Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters. Sam” Raybum (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr.
We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon-raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin-lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible” goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be. We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate-coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered.
The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart.
No president-no era of American politics-has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak. The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time.
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