“Please don’t go, Jack.” I felt myself pressing this warning on President Kennedy as he prepared to fly to Texas in late November of 1963.

Such was my emotional response to Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, volume four of his great biography of Lyndon Johnson. And it wasn’t only the writer’s account of the Kennedy assassination that brought me to tears. Throughout my reading of the 600 pages, I often choked with deep feelings about the many people and dramatic events described.

Given Caro’s painstaking historical research, his promised fifth and last volume will presumably take many years to come. But I can hardly wait to read it, because he has an extraordinary grasp of characters and events.

Johnson’s acceptance of nomination as Vice-President at the 1960 Democratic convention shocked me at the time. How could Kennedy have chosen him, and why would he agree to surrender his role as Senate Majority Leader?

As became clear later, JFK judged, correctly, that he could not have won without the support of a running mate with roots in the South.

For his part LBJ was more calculating. He had his staff discover how many Vice Presidents had succeeded to the presidency. The answer was ten.

They also found that during the hundred years previous to 1960, five Presidents had died in office, one approximately every twenty years.

A large part of my fascination with LBJ comes from the way he mixed caring about other people with his way of manipulating others to benefit himself. He brought about great changes that improved the lives of the poor and people of color. At the same time, he could act brutally toward his political enemies and others.

Caro gives much attention to what he calls the “blood feud” between Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy. They had hated one another ever since their first encounter when Bobby worked for Joe McCarthy in the Senate.

During LBJ’s Vice Presidency, Bobby ignored him as much as possible. After the assassination of his brother, Bobby seems never to have referred to LBJ as President.

An irony connected with the murder of Jack Kennedy was the way it apparently saved Johnson from being exposed for misdeeds committed earlier in his career. Life Magazine and other publications were preparing to reveal serious financial violations, some of them connected with the television station he and his wife owned in Austin, Texas.

On the very morning JFK was killed, a Senate committee had begin hearings about illegal activities by one of LBJ’s closest aides. When LBJ became President, however, no one was about to bring charges of any kind against the nation’s new leader.

Readers of volume three of this biography will remember that it featured LBJ’s skills as Senate Majority Leader. Better than anyone else, before or since, he manipulated senators to advance the bills he considered important.

He exercised those same skills with superb effectiveness as President, getting Congress to pass bills  for tax cuts and civil rights. This legislation had been submitted to Congress by Kennedy but he might never been able to get it passed.

Caro offers detailed but spellbinding accounts of how LBJ manipulated a veteran Senator, Harry Byrd of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.  LBJ knew how to handle the crafty old Virginian like no one else and was rewarded with legislative success.

Scholars rate Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson as possibly the greatest in English literature. But now, I would ask Boswell to move over to make room for Robert Caro’s biography of another Johnson.