the evening of election day, several hours after polls had closed, veteran reporters had noticed what one called the “slow-motion count of votes” in Duval—they knew what that meant; that the Duke was holding back a final tally until he saw whether the race was close, so that if it was, he could give his allies the votes they needed. At midnight, only one of Duval’s ten precincts had reported a final tally. Then, finally, came the count itself. The Duke controlled not only Duval County but Starr County as well as a personal fiefdom. Duval voted for Kennedy-Johnson by a margin of 3,803 to 808, Starr by 4,051 to 284. In a petition for a recount filed with the state canvassing board three days after the election, Republicans charged that pistols were carried by “[election] judges and ([Location 3979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=3979)) - others in Duval County so that voters were intimidated and coerced.” Then there was Jim Wells County, or to be precise, the county’s Precinct Thirteen: “Box 13,” the precinct, already legendary in Texas political history, that in 1948 had provided the decisive margin for Lyndon Johnson by giving him two hundred new votes—the votes that were cast in alphabetical order and all in the same handwriting six days after the polls had closed. The Mexican-American reform movement had taken control of most of Jim Wells from Parr, but not the thirteenth precinct, the poorest Mexican district in the county seat of Alice. In 1960, that box gave Lyndon Johnson’s ticket a margin of 1,144 to 45, or twenty-five to one, so the ticket came out of the heart of the Duke’s Rio Grande domain with more than 88 percent of the vote—and a plurality of more than 7,800 votes. The results were almost as lopsided in the counties controlled by Parr’s allies, who followed his lead. In Webb County, it was 10,059 to 1,802, more than five to one; in Jim Hogg County, 1,255 to 244, more than five to one; in Brooks, 1,934 to 540, almost four to one. The nine counties controlled by Parr and his allies reported a total of 37,063 votes to the Texas Election Bureau. Almost 30,000 of them—29,377, or 79 percent—were for Kennedy-Johnson.2 The Democratic ticket therefore came out of those counties with a plurality of 21,691. ([Location 3986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=3986)) - How he might have reacted had Lyndon Johnson not assisted with his court case can be today, long after his death, a matter only for speculation, since, so far as the author can determine, no historian or journalist raised the matter with him before his death. But the point is moot in any event: Johnson produced the legal help, and Parr produced the votes—the 21,000 plurality. Thirty-one thousand and 21,000—in an election that was decided by 46,000 votes, the weight of those votes could hardly have been a minor factor. Whatever the explanation for the results from the “ethnic bloc” in Texas, John Kennedy had selected Lyndon Johnson in part to take back Texas for the Democratic presidential ticket, and Johnson had done it. ([Location 4030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=4030)) - “The Jews in Palestine have become an immensely proud and determined people … a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation,” he wrote. They have “an undying spirit” the Arabs could never have; as for the United States, its failure to come more strongly to Israel’s assistance should be a matter of shame. ([Location 5869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=5869)) - A master of an art recognizes another master when he encounters one, and Johnson knew there was a master battling—and counting votes—against him. ([Location 6241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=6241)) - (“in the peculiar Washington world here under review, wives were not the only women included in social activity.… One way or another, young women become more or less legal tender in the ancient and crafty commerce of getting things done”), ([Location 7473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=7473)) - Writing shortly before Kennedy’s assassination, the respected columnist Walter Lippmann said: “This Congress has gone further than any other within memory to replace debate and decision by delay and stultification. This is one of those moments when there is reason to wonder whether the congressional system as it now operates is not a grave danger to the Republic.” Commenting ([Location 8569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0062B0844&location=8569))