  We calculate the form factors for the semileptonic decays of the $B$ meson to
$D$ and $D^*$ mesons in a Bethe-Salpeter model. We show that our model is
consistent with the constraints of Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET) and we
extract the matrix elements that represent the $1/m_Q$ corrections to the form
factors in HQET. With available data, we obtain $V_{cb} $=$ (31.9 \pm
1.4)\times10^{-3}$.
