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The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1
The Path to Power
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. 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 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. 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.
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. 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 watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. 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 follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam” Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR 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 . . .
Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection” in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines.
We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness” of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.
Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.
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. 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.
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. 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 watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. 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 follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam” Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR 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 . . .
Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection” in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines.
We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness” of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.
Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.
882 pages, Paperback
First published November 21, 1982
About the author
Robert A. Caro
45 books2,412 followersRobert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president. Caro has been described as "the most influential biographer of the last century".
For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, two National Book Awards (including one for Lifetime Achievement), the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist"), three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Mencken Award for Best Book, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the D. B. Hardeman Prize, and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal.
Due to Caro's reputation for exhaustive research and detail, he is sometimes invoked by reviewers of other writers who are called "Caro-esque" for their own extensive research.
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president. Caro has been described as "the most influential biographer of the last century".
For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, two National Book Awards (including one for Lifetime Achievement), the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist"), three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Mencken Award for Best Book, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the D. B. Hardeman Prize, and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal.
Due to Caro's reputation for exhaustive research and detail, he is sometimes invoked by reviewers of other writers who are called "Caro-esque" for their own extensive research.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,392 reviews
September 10, 2013
Not being American myself, I have no particular interest in US presidential history, unless that history can be shoehorned into an entertaining biopic, preferably with a British actor in the lead role. (I wonder who they’ll get to play Obama when the time comes. Liam Neeson?)
This book, though. This book is something else. ‘Political biography’ is too pissant a term for this Ahab-like undertaking. I’d call it a biographie-fleuve, but I don’t think that’s a real word even in French. Let’s just call it a great big fucking book, in every sense of the various adjectives.
It’s somehow fitting that, in the same week that The Path to Power was keeping me up till 3 or 4 a.m. every night, I was also working my way through the first two seasons of Breaking Bad. Seen side by side like this, LBJ the wheeler-dealer and Walter White the meth dealer share a certain resemblance; they inhabit the same moral penumbra. Both men get caught up in a dangerous game that they turn out to be really, really good at, and both have, shall we say, an open-door policy vis-à-vis the dark side. Of course, LBJ never strangled anyone with a bike lock (as far as we know) but he still had enough blood on his hands to incarnadine the multitudinous seas, or at least turn them a ghastly pink.
People are going to be arguing about Robert Caro’s portrayal of Lyndon Johnson for decades to come, but even on the most generous interpretation of the facts, it seems pretty clear that the 36th POTUS was at once a crook, a liar, a shameless toady, a serial adulterer and a complete physical coward. Just for starters. He was also, and equally clearly, a political genius who did more to liberate and enfranchise his fellow citizens than any president since Lincoln. So there’s that too.
Still, for all Johnson’s Shakespearean complexities, this wouldn’t be the great big fucking book it is if Robert Caro had stuck to his safe, biographical bailiwick. Almost more fascinating than its central figure are the rich little digressions and sidelights it contains. To use an unfashionable word, it’s an edifying book: it teaches you stuff you didn’t even know you wanted to know, stuff like the history of the Texas Hill Country, or the domestic chores of farmers' wives, or the rococo politics of dam-building under the New Deal, or the grotesque career of Pappy O’Daniel. And then there’s the plain old gossip, such as the astonishing fact that the young LBJ had a passionate and very illicit affair with one of the most beautiful women of the day, who, decades later, would end up burning all his love letters out of mortification over the Vietnam War. See? Who wouldn’t want to know that?
Bring on volume two! And season three! I'm starting to get a taste for all this skeevy ambivalence and moral murk.
This book, though. This book is something else. ‘Political biography’ is too pissant a term for this Ahab-like undertaking. I’d call it a biographie-fleuve, but I don’t think that’s a real word even in French. Let’s just call it a great big fucking book, in every sense of the various adjectives.
It’s somehow fitting that, in the same week that The Path to Power was keeping me up till 3 or 4 a.m. every night, I was also working my way through the first two seasons of Breaking Bad. Seen side by side like this, LBJ the wheeler-dealer and Walter White the meth dealer share a certain resemblance; they inhabit the same moral penumbra. Both men get caught up in a dangerous game that they turn out to be really, really good at, and both have, shall we say, an open-door policy vis-à-vis the dark side. Of course, LBJ never strangled anyone with a bike lock (as far as we know) but he still had enough blood on his hands to incarnadine the multitudinous seas, or at least turn them a ghastly pink.
People are going to be arguing about Robert Caro’s portrayal of Lyndon Johnson for decades to come, but even on the most generous interpretation of the facts, it seems pretty clear that the 36th POTUS was at once a crook, a liar, a shameless toady, a serial adulterer and a complete physical coward. Just for starters. He was also, and equally clearly, a political genius who did more to liberate and enfranchise his fellow citizens than any president since Lincoln. So there’s that too.
Still, for all Johnson’s Shakespearean complexities, this wouldn’t be the great big fucking book it is if Robert Caro had stuck to his safe, biographical bailiwick. Almost more fascinating than its central figure are the rich little digressions and sidelights it contains. To use an unfashionable word, it’s an edifying book: it teaches you stuff you didn’t even know you wanted to know, stuff like the history of the Texas Hill Country, or the domestic chores of farmers' wives, or the rococo politics of dam-building under the New Deal, or the grotesque career of Pappy O’Daniel. And then there’s the plain old gossip, such as the astonishing fact that the young LBJ had a passionate and very illicit affair with one of the most beautiful women of the day, who, decades later, would end up burning all his love letters out of mortification over the Vietnam War. See? Who wouldn’t want to know that?
Bring on volume two! And season three! I'm starting to get a taste for all this skeevy ambivalence and moral murk.
January 16, 2021
“Knowing Lyndon Baines Johnson – understanding the character of the thirty-sixth President of the United States – is essential to understanding the history of the United States in the twentieth century. During his Presidency, his Great Society, with its education acts and civil-rights acts and anti-poverty acts, brought to crest tides of social change that had begun flowing during the New Deal a quarter of a century before; after his Presidency, the currents of social change were to flow – abruptly – in a very different course. When he became President, 16,000 American advisors were serving in Vietnam – in a war that was essentially a Vietnamese war. When he left the Presidency, 536,000 American combat troops were fighting in Vietnam’s jungles, 30,000 Americans had died there, and the war had been “Americanized” – transformed into a war that would, before it was ended, exhaust America financially and soak up the blood of thousands upon thousands of young men; into a war abroad that at home caused civil disobedience that verged on civil insurrection; into a war that transformed America’s image of itself as well as its image in the eyes of the world. Lyndon Johnson’s full term as President began in triumph: the 1964 landslide that Theodore H. White calls “the greatest electoral victory that any man ever won in an election of free peoples.” It ended – to the chant, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” from a generation to whom he was the hated war maker – with his announcement that he would not again ask the nation to elect him its leader. The Great Society; Vietnam – the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, only five years in span, was nonetheless a watershed in America’s history, one of the great divides in the evolution of its foreign and domestic policies…”
- Robert Caro, The Path to Power
Warning: Once you begin The Path to Power, the first volume in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, you can never go back. You will never again be able to read a biography without comparing that biography to this. You will never again read about a person’s life without saying: Caro could have done this better. For me, the still-uncompleted series (up to four books now) comprises the greatest biography I have ever read.
It is not even a contest.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is like a baby’s first gulp of oxygen; it is like your first kiss; it is like scaling a mountain and looking down at everything around you.
It’s that good. Seriously.
Any great biography has to begin with a great subject. Here, that subject is Lyndon Baines Johnson, a poor Texas boy born in the dry Hill Country, who went to a no-name teaching college, who taught Mexican kids on the border, who worked himself nearly to death to win a congressional seat, who likely stole his Senate seat, who became the most powerful Majority Leader in Senate history, who became an accidental president, who spent his life accumulating power, and then spent that power on civil rights, voting rights, and the poor, and who then broke himself on the rock of Vietnam.
William Manchester said of Douglas MacArthur: “He was a thundering paradox of a man.”
So it could be said of Johnson. His complexities are titanic; the smallness within him was at constant war with the transcendent. He was crude, cruel, a money-grubber, quite possibly a lawbreaker. But he was there when the wheel turned on civil rights, when the dam in the Senate, shored up by a century of southern obstruction, broke.
He helped turn the wheel. He helped break that dam.
In this, the first volume, Caro spends a massive amount of time on Lyndon’s family, his birth, and his upbringing. You know the parts of a man’s life that the typical biographer spends between thirty and sixty pagers covering? Caro devotes hundreds of pages. He dives into Lyndon’s family history, especially his father, a Texas politician known for his hard work, his honesty, and his poverty.
A big chunk of The Path to Power is given over to bringing the Hill Country to life, because its problems formed a crucial part of Lyndon Johnson's psyche. Much of his drive, his ambition, his need to dominate, came from growing up in this hardscrabble land. In telling this tale, Caro employs elegantly structured prose and a deep reservoir of facts. “The Hill Country,” he writes, “was a trap baited with water.”
When first settled, during a wet period, newly-arrived pioneers thought this was a suitable place for farming. It was not. Instead, it was on a meteorological borderline that determined the fate of all who came to live there:
What separates Caro from other biographers is that Lyndon’s world is as important as Lyndon, both because he was shaped by it, and because later, he would do the shaping. Caro never got to interview Lyndon himself, and – as though to make up for this – he is fanatical about talking to everyone else. The result is a flood-tide of details, many of them quotidian, that show us Lyndon’s development from the day of his birth.
Because this is a multivolume work, Caro is able to expand his view, giving us long digressions on the other stars in Lyndon’s orbit. There is, for example, an entire chapter on Sam Rayburn that is almost worth the original hardcover price alone. When Caro discusses Lyndon’s attempt to push rural electrification for the Hill Country folk, he does it by taking us through the life of a Hill Country woman, and how much water she needed to haul and boil every day to cook and clean. Caro does not tell – he shows. Not only does he show, but he delivers incredible narrative set-pieces that put you right in the moments, big and small, that shaped Lyndon’s journey.
My two biggest complaints in any biography are this: Lack of inner knowledge on who the subject is as a person; and lack of context. These are two facets at which Caro directs a laser focus.
One of the things that surprised me when I first read this was Caro’s barely-concealed disdain for Johnson (which is even more striking in the second volume). I’ve thought about it a lot, since it is such a strange phenomena. Most of the time, a biographer tends to be sympathetic to his or her subject, even if that subject happens to be a terrible person. It is only natural. After all, if you are a writer, you are probably not going to spend years of your life researching someone you find absolutely abhorrent or without redeeming virtue (biographers of Hitler and Stalin excepted, of course).
Upon reflection, though, maybe Caro’s skepticism is a good thing. It might be, in fact, the only way to get to the unknowable core of Lyndon Johnson.
The Path to Power ends on the verge of Lyndon’s infamous U.S. Senate race against Coke Stevenson, a race that is covered exhaustively in Means of Ascent, the second volume in the series.
When you finish, you will find yourself reaching immediately for that next entry. You will want to read it, and read it quickly. If anything slows you down, it will be the knowledge that once you have finished it, you can never read it for the first time again.
Lyndon B. Johnson is a gargantuan figure in American history. Caro is his equal as scribe.
- Robert Caro, The Path to Power
Warning: Once you begin The Path to Power, the first volume in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, you can never go back. You will never again be able to read a biography without comparing that biography to this. You will never again read about a person’s life without saying: Caro could have done this better. For me, the still-uncompleted series (up to four books now) comprises the greatest biography I have ever read.
It is not even a contest.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is like a baby’s first gulp of oxygen; it is like your first kiss; it is like scaling a mountain and looking down at everything around you.
It’s that good. Seriously.
Any great biography has to begin with a great subject. Here, that subject is Lyndon Baines Johnson, a poor Texas boy born in the dry Hill Country, who went to a no-name teaching college, who taught Mexican kids on the border, who worked himself nearly to death to win a congressional seat, who likely stole his Senate seat, who became the most powerful Majority Leader in Senate history, who became an accidental president, who spent his life accumulating power, and then spent that power on civil rights, voting rights, and the poor, and who then broke himself on the rock of Vietnam.
William Manchester said of Douglas MacArthur: “He was a thundering paradox of a man.”
So it could be said of Johnson. His complexities are titanic; the smallness within him was at constant war with the transcendent. He was crude, cruel, a money-grubber, quite possibly a lawbreaker. But he was there when the wheel turned on civil rights, when the dam in the Senate, shored up by a century of southern obstruction, broke.
He helped turn the wheel. He helped break that dam.
In this, the first volume, Caro spends a massive amount of time on Lyndon’s family, his birth, and his upbringing. You know the parts of a man’s life that the typical biographer spends between thirty and sixty pagers covering? Caro devotes hundreds of pages. He dives into Lyndon’s family history, especially his father, a Texas politician known for his hard work, his honesty, and his poverty.
A big chunk of The Path to Power is given over to bringing the Hill Country to life, because its problems formed a crucial part of Lyndon Johnson's psyche. Much of his drive, his ambition, his need to dominate, came from growing up in this hardscrabble land. In telling this tale, Caro employs elegantly structured prose and a deep reservoir of facts. “The Hill Country,” he writes, “was a trap baited with water.”
When first settled, during a wet period, newly-arrived pioneers thought this was a suitable place for farming. It was not. Instead, it was on a meteorological borderline that determined the fate of all who came to live there:
The line was an “isohyet” – a line drawn on a map so that all points along it have equal rainfall. This particular isohyet showed the westernmost limits in the United States along which the annual rainfall averages thirty inches; and a rainfall of thirty inches, when combined with two other factors – rate of evaporation (very high in the Hill Country), and seasonal distribution of rainfall (very uneven in the Hill Country, since most of it comes in spring or autumn thundershowers) – is the bare minimum needed to grow crops successfully. Even this amount of rainfall, “especially with its irregular seasonal distribution,” is, the United States Department of Agriculture would later state, “too low” for that purpose. East of that line, in other words, farmers would prosper; west of it, they couldn’t. And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet along the 98th meridian – almost exactly the border of the Hill Country. At the very moment, in which settlers entered that country in pursuit of their dream, they unknowingly crossed a line which made the realization of that dream impossible. And since rainfall diminishes quite rapidly westward, with every step they took into the Hill Country, the dream became more impossible still.
What separates Caro from other biographers is that Lyndon’s world is as important as Lyndon, both because he was shaped by it, and because later, he would do the shaping. Caro never got to interview Lyndon himself, and – as though to make up for this – he is fanatical about talking to everyone else. The result is a flood-tide of details, many of them quotidian, that show us Lyndon’s development from the day of his birth.
Because this is a multivolume work, Caro is able to expand his view, giving us long digressions on the other stars in Lyndon’s orbit. There is, for example, an entire chapter on Sam Rayburn that is almost worth the original hardcover price alone. When Caro discusses Lyndon’s attempt to push rural electrification for the Hill Country folk, he does it by taking us through the life of a Hill Country woman, and how much water she needed to haul and boil every day to cook and clean. Caro does not tell – he shows. Not only does he show, but he delivers incredible narrative set-pieces that put you right in the moments, big and small, that shaped Lyndon’s journey.
My two biggest complaints in any biography are this: Lack of inner knowledge on who the subject is as a person; and lack of context. These are two facets at which Caro directs a laser focus.
One of the things that surprised me when I first read this was Caro’s barely-concealed disdain for Johnson (which is even more striking in the second volume). I’ve thought about it a lot, since it is such a strange phenomena. Most of the time, a biographer tends to be sympathetic to his or her subject, even if that subject happens to be a terrible person. It is only natural. After all, if you are a writer, you are probably not going to spend years of your life researching someone you find absolutely abhorrent or without redeeming virtue (biographers of Hitler and Stalin excepted, of course).
Upon reflection, though, maybe Caro’s skepticism is a good thing. It might be, in fact, the only way to get to the unknowable core of Lyndon Johnson.
The Path to Power ends on the verge of Lyndon’s infamous U.S. Senate race against Coke Stevenson, a race that is covered exhaustively in Means of Ascent, the second volume in the series.
When you finish, you will find yourself reaching immediately for that next entry. You will want to read it, and read it quickly. If anything slows you down, it will be the knowledge that once you have finished it, you can never read it for the first time again.
Lyndon B. Johnson is a gargantuan figure in American history. Caro is his equal as scribe.
October 1, 2020
Robert A. Caro is the best biographer in the history of the world. That's not hyperbole, that's using GPS to locate the author's credentials. This book is an intellectual tour de force by a tireless researcher who has enough flair to magisterially concoct a view into his subject in astounding details.
This book was written in 4k and beyond. I'm grateful that I had the ripening wherewithal to know about the project that was this biography. The topic was so fascinating that the historical figures look airbrushed in their narration. Such is the color imprinted and injected into the life of greats and lesser participants in this nonfiction book.
I won't urge you to read this. You'll count your blessings if you do. But this is not a romance, not a cozy, not a thriller, not a horror, not a historical mystery. This is what unites us non scholar readers and reading this book makes one an intellectual for the duration of the book. Whether you stay so is up to the life that you lead. I myself, frankly my dear, am not one.
This book was written in 4k and beyond. I'm grateful that I had the ripening wherewithal to know about the project that was this biography. The topic was so fascinating that the historical figures look airbrushed in their narration. Such is the color imprinted and injected into the life of greats and lesser participants in this nonfiction book.
I won't urge you to read this. You'll count your blessings if you do. But this is not a romance, not a cozy, not a thriller, not a horror, not a historical mystery. This is what unites us non scholar readers and reading this book makes one an intellectual for the duration of the book. Whether you stay so is up to the life that you lead. I myself, frankly my dear, am not one.
January 9, 2017
"...if Lyndon Johnson was not a reader of books, he was a reader of men--a reader with a rare ability to see into their souls."
-- Robert A Caro, The Path to Power
I'll write more tomorrow, but if the next three (and the final, yet to be written book) are as polished and well-researched as this one, this may end up being the definitive biography of any president. I loved Morris' Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy. It and Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton were nearly tied in my affection and esteem as my favorite political biographies. This one just jumped ahead.
Caro writes as well about place and people as John McPhee. He seems to possess all the qualities you want in an academic and popular historian. I bought these novels years ago. They sat collecting dust behind me and haunted me, but I was afraid to pick them up. They are just damn intimidating. Not just their thickness, but also the heft. The books are dense and heavy. So, each time I turned to read them, I imagined some immense mountain I would need to climb. But Caro's narrative is so easy, so fascinating, so compelling that the mountain practically pulls you up. After the first chapter I had a hard time putting this beast down.
-- Robert A Caro, The Path to Power
I'll write more tomorrow, but if the next three (and the final, yet to be written book) are as polished and well-researched as this one, this may end up being the definitive biography of any president. I loved Morris' Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy. It and Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton were nearly tied in my affection and esteem as my favorite political biographies. This one just jumped ahead.
Caro writes as well about place and people as John McPhee. He seems to possess all the qualities you want in an academic and popular historian. I bought these novels years ago. They sat collecting dust behind me and haunted me, but I was afraid to pick them up. They are just damn intimidating. Not just their thickness, but also the heft. The books are dense and heavy. So, each time I turned to read them, I imagined some immense mountain I would need to climb. But Caro's narrative is so easy, so fascinating, so compelling that the mountain practically pulls you up. After the first chapter I had a hard time putting this beast down.
January 31, 2019
I had all four of Caro's LBJ books (with at least one more coming) on my shelf for many years before deciding to take the plunge. I'm a slow reader, as evidenced by the near six weeks it took me to finish this book.
LBJ has always fascinated me and I've always considered him one of our most interesting 20th Century Presidents. After reading the first volume of Caro, I still find Johnson fascinating and now know a LOT more about his early life than I previously knew (which was very little). Even so, Johnson, in some respects, appears more enigmatic and sphinx-like after finishing the book and I have a feeling that while a great portion of his political life may be chronicled, Lyndon Johnson the man may take a phalanx of psychoanalysts all working with Caro's assiduity to understand what formed LBJ and led to many of his sometimes inexplicable and contradictory actions.
Some aspects of LBJ seem clear. From childhood, Johnson was coddled by his mother, who was a former teacher and a cultured and sophisticated lady considering her roots in the Texas Hill Country. Lyndon adored his mother and even into his mid-20's they exchanged letters almost every day. LBJ's relationship with his father was more complicated. As a youth, his father served as a congressman in the Texas legislature and LBJ would accompany him to Austin where he was a close observer of his father's affable way with both his constituents and his legislative peers. The young Lyndon would imitate his father's habit of a warm handshake where both hands were employed, one grasping the hand of the person he was greeting and the other grasping the forearm as a gesture of friendly reinforcement. The father also had a habit of standing quite close to a fellow legislator as he talked and often would grasp the lapel of the congressman during his bantering.
As a child, Johnson had a charisma about him and a wilfulness. He was a mass of contradictions, full of ideas and energy and able to charm his family. At the same time he grew up on a farm in hardscrabble times and refused to help his mother do backbreaking chores. His mother also dressed him in odd outfits like sailor suits and he insisted on being the center of attention at most gatherings with other kids. This is illustrated by Lyndon's owning the one baseball he and his friends would use for games, but if Lyndon was not allowed to pitch he would take his baseball and go home. His mother infused his life with poetry and high culture but at school he was a lackluster student who did not take much interest in his studies.
Johnson did seem to excel, even from an early age, in getting others to do his bidding and using his considerable charm to sway others to his way of thinking. His relationship with his father deteriorated over the years as the father's fortunes turned sour and he lost his legislative seat and began accumulating debts he could not pay. Lyndon went from idolizing and imitating his father to deriding him. A weak spot in the book is that at the time of the father's early death at age sixty, he is depicted as an alcoholic but very little is mentioned about his drinking until he passes.
LBJ is depicted as having a superior intelligence but little ambition, and upon graduation from high school he refuses to attend college as his parents wish and heads to California where he works for a time for an attorney cousin until a series of misadventures convinces him to return to Texas and capitulate to his parents' desires to attend the nearby teacher's college in San Marcos. It is at college that LBJ begins to come into his own. He is an unpopular student but is still blessed with an almost preternatural ability to bend others to his will and to judge which of his peers can be bent. He is also a shameless prevaricator regarding his own accomplishments. Johnson's contradictions are again shown in college by the fact he is over 6'3" tall but is a physical coward. At the same time, though, he shows his masterful ability to strategize and manipulate others and what will be a theme running throughout the book: an amazing ability to cultivate fatherly relationships with important and powerful men via toadying and ass-kissing. After fostering these relationships, Johnson then uses his favored status to advance his own interests and those of his friends.
I read an interview with Robert Caro while reading the book and apparently one of the questions he most abhors is, "Do you like Lyndon Johnson.?" In the book, Caro portrays Johnson from a young age as being mostly immoral and a budding sociopath and asserts that his character flaws stayed with him the rest of his life. Concomitant with this is the assumption that almost any action Johnson took had a self-serving motive. Sometimes Johnson's behavior does not seem to fit this pattern, as when he took a year off from college to teach in an impoverished South Texas town with a mostly Latino population. Johnson proves to be an excellent motivator loved by his students and their families. One wonders what he could have hoped to gain by this other than it was during the Great Depression and good references were pretty important. Caro does make clear throughout the book that Johnson had his eye on the Presidency from an early age.
The book continues to limn Johnson's slow rise to power, at first as an assistant to a Texas congressman and later as a junior congressman. Johnson is an indefatigable worker, adept at schmoozing the right people and knowing whom to schmooze. Even as a lowly congressional assistant, Johnson manages to cultivate a relationship with the powerful and daunting Sam Rayburn. He also develops many contacts in Washington and becomes known as a person who can "get things done." By this time he is married to Lady Bird and Caro seems to imply that Johnson was seeking a rich wife because one of his secondary goals was to become wealthy due to the privations he experienced growing up in an isolated area lacking electricity and indoor plumbing at a time when these amenities were commonplace in larger Texas towns. Lady Bird seems, at first, a strange choice, since she is shy and retiring and acts completely subservient to LBJ's every whim. She was, however, the daughter of a rich, self-made business owner and eventually proves yet another example of Johnson's ability to choose his alliances wisely.
Johnson gets an opportunity to run for congress in his home district, where he is a political unknown, and manages to emerge victorious over his better-known opponents through a combination of herculean campaigning and implementing a well-run team of hand-picked friends and allies that he cultivated from college days and from his brief time teaching at a high school in Houston where an uncle working there procured him a job. In yet another amazing contradiction, Johnson, a mediocre college debater, coaches a couple of raw youth into champion debaters while teaching in Houston. Johnson has both an eye for recognizing talent and an eye for recruiting people he can control. Likewise, he proves to be a great motivator at getting his chosen underlings to perform at standards beyond all expectations.
Johnson enters congress and experiences the first lulls in an otherwise meteoric political career. Perhaps the most important events of this period include his vigorous and ultimately successful attempts to cultivate Franklin D. Roosevelt as a mentor and a willingness to turn on and oppose some former mentors. Johnson also cultivates relationships with the rich and powerful and uses his guile and political legerdemain to aide his new rich and powerful friends, thus making them even wealthier and important contributors to his future political endeavors. The book ends with Johnson's first taste of political defeat in a 1941 senate runoff to elect a replacement for a deceased Texas senator. This race is quite interesting and points up the vagaries of life and politics.
Caro is an excellent writer and my only issue with him is his all too frequent use of the word, "moreover." It seems to crop up at least a hundred times. It is clear he has done exhaustive research and equally clear that whether he likes LBJ or not, he is fascinated with him and has devoted the remainder of his career as a writer and historian examining his conflicted subject.
I think that beyond the life of Johnson, Caro is fascinated most by power. How does one acquire it, wield it, use it as a bargaining tool and a cudgel, depending on circumstances? Johnson has been a outstanding character study for this interest due to his intense desire for power and his unique ability to acquire it by reading people and situations. I am naturally curious to see the LBJ show unfold in the next 3 volumes, though given my undisciplined, scattershot approach to reading, my review of the next book in the tetralogy may be a while in coming.
LBJ has always fascinated me and I've always considered him one of our most interesting 20th Century Presidents. After reading the first volume of Caro, I still find Johnson fascinating and now know a LOT more about his early life than I previously knew (which was very little). Even so, Johnson, in some respects, appears more enigmatic and sphinx-like after finishing the book and I have a feeling that while a great portion of his political life may be chronicled, Lyndon Johnson the man may take a phalanx of psychoanalysts all working with Caro's assiduity to understand what formed LBJ and led to many of his sometimes inexplicable and contradictory actions.
Some aspects of LBJ seem clear. From childhood, Johnson was coddled by his mother, who was a former teacher and a cultured and sophisticated lady considering her roots in the Texas Hill Country. Lyndon adored his mother and even into his mid-20's they exchanged letters almost every day. LBJ's relationship with his father was more complicated. As a youth, his father served as a congressman in the Texas legislature and LBJ would accompany him to Austin where he was a close observer of his father's affable way with both his constituents and his legislative peers. The young Lyndon would imitate his father's habit of a warm handshake where both hands were employed, one grasping the hand of the person he was greeting and the other grasping the forearm as a gesture of friendly reinforcement. The father also had a habit of standing quite close to a fellow legislator as he talked and often would grasp the lapel of the congressman during his bantering.
As a child, Johnson had a charisma about him and a wilfulness. He was a mass of contradictions, full of ideas and energy and able to charm his family. At the same time he grew up on a farm in hardscrabble times and refused to help his mother do backbreaking chores. His mother also dressed him in odd outfits like sailor suits and he insisted on being the center of attention at most gatherings with other kids. This is illustrated by Lyndon's owning the one baseball he and his friends would use for games, but if Lyndon was not allowed to pitch he would take his baseball and go home. His mother infused his life with poetry and high culture but at school he was a lackluster student who did not take much interest in his studies.
Johnson did seem to excel, even from an early age, in getting others to do his bidding and using his considerable charm to sway others to his way of thinking. His relationship with his father deteriorated over the years as the father's fortunes turned sour and he lost his legislative seat and began accumulating debts he could not pay. Lyndon went from idolizing and imitating his father to deriding him. A weak spot in the book is that at the time of the father's early death at age sixty, he is depicted as an alcoholic but very little is mentioned about his drinking until he passes.
LBJ is depicted as having a superior intelligence but little ambition, and upon graduation from high school he refuses to attend college as his parents wish and heads to California where he works for a time for an attorney cousin until a series of misadventures convinces him to return to Texas and capitulate to his parents' desires to attend the nearby teacher's college in San Marcos. It is at college that LBJ begins to come into his own. He is an unpopular student but is still blessed with an almost preternatural ability to bend others to his will and to judge which of his peers can be bent. He is also a shameless prevaricator regarding his own accomplishments. Johnson's contradictions are again shown in college by the fact he is over 6'3" tall but is a physical coward. At the same time, though, he shows his masterful ability to strategize and manipulate others and what will be a theme running throughout the book: an amazing ability to cultivate fatherly relationships with important and powerful men via toadying and ass-kissing. After fostering these relationships, Johnson then uses his favored status to advance his own interests and those of his friends.
I read an interview with Robert Caro while reading the book and apparently one of the questions he most abhors is, "Do you like Lyndon Johnson.?" In the book, Caro portrays Johnson from a young age as being mostly immoral and a budding sociopath and asserts that his character flaws stayed with him the rest of his life. Concomitant with this is the assumption that almost any action Johnson took had a self-serving motive. Sometimes Johnson's behavior does not seem to fit this pattern, as when he took a year off from college to teach in an impoverished South Texas town with a mostly Latino population. Johnson proves to be an excellent motivator loved by his students and their families. One wonders what he could have hoped to gain by this other than it was during the Great Depression and good references were pretty important. Caro does make clear throughout the book that Johnson had his eye on the Presidency from an early age.
The book continues to limn Johnson's slow rise to power, at first as an assistant to a Texas congressman and later as a junior congressman. Johnson is an indefatigable worker, adept at schmoozing the right people and knowing whom to schmooze. Even as a lowly congressional assistant, Johnson manages to cultivate a relationship with the powerful and daunting Sam Rayburn. He also develops many contacts in Washington and becomes known as a person who can "get things done." By this time he is married to Lady Bird and Caro seems to imply that Johnson was seeking a rich wife because one of his secondary goals was to become wealthy due to the privations he experienced growing up in an isolated area lacking electricity and indoor plumbing at a time when these amenities were commonplace in larger Texas towns. Lady Bird seems, at first, a strange choice, since she is shy and retiring and acts completely subservient to LBJ's every whim. She was, however, the daughter of a rich, self-made business owner and eventually proves yet another example of Johnson's ability to choose his alliances wisely.
Johnson gets an opportunity to run for congress in his home district, where he is a political unknown, and manages to emerge victorious over his better-known opponents through a combination of herculean campaigning and implementing a well-run team of hand-picked friends and allies that he cultivated from college days and from his brief time teaching at a high school in Houston where an uncle working there procured him a job. In yet another amazing contradiction, Johnson, a mediocre college debater, coaches a couple of raw youth into champion debaters while teaching in Houston. Johnson has both an eye for recognizing talent and an eye for recruiting people he can control. Likewise, he proves to be a great motivator at getting his chosen underlings to perform at standards beyond all expectations.
Johnson enters congress and experiences the first lulls in an otherwise meteoric political career. Perhaps the most important events of this period include his vigorous and ultimately successful attempts to cultivate Franklin D. Roosevelt as a mentor and a willingness to turn on and oppose some former mentors. Johnson also cultivates relationships with the rich and powerful and uses his guile and political legerdemain to aide his new rich and powerful friends, thus making them even wealthier and important contributors to his future political endeavors. The book ends with Johnson's first taste of political defeat in a 1941 senate runoff to elect a replacement for a deceased Texas senator. This race is quite interesting and points up the vagaries of life and politics.
Caro is an excellent writer and my only issue with him is his all too frequent use of the word, "moreover." It seems to crop up at least a hundred times. It is clear he has done exhaustive research and equally clear that whether he likes LBJ or not, he is fascinated with him and has devoted the remainder of his career as a writer and historian examining his conflicted subject.
I think that beyond the life of Johnson, Caro is fascinated most by power. How does one acquire it, wield it, use it as a bargaining tool and a cudgel, depending on circumstances? Johnson has been a outstanding character study for this interest due to his intense desire for power and his unique ability to acquire it by reading people and situations. I am naturally curious to see the LBJ show unfold in the next 3 volumes, though given my undisciplined, scattershot approach to reading, my review of the next book in the tetralogy may be a while in coming.
June 11, 2007
I finished the first installment of the complete history of LBJ's political career just as I began working at the Texas Legislature. Lots of people think LBJ was a mean ole' SOB, but he was also enigmatic, visionary and had a great understanding of how to bust some balls for the good of the people. Caro has been banned from the LBJ Museum at UT-Austin because he doesn't portray LBJ as a warm and fuzzy guy. Despite the accounts of infidelty, great ego and down-right intimidating scariness, LBJ is one of the most under-valued presidents. He set the framework for civil rights in motion and devoted more policy to education and eradicating poverty than any president since him. And Caro is just a fun read. His research is so detailed you feel as though you are reading a narrative fiction instead of a biography of a president.
June 30, 2012
Published in 1982, this is the first volume in Robert Caro's massive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Originally scheduled to run three volumes, the fourth has just been published and there is at least one more to follow. Caro has devoted the last forty years of his life to this project. He has done a staggering amount of research, which includes interviews with scores of the former president’s contemporaries, and the result is the most complete study of the life of LBJ that we are ever likely to get. This is from the "warts and all" school of biography, and it's not an especially pretty or inspiring picture. Those who still yearn to believe that the American government operates the way their seventh-grade civics book described will doubtless want to avert their eyes.
Caro's Johnson is an immensely complex figure, a man with an extraordinary talent for politics who emerged from the womb desperate for power and attention. Caro describes at length Johnson's ancestry and his early hardscrabble life in the Texas Hill Country. This biography is also very much in the "life and times" tradition and we learn almost as much about Johnson's surroundings as we do about the man himself.
Johnson's political abilities and his lust for power were first on full display at Southwest Texas State Teacher's College in San Marcos. There, Johnson organized a group of students, the White Stars, taking over the student government and demonstrating early on that he would do whatever it took to win. There Johnson also demonstrated a pattern that he would exhibit all of his life, toadying up to older men whose support could advance his own career. In this case, it was the college president; later it would be much more powerful men like Sam Rayburn and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After briefly teaching school, Johnson first made his way to Washington, D.C. as an aide for a congressman who was largely absent and inattentive. Johnson used the opportunity to essentially take over the office and begin building a base of power for himself. When FDR came to the presidency, Johnson landed a job as Texas State Director of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program aimed at providing jobs for unemployed youth. As he had at every stage of his career, he threw himself into the job, exhausting himself and his employees, but bringing much-needed work for large numbers of Texas young people. In the process, he also created a program that would be imitated in several other states.
This position gave Johnson further opportunities to network and to expand the base of power he was building both in Texas and in Washington. In particular, Johnson earned the friendship and the critical support of Herman and George Brown of the construction firm, Brown and Root, which would later become part of Haliburton. With Johnson’s support, the company would become a huge construction and engineering giant with projects around the world. And in return, the grateful Browns would become Johnson’s principal patrons.
In 1937, Johnson ran in a special election for the congressional seat for the Tenth District in Texas when the incumbent died suddenly. The odds against him seemed impossibly high, given that Johnson was only twenty-eight, given that he had basically no name recognition in the district and given that a number of much more powerful and better-known candidates had announced for the position. But Johnson ran a brilliant and exhausting campaign, with a considerable amount of help from the Browns and won the race.
Once in office, Johnson worked night and day to capitalize on federal programs to pour as much federal money into his district as he possibly could, dramatically improving the lives of the people there. But he sponsored no legislation at all of his own and worked very hard to obfuscate his views on the larger issues of the day. He was determined not to take a stand on any issue that might impede his rise to power in the future. Thus, to his constituents and to the President and his advisors, Johnson claimed to be a solid supporter of both FDR and his New Deal programs. But back in Texas, behind closed doors with the power brokers and others who hated the New Deal, Johnson insisted that he did too and that he was just exploiting the programs to bring as much money into the state as possible.
In 1941, still only thirty-two, Johnson had a chance to run for a Senate seat, when one of the state’s Senators died. Again, it was an uphill campaign against huge odds and against much better-known candidates. But Johnson had the support of Brown and Root and others in their circle, and they poured huge amounts of money into Johnson’s campaign—more than had ever been spent in a Texas Senate campaign, and much of it raised and spent in violation of the law.
As a result, Johnson basically had the election in the bag. But then, surprisingly, on election day he made a dumb rookie mistake. Johnson’s campaign had bought a large number of votes in the southern part of the state and instead of holding them back until late in the day, Johnson announced the results early. That allowed his principal opponent, who had bought a large number of votes in the eastern part of the state, to know what Johnson’s final total would be and to massage his own numbers so that, in the end, he defeated Johnson by a little over a thousand votes. It was a very hard lesson and Johnson would not make that same mistake when he ran for the Senate again in 1948.
Following the election, the IRS began an investigation of the way in which Johnson’s campaign had been financed, focusing principally on the activities of executives at Brown and Root. The investigators believed that they had more than enough evidence to support criminal prosecution against a number of Johnson’s contributors, and it appeared that Johnson’s political career was about to take a massive and perhaps fatal hit. But Johnson pleaded with the White House to intervene and in the end, the investigation was shut down. Brown and Root paid a tiny fine for “irregularities,” and the case was closed. This volume ends in 1942, when Johnson took a temporary leave from the House of Representatives to join the Navy during World War II.
This is a monumental study of politics and biography and is certain to stand for a very long time as a classic work of American History. Those who enjoy biography and political history will certainly want to read it.
Caro's Johnson is an immensely complex figure, a man with an extraordinary talent for politics who emerged from the womb desperate for power and attention. Caro describes at length Johnson's ancestry and his early hardscrabble life in the Texas Hill Country. This biography is also very much in the "life and times" tradition and we learn almost as much about Johnson's surroundings as we do about the man himself.
Johnson's political abilities and his lust for power were first on full display at Southwest Texas State Teacher's College in San Marcos. There, Johnson organized a group of students, the White Stars, taking over the student government and demonstrating early on that he would do whatever it took to win. There Johnson also demonstrated a pattern that he would exhibit all of his life, toadying up to older men whose support could advance his own career. In this case, it was the college president; later it would be much more powerful men like Sam Rayburn and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After briefly teaching school, Johnson first made his way to Washington, D.C. as an aide for a congressman who was largely absent and inattentive. Johnson used the opportunity to essentially take over the office and begin building a base of power for himself. When FDR came to the presidency, Johnson landed a job as Texas State Director of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program aimed at providing jobs for unemployed youth. As he had at every stage of his career, he threw himself into the job, exhausting himself and his employees, but bringing much-needed work for large numbers of Texas young people. In the process, he also created a program that would be imitated in several other states.
This position gave Johnson further opportunities to network and to expand the base of power he was building both in Texas and in Washington. In particular, Johnson earned the friendship and the critical support of Herman and George Brown of the construction firm, Brown and Root, which would later become part of Haliburton. With Johnson’s support, the company would become a huge construction and engineering giant with projects around the world. And in return, the grateful Browns would become Johnson’s principal patrons.
In 1937, Johnson ran in a special election for the congressional seat for the Tenth District in Texas when the incumbent died suddenly. The odds against him seemed impossibly high, given that Johnson was only twenty-eight, given that he had basically no name recognition in the district and given that a number of much more powerful and better-known candidates had announced for the position. But Johnson ran a brilliant and exhausting campaign, with a considerable amount of help from the Browns and won the race.
Once in office, Johnson worked night and day to capitalize on federal programs to pour as much federal money into his district as he possibly could, dramatically improving the lives of the people there. But he sponsored no legislation at all of his own and worked very hard to obfuscate his views on the larger issues of the day. He was determined not to take a stand on any issue that might impede his rise to power in the future. Thus, to his constituents and to the President and his advisors, Johnson claimed to be a solid supporter of both FDR and his New Deal programs. But back in Texas, behind closed doors with the power brokers and others who hated the New Deal, Johnson insisted that he did too and that he was just exploiting the programs to bring as much money into the state as possible.
In 1941, still only thirty-two, Johnson had a chance to run for a Senate seat, when one of the state’s Senators died. Again, it was an uphill campaign against huge odds and against much better-known candidates. But Johnson had the support of Brown and Root and others in their circle, and they poured huge amounts of money into Johnson’s campaign—more than had ever been spent in a Texas Senate campaign, and much of it raised and spent in violation of the law.
As a result, Johnson basically had the election in the bag. But then, surprisingly, on election day he made a dumb rookie mistake. Johnson’s campaign had bought a large number of votes in the southern part of the state and instead of holding them back until late in the day, Johnson announced the results early. That allowed his principal opponent, who had bought a large number of votes in the eastern part of the state, to know what Johnson’s final total would be and to massage his own numbers so that, in the end, he defeated Johnson by a little over a thousand votes. It was a very hard lesson and Johnson would not make that same mistake when he ran for the Senate again in 1948.
Following the election, the IRS began an investigation of the way in which Johnson’s campaign had been financed, focusing principally on the activities of executives at Brown and Root. The investigators believed that they had more than enough evidence to support criminal prosecution against a number of Johnson’s contributors, and it appeared that Johnson’s political career was about to take a massive and perhaps fatal hit. But Johnson pleaded with the White House to intervene and in the end, the investigation was shut down. Brown and Root paid a tiny fine for “irregularities,” and the case was closed. This volume ends in 1942, when Johnson took a temporary leave from the House of Representatives to join the Navy during World War II.
This is a monumental study of politics and biography and is certain to stand for a very long time as a classic work of American History. Those who enjoy biography and political history will certainly want to read it.
July 6, 2023
In hopes of trying to stir up the vibes for Robert A. Caro to complete this multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, I chose to begin a re-read of those tomes already published. Let’s see if it works!
Robert A. Caro undertook a Herculean task with this epic multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). This is a sensational opening to the series, which encapsulates all that Caro wants to discuss with some of the lesser-known facts about the man who would ascend from abject poverty into the White House. I am blown away by the detail that Caro includes and the stories that he is able to weave, shedding both positive and negative lights on LBJ. It appears that no stone was left unturned and no person’s opinion was swept under the rug. Caro does a great job in this, the first of four massive published volumes, with his a rumoured fifth yet to be completed that will sum everything up.
Caro explores the history of LBJ’s family and how they came to settle in the heart of Texas many generations ago. He moves the story forward with wonderful backstories about the Johnson family and how they put their mark on state politics, beginning with Sam Johnson, the paternal head of the family. He helped hone his son’s skills, who was always interested in getting to the root of the matter and helping those in need. Caro spends some much needed time looking at LBJ as a dedicated student, always wanting to be social, but also the compassion of going to teacher’s college and working with some of the least affluent children in the state.
His move into politics came while trying to get some of the new FDR programs into place for Texas children, as well as ensuring that he could be seen as a strong advocate for the new president. His dedication to the work and demand of the highest quality output helped form him into the go-getter for which he would be known before too long. This led to a role as an assistant to a congressman, where Johnson found his niche in the politics of Washington and working with federal agencies to ensure that his congressional district was covered. Caro explores this at length, examining many of the key aspects of work on the Capitol.
When LBJ sought to make the leap into politics himself, he had the machine of FDR and the Democrats to keep him buoyed. Working to sell himself to his constituents, LBJ did whatever he could and then pushed himself to be a key player in Texas’ push to ensure the Roosevelt government used him to bring work to the state. Caro delves as deeply as he can into this and develops some strong arguments about LBJ’s push to power. However, as the book wanes, Caro shows how LBJ’s ambition saw him push to gain access into the Senate a spot where he could make even more difference and use the power he had garnered to further himself, as well as keep Texas on the map. While this run for Senate was not successful, it lit a fire in LBJ for future successes.
Caro uses a technique with which I am usually highly critical; that of tangential writing. He steers away from the story to tell a tale about something or someone unrelated. I was worried when the first chapter was all about the terrain and soil make-up of the Lone Star State. He does move on point and one does eventually see why he appeared to leave the story. Much can be learned about the larger picture through this method. The chapters were strong and the commentary priceless. Caro helps to show the reader how they can wrap their head around all that is going on to create a vast fountain of knowledge, from which much will have to be pulled as the series progresses.
Kudos, Mr. Caro, as you brought to light some wonderful sides to the young LBJ, as well as the early seeds of corrupt politics that will become essential in the years to come.
Like/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
Robert A. Caro undertook a Herculean task with this epic multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). This is a sensational opening to the series, which encapsulates all that Caro wants to discuss with some of the lesser-known facts about the man who would ascend from abject poverty into the White House. I am blown away by the detail that Caro includes and the stories that he is able to weave, shedding both positive and negative lights on LBJ. It appears that no stone was left unturned and no person’s opinion was swept under the rug. Caro does a great job in this, the first of four massive published volumes, with his a rumoured fifth yet to be completed that will sum everything up.
Caro explores the history of LBJ’s family and how they came to settle in the heart of Texas many generations ago. He moves the story forward with wonderful backstories about the Johnson family and how they put their mark on state politics, beginning with Sam Johnson, the paternal head of the family. He helped hone his son’s skills, who was always interested in getting to the root of the matter and helping those in need. Caro spends some much needed time looking at LBJ as a dedicated student, always wanting to be social, but also the compassion of going to teacher’s college and working with some of the least affluent children in the state.
His move into politics came while trying to get some of the new FDR programs into place for Texas children, as well as ensuring that he could be seen as a strong advocate for the new president. His dedication to the work and demand of the highest quality output helped form him into the go-getter for which he would be known before too long. This led to a role as an assistant to a congressman, where Johnson found his niche in the politics of Washington and working with federal agencies to ensure that his congressional district was covered. Caro explores this at length, examining many of the key aspects of work on the Capitol.
When LBJ sought to make the leap into politics himself, he had the machine of FDR and the Democrats to keep him buoyed. Working to sell himself to his constituents, LBJ did whatever he could and then pushed himself to be a key player in Texas’ push to ensure the Roosevelt government used him to bring work to the state. Caro delves as deeply as he can into this and develops some strong arguments about LBJ’s push to power. However, as the book wanes, Caro shows how LBJ’s ambition saw him push to gain access into the Senate a spot where he could make even more difference and use the power he had garnered to further himself, as well as keep Texas on the map. While this run for Senate was not successful, it lit a fire in LBJ for future successes.
Caro uses a technique with which I am usually highly critical; that of tangential writing. He steers away from the story to tell a tale about something or someone unrelated. I was worried when the first chapter was all about the terrain and soil make-up of the Lone Star State. He does move on point and one does eventually see why he appeared to leave the story. Much can be learned about the larger picture through this method. The chapters were strong and the commentary priceless. Caro helps to show the reader how they can wrap their head around all that is going on to create a vast fountain of knowledge, from which much will have to be pulled as the series progresses.
Kudos, Mr. Caro, as you brought to light some wonderful sides to the young LBJ, as well as the early seeds of corrupt politics that will become essential in the years to come.
Like/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
July 13, 2023
My 2nd time reading this, and I enjoyed it just as much this time around. Robert Caro provides such depth and vividness in this intense study of Lyndon Johnson (this covers his life through 1941; later books in the series continue from there).
The Hill Country
It’s not just the way Johnson is captured, it’s also the vivid portrayals of the settings and supporting characters. Like the “Hill Country” where Johnson grew up. Caro describes the hardness of life for farmers in this arid land that seemed to refuse to grow anything (I was also fascinated by the background of how settlers that first arrived in this land were fooled by the lush greenery. This was the result of centuries of growth and didn’t grow back easily once harvested). There was no electricity or indoor plumbing (some families even found an outhouse to be too much of a luxury). Every chore was a brutally slow and painful experience, like hauling buckets of water from the well, or cleaning the floor on hands and knees because brooms were too precious to waste. The High School didn’t have a basketball team because they couldn’t afford a basketball. I could go on, but I couldn’t do justice to the way Caro described it.
Lyndon as a Youth
Normally in biographies I’m bored with descriptions of childhood and am impatient to get to the parts where they become notable. But the stories of what Lyndon was like as a child set the stage for understanding him. The way he was desperate to “be somebody” and to lead. The way he would lie and cheat to get what he wants. And the way he would flatter and suck up to people shamelessly.
A Secret to Success: Sucking Up
Oh man, the sucking up. Some people are shameless and ambitious enough to make this a regular part of their lifestyle, but I don’t think anyone ever took it to the depths that Lyndon Johnson did.
Even the people that do this, they almost always have some limit, either out of self-respect or a belief that it could backfire if they do it too much. But when Lyndon Johnson realized that it helped him get what he wants, he kept experimenting with laying it on thicker and thicker, trying to find out if would help him even more. As it turned out, it did.
Much of Johnson’s success can be attributed to his ability to ingratiate himself with powerful people. He turned sucking up into an art form. He seemed to understand what types of flattery different people were vulnerable to. It was both amusing and depressing seeing how Johnson’s flattery worked on even the most gruff and hard-nosed people.
There is a story later in the book about how Johnson drove his car during his first Congressional election. He drove his car as fast is it could go, making his driving companions nervous. But he wasn’t reckless. At pit stops, he would inspect the tires carefully and made sure the car was in good condition for the next leg. He treated sucking up the same way, driving it to the absolute limits of its usefulness. But not in a reckless way.
Other than That – What was he like?
Maybe I focused too much on the brown-nosing. I just found that stuff kind of hilarious. Some other takeaways on what Lyndon Johnson was like:
He was a legendarily hard worker, and the effort he put into his jobs as a teacher, Congressional Aide, and Congressman (the book stops before he reaches the Senate) probably helped people quite a bit. He knew what mattered to people and had ideas for how to fix them. He knew how to get things done and had the drive to see things through until they actually were done. And he was, as Caro puts it repeatedly, a “political genius”. He saw opportunities for power that no one else did; often that no one would even dream of thinking about. There are parts of the book where you can’t help but root for this plucky underdog.
But there were also moments where I felt disgust and revulsion towards him. Perhaps the biggest thing I took away from this book is that Lyndon Johnson was a born sociopath. He would lie, cheat, and steal to get what he wants. He didn’t have any core philosophical or political beliefs; he would just tell people whatever they wanted to hear. If he was born in different circumstances, where it would have benefited him to become a conservative Republican, or a segregationist Democrat, he would have had no problem being either. He wanted to not just have power but to dominate people, and often enjoyed playing cruel psychological games to belittle people and demonstrate his power over them.
A couple final highlights
I haven’t talked about some of the examples of the wacky shenanigans Johnson would perform to build power for himself, but there are a lot of great stories of him doing this while in College and in the “Little Congress” he was a member of while he worked as a Congressional Aide. He literally stole elections in each place, practice for his even shadier activities when he began running for office. I also loved reading about the no-nonsense Sam Rayburn, who rose to be Speaker of the House and succumbed to Lyndon’s flattery. “Pappy” O’Daniel was another colorful Texan I enjoyed reading about. O’Daniel is perhaps the only one who could rival Johnson in cynicism and phoniness. The book ends with Johnson losing to Pappy O’Daniel in the 1941 US Senate race. It was a heartbreakingly close election, where in a surprising turnabout Johnson was outfoxed and outcheated by his opponent.
The Hill Country
It’s not just the way Johnson is captured, it’s also the vivid portrayals of the settings and supporting characters. Like the “Hill Country” where Johnson grew up. Caro describes the hardness of life for farmers in this arid land that seemed to refuse to grow anything (I was also fascinated by the background of how settlers that first arrived in this land were fooled by the lush greenery. This was the result of centuries of growth and didn’t grow back easily once harvested). There was no electricity or indoor plumbing (some families even found an outhouse to be too much of a luxury). Every chore was a brutally slow and painful experience, like hauling buckets of water from the well, or cleaning the floor on hands and knees because brooms were too precious to waste. The High School didn’t have a basketball team because they couldn’t afford a basketball. I could go on, but I couldn’t do justice to the way Caro described it.
Lyndon as a Youth
Normally in biographies I’m bored with descriptions of childhood and am impatient to get to the parts where they become notable. But the stories of what Lyndon was like as a child set the stage for understanding him. The way he was desperate to “be somebody” and to lead. The way he would lie and cheat to get what he wants. And the way he would flatter and suck up to people shamelessly.
A Secret to Success: Sucking Up
Oh man, the sucking up. Some people are shameless and ambitious enough to make this a regular part of their lifestyle, but I don’t think anyone ever took it to the depths that Lyndon Johnson did.
Even the people that do this, they almost always have some limit, either out of self-respect or a belief that it could backfire if they do it too much. But when Lyndon Johnson realized that it helped him get what he wants, he kept experimenting with laying it on thicker and thicker, trying to find out if would help him even more. As it turned out, it did.
Much of Johnson’s success can be attributed to his ability to ingratiate himself with powerful people. He turned sucking up into an art form. He seemed to understand what types of flattery different people were vulnerable to. It was both amusing and depressing seeing how Johnson’s flattery worked on even the most gruff and hard-nosed people.
There is a story later in the book about how Johnson drove his car during his first Congressional election. He drove his car as fast is it could go, making his driving companions nervous. But he wasn’t reckless. At pit stops, he would inspect the tires carefully and made sure the car was in good condition for the next leg. He treated sucking up the same way, driving it to the absolute limits of its usefulness. But not in a reckless way.
Other than That – What was he like?
Maybe I focused too much on the brown-nosing. I just found that stuff kind of hilarious. Some other takeaways on what Lyndon Johnson was like:
He was a legendarily hard worker, and the effort he put into his jobs as a teacher, Congressional Aide, and Congressman (the book stops before he reaches the Senate) probably helped people quite a bit. He knew what mattered to people and had ideas for how to fix them. He knew how to get things done and had the drive to see things through until they actually were done. And he was, as Caro puts it repeatedly, a “political genius”. He saw opportunities for power that no one else did; often that no one would even dream of thinking about. There are parts of the book where you can’t help but root for this plucky underdog.
But there were also moments where I felt disgust and revulsion towards him. Perhaps the biggest thing I took away from this book is that Lyndon Johnson was a born sociopath. He would lie, cheat, and steal to get what he wants. He didn’t have any core philosophical or political beliefs; he would just tell people whatever they wanted to hear. If he was born in different circumstances, where it would have benefited him to become a conservative Republican, or a segregationist Democrat, he would have had no problem being either. He wanted to not just have power but to dominate people, and often enjoyed playing cruel psychological games to belittle people and demonstrate his power over them.
A couple final highlights
I haven’t talked about some of the examples of the wacky shenanigans Johnson would perform to build power for himself, but there are a lot of great stories of him doing this while in College and in the “Little Congress” he was a member of while he worked as a Congressional Aide. He literally stole elections in each place, practice for his even shadier activities when he began running for office. I also loved reading about the no-nonsense Sam Rayburn, who rose to be Speaker of the House and succumbed to Lyndon’s flattery. “Pappy” O’Daniel was another colorful Texan I enjoyed reading about. O’Daniel is perhaps the only one who could rival Johnson in cynicism and phoniness. The book ends with Johnson losing to Pappy O’Daniel in the 1941 US Senate race. It was a heartbreakingly close election, where in a surprising turnabout Johnson was outfoxed and outcheated by his opponent.
March 15, 2012
Remarkable. I won't say it reads like a novel because it is history, good history. But it draws you in like a novel and is as well-written as a good novel. It is not just a biography of Johnson, it is a biography of a time and a place. And it is drawn so vividly that one feels anxieties about the outcome of events that were long ago decided.
He has long chapters that are not at all about Johnson but about people who, at some point, were important to his life or career and at one point, about the place he was raised--hill country in Texas. And yet I never came away feeling that these long "detours" were unnecessary. Caro shows how no one person's life can be described by narrating just the facts of his or her life. Places and people and events are the ground from which the person grows and draws life and sometimes which bring destruction. In one chapter, Caro describes what it was like for poor farmers and their wives to live in hill country when the electric companies had decided that electrifying these poor and spread-out farms was not worth their efforts. In excruciating detail one reads descriptions of life when water had to be painstakingly drawn from deep wells and then carried distances. When hot summer days were spent canning over a hot stove--with a fire fed by painfully gathered and carried wood. There is no way one can read that chapter and not have a sense of the overwhelming need of a boy from that farmland to get away--a long way away.
This doesn't justify some of Johnson's actions or the lengths he went to fulfill his ambitions but it does a great deal to explain them.
He has long chapters that are not at all about Johnson but about people who, at some point, were important to his life or career and at one point, about the place he was raised--hill country in Texas. And yet I never came away feeling that these long "detours" were unnecessary. Caro shows how no one person's life can be described by narrating just the facts of his or her life. Places and people and events are the ground from which the person grows and draws life and sometimes which bring destruction. In one chapter, Caro describes what it was like for poor farmers and their wives to live in hill country when the electric companies had decided that electrifying these poor and spread-out farms was not worth their efforts. In excruciating detail one reads descriptions of life when water had to be painstakingly drawn from deep wells and then carried distances. When hot summer days were spent canning over a hot stove--with a fire fed by painfully gathered and carried wood. There is no way one can read that chapter and not have a sense of the overwhelming need of a boy from that farmland to get away--a long way away.
This doesn't justify some of Johnson's actions or the lengths he went to fulfill his ambitions but it does a great deal to explain them.
August 19, 2021
This was the extraordinary first in a series of 4 (and hopefully 5) volumes of Robert Caro's epic biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson. This first volume talks of his family life in the Hill Country in Texas (roughly southwest of Austin) up to his loss in a race for a Senate seat in 1941. It is a wonderful book full of insight into his upbringing and his evolving sense of politics. He remains an ambiguous figure in American history and probably, had he not shit the bed with his failed policies on Vietnam, he would be ranked up there with his mentor FDR and some of the other greatest presidents. It is very, very long though. I am especially looking forward to the 3rd volume Master of the Senate which won a Pulitzer. I do insist that this one is still one of the most readable presidential biographies I have ever read.
December 21, 2023
Caro is a master. He has taken the story of the rise of someone very unlikable and turned it into a fascinating five-book (almost) series. Johnson is undeniably a villain in this book yet Caro convinces you that you want to know every single thing about his life. Obviously it doesn’t hurt that Caro also teaches a master course in American history along the way.
Johnson was not someone who was just in the right place at the right time to end up as the most powerful person in the world. He desired power above everything else and had the exact skill set necessary to acquire it. LBJ would have become President of the United States in any generation, something that probably can’t be said about any other president.
Of all the fascinating parts (and there are plenty, see below) the most fascinating is the research that went behind the book, something he gets into a little bit in the afterword but also in several interviews and podcast episodes I’ve listened to. You should seek those out I think he probably also goes into it in depth in his book Working but I haven’t read that yet.
I actually read the fourth book in this series first. It covers the years from when Kennedy was elected president into LBJ’s first days in office. I liked it better than this, probably just because of the period of time covered.
Best parts of the book (with no spoilers):
- LBJ’s relationship with Sam Rayburn over time. Rayburn saw through LBJ in a way others weren’t able to and knew that LBJ was using him, but loved him anyway.
- A brief but really engaging walk through the story of Hoover and the Great Depression.
- Chapter 25 - “Longlea” - on LBJ’s relationship with the Marshes.
- Chapter 27 - “The Sad Irons” - on life before electricity.
- Chapter 34 - “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” - The story of Pappy O��Daniel. Excellent.
Also fascinating but kind of makes you uncomfortable to read about - the psychology of LBJ’s relationship with his dad; the college years where LBJ learned how to hone his skills in manipulation.
Having said all this about LBJ, I feel like he ended up being a pretty good president. I’m looking forward to book five which gets into that some more.
Johnson was not someone who was just in the right place at the right time to end up as the most powerful person in the world. He desired power above everything else and had the exact skill set necessary to acquire it. LBJ would have become President of the United States in any generation, something that probably can’t be said about any other president.
Of all the fascinating parts (and there are plenty, see below) the most fascinating is the research that went behind the book, something he gets into a little bit in the afterword but also in several interviews and podcast episodes I’ve listened to. You should seek those out I think he probably also goes into it in depth in his book Working but I haven’t read that yet.
I actually read the fourth book in this series first. It covers the years from when Kennedy was elected president into LBJ’s first days in office. I liked it better than this, probably just because of the period of time covered.
Best parts of the book (with no spoilers):
- LBJ’s relationship with Sam Rayburn over time. Rayburn saw through LBJ in a way others weren’t able to and knew that LBJ was using him, but loved him anyway.
- A brief but really engaging walk through the story of Hoover and the Great Depression.
- Chapter 25 - “Longlea” - on LBJ’s relationship with the Marshes.
- Chapter 27 - “The Sad Irons” - on life before electricity.
- Chapter 34 - “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” - The story of Pappy O��Daniel. Excellent.
Also fascinating but kind of makes you uncomfortable to read about - the psychology of LBJ’s relationship with his dad; the college years where LBJ learned how to hone his skills in manipulation.
Having said all this about LBJ, I feel like he ended up being a pretty good president. I’m looking forward to book five which gets into that some more.
September 19, 2017
So far in my quest to read a biography of each President who held office during my lifetime, I have covered Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. I have been mostly content with the biographers I chose but Robert A Caro tops them all. He even managed to keep me interested for at least 80% of the time.
Reading presidential biographies feels a lot like being in school, except that most of the American history I studied in school was deeply slanted towards the sentiments that all of our Presidents were awesome dudes and America is the most democratic country in the world. Reading these carefully researched books has given me the education about my country I need to be a confident and wise citizen and voter.
The Path to Power only covers Johnson's first 36 years from his birth to his election to the House of Representatives to his first failed campaign for the Senate. He was born in the Texas Hill Country, an impoverished farming area. His father had been a well-loved member of the Texas House of Representatives but later fell into debt and alcoholism. It was at his father's side as a child that Lyndon became fired up about politics, but where his father wanted to serve his constituents, Lyndon was in it purely for the power, the attention, and therefore the votes.
Caro portrays him as a fairly disreputable character with a genius for the political game. No morals, no deep love of country, no mission to make America great, though quite a few of his actions did improve the lives of many. What drove him was a burning desire to be somebody and a great capacity for working the game for his personal gain.
He was not a good student, he was not admired or even liked in his childhood by anyone but his mother and one cousin, and later Lady Bird. But once he set his sights on a goal of his own choosing he was tireless. His goal was to be President of the United States. This volume covers the years when he began to build the connections that would take him to that goal. Because he would do anything to win, he often did and thus eventually gathered around him several slavish and devoted admirers who would do anything for him.
I have always viewed politics as a dirty game with the occasional bright star I could respect. The book did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. Johnson learned all the tricks and invented some of his own. In a time when due to the Depression, campaign spending was fairly low, Johnson managed to work his way into the confidence and gratitude of men with money and spent more than any candidate for public office had, at least in Texas. He was not above stealing votes, stuffing the ballot box and later buying votes.
I could go on and on but if you want to learn about the state of the union from 1920 to 1944, just buckle down and read the book. It is an eye-opener.
Because I started my project with Truman, I didn't know much about Franklin D Roosevelt, President from 1933 to 1945. I know more now. I also got a pretty good history of Texas from the years before LBJ's birth up to WWII. If I didn't know better from reading those other biographies, I would have finished the book thinking that Texas single-handedly invented dirty politics.
Ahead of me are three more volumes to read about this man (and possibly four since Caro is writing the final volume as I write this review.) This kind of reading takes longer to get through than reading novels. I read this one for over two months, averaging 20 pages a day while reading 24 novels in between.
It has enlightened me a great deal as to how the world of government and politics works. I am less upset about our current administration than I had been before I read it. My country has had truly awful Presidents before; dishonest, ignorant, unstable human beings who nevertheless were elected into office. Somehow our system of government survives and the country powers on. Plato was right however. A republic cannot stand when the populace is uneducated, when the franchise is not universal, and when money/business/finance is the main engine behind the government.
The least I can do is get educated and vote.
August 14, 2020
Lyndon Johnson was not a particularly likable person. From childhood on he was a wheedling, two faced, sycophantic, mildly sociopathic wannabe politician who reeked of raw ambition. Spend enough time in his shoes though, and you start to accept him as part of the story being told, you begin to identify with him. He becomes almost likable.
This is just part of Robert Caro’s genius. Caro also happens to be a meticulous researcher and an engaging storyteller. Johnson provides a good lens through which to view the second half of the American experiment. The Path to Power starts with Johnson’s grandparents, in a Texas where Comanches still roamed the countryside and this first volume ends with Lyndon Johnson as a member of the House of Representatives at the beginning of WWII. Along the way we are treated to detailed and fascinating glimpses of old timey politiking, the booze soaked corruption of the Texas State House, and the inner workings of Congress during the Great Depression.
Caro has used the life of Lyndon Johnson as a means of telling the story of how power works in the United States and it is one of the most compelling and epic sagas that an American writer has ever produced, including fiction. This series is just that good.
This is just part of Robert Caro’s genius. Caro also happens to be a meticulous researcher and an engaging storyteller. Johnson provides a good lens through which to view the second half of the American experiment. The Path to Power starts with Johnson’s grandparents, in a Texas where Comanches still roamed the countryside and this first volume ends with Lyndon Johnson as a member of the House of Representatives at the beginning of WWII. Along the way we are treated to detailed and fascinating glimpses of old timey politiking, the booze soaked corruption of the Texas State House, and the inner workings of Congress during the Great Depression.
Caro has used the life of Lyndon Johnson as a means of telling the story of how power works in the United States and it is one of the most compelling and epic sagas that an American writer has ever produced, including fiction. This series is just that good.
June 29, 2023
When you dive into any biography by Robert A. Caro, it's an experience like no other. He's knowledge rich, as a result of devoting decades of his life to the study of his subject; in this case, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). The quintessentially meticulous researcher, Caro is also an extraordinary writer.
Moreover, I understand from an article I've read recently in The New Yorker, about that hardworking biographer: As an octogenarian now, he's working on a final LBJ biography.
Especially fascinating in this book was his panoramic history of the U.S. Senate, beginning at the time of the great orators like Henry Clay, then inching his way forward until LBJ entered the Senate. This, the Texas senator transformed nearly beyond recognition.
Equally gobsmacking, Caro chose to end this book with an anecdote about Johnson's last power grab before leaving the Senate; almost unbelievable to listen to, even given all the audacious previous ploys by LBJ: so daring, so sneaky, so kinda nuts, and in every aspect of its outrageousness... so very LBJ.
As always, with every book I've read so far by Robert Caro, just when you thought that work of history couldn't get any better... it does. Oh, it does.
Moreover, I understand from an article I've read recently in The New Yorker, about that hardworking biographer: As an octogenarian now, he's working on a final LBJ biography.
Especially fascinating in this book was his panoramic history of the U.S. Senate, beginning at the time of the great orators like Henry Clay, then inching his way forward until LBJ entered the Senate. This, the Texas senator transformed nearly beyond recognition.
Equally gobsmacking, Caro chose to end this book with an anecdote about Johnson's last power grab before leaving the Senate; almost unbelievable to listen to, even given all the audacious previous ploys by LBJ: so daring, so sneaky, so kinda nuts, and in every aspect of its outrageousness... so very LBJ.
As always, with every book I've read so far by Robert Caro, just when you thought that work of history couldn't get any better... it does. Oh, it does.
October 21, 2017
https://bestpresidentialbios.com/2017...
“The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson” is the first volume in Robert Caro’s epic series covering the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro is a former investigative reporter and the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies: “Master of the Senate” (the third volume in this series) and “The Power Broker” about the life of Robert Moses. Caro is currently working on the fifth (and, presumably, final) volume in his LBJ series.
Published in 1982, “The Path to Power” is the inaugural volume in a series that has consumed more than four decades of Caro’s life. Originally intended to be the first of just three volumes, its 768 pages follow Johnson from birth through his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in 1941. This biography is the result of seven years of research by Caro and his wife – a remarkable effort in which he conducted approximately 1,000 interviews.
For good reason, “The Path to Power” is widely considered one of the most extraordinary presidential biographies ever published. It is a profoundly penetrating and extraordinarily insightful narrative of the early life of one of our most complex and colorful presidents. And it seems all but certain to remain the most comprehensive account of Johnson’s early life ever published.
Caro is undeniably unique among the 140 different biographers I have encountered. Although his writing style is articulate and descriptive, it is not smooth or elegant in a traditional sense. Caro can be both verbose and repetitive and it is not uncommon for his sentences to exceed 60 or 70 words involving a half-dozen commas…or more. But they are often linguistic works of art which embed penetrating insights, keen observations and clever syntax.
The first one-third of this volume is brilliant…and very nearly perfect. Describing LBJ’s ancestry, his hardscrabble youth, his college years and early congressional career, these fifteen chapters may be as good as a biography can possibly be. Caro does an incomparable job setting scenes, providing context and putting the reader “in the moment” – whether in the Texas Hill Country, in a dorm room or on the campaign trail.
His review of the westward migration of settlers into central Texas is spellbinding and he does a masterful job tracing the dramatic rise and fall of LBJ’s grandparents. Two chapters on rural electrification (and life without electric power) are among the most interesting in the book. But the most valuable chapters may be those devoted to LBJ’s college years in San Marcos – replete with anecdotes, eyewitness testimony and other observations so revealing they seem to be the most important pages in the book.
The remaining twenty-two chapters are solid-to-excellent though not as consistently engaging or efficiently impactful as earlier chapters. Johnson’s successful campaign for the House and his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in 1941 are extremely well-told and the narrative is littered with so many marvelous mini-biographies of LBJ’s friends, enemies and colleagues it is difficult to keep count.
Nearly every one of these multi-page introductions is a literary jewel and in many cases they describe individuals not widely known: Alvin Wirtz, Herman Brown, Tommy Corcoran and Charles Marsh. The thirty-five-page chapter devoted to Sam Rayburn, in particular, is so well written it begs the question of whether there exists a full-scale biography of Rayburn as good as Caro’s summary.
But while Caro’s inaugural volume on Lyndon Johnson is excellent in most respects it is not without flaws. Few (if any) biographers can understand a subject and his or her surroundings, or place the reader in the thick of events, like Caro. But the cost is not trivial: this biography demands a much higher than average level of patience and perseverance from its audience.
You don’t read this volume to become casually acquainted with the young LBJ; you read it to become fully immersed in his early life. Caro seems compelled to include in the text each new, interesting morsel he unearthed in his research and appears to leave no stone unturned in his quest to decipher this complicated man.
And while Caro is prone to detail, he is equally inclined to digression. This biography frequently wanders from its primary arc in favor of some tangent Caro is interested in exploring. These deviations are often fascinating…but occasionally tedious. A skillful editor could probably excise up to a quarter of the book without harming the narrative.
In addition, some readers will find Caro too critical of his subject. While evaluating LBJ’s character, Caro finds much to abhor and he pulls no punches. Anyone seeking a more “balanced” view of the young LBJ can turn to the first volume of Robert Dallek’s series. Finally, while the depth of his research often seems unmatched, Caro eschews traditional footnotes in favor of abbreviated citations which often prove oddly enigmatic or incomplete.
Overall, “The Path to Power” proves an extraordinary opening act for one of the most significant biographical achievements ever. This volume requires time, patience and perseverance…but rewards its readers handsomely with unparalleled insight and appreciation for Johnson and his times. Robert Caro’s “The Path to Power” is a literary gem, a biographical treasure and a promising start to his ongoing five-volume journey through Lyndon Johnson’s life.
Overall rating: 4½ stars
“The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson” is the first volume in Robert Caro’s epic series covering the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro is a former investigative reporter and the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies: “Master of the Senate” (the third volume in this series) and “The Power Broker” about the life of Robert Moses. Caro is currently working on the fifth (and, presumably, final) volume in his LBJ series.
Published in 1982, “The Path to Power” is the inaugural volume in a series that has consumed more than four decades of Caro’s life. Originally intended to be the first of just three volumes, its 768 pages follow Johnson from birth through his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in 1941. This biography is the result of seven years of research by Caro and his wife – a remarkable effort in which he conducted approximately 1,000 interviews.
For good reason, “The Path to Power” is widely considered one of the most extraordinary presidential biographies ever published. It is a profoundly penetrating and extraordinarily insightful narrative of the early life of one of our most complex and colorful presidents. And it seems all but certain to remain the most comprehensive account of Johnson’s early life ever published.
Caro is undeniably unique among the 140 different biographers I have encountered. Although his writing style is articulate and descriptive, it is not smooth or elegant in a traditional sense. Caro can be both verbose and repetitive and it is not uncommon for his sentences to exceed 60 or 70 words involving a half-dozen commas…or more. But they are often linguistic works of art which embed penetrating insights, keen observations and clever syntax.
The first one-third of this volume is brilliant…and very nearly perfect. Describing LBJ’s ancestry, his hardscrabble youth, his college years and early congressional career, these fifteen chapters may be as good as a biography can possibly be. Caro does an incomparable job setting scenes, providing context and putting the reader “in the moment” – whether in the Texas Hill Country, in a dorm room or on the campaign trail.
His review of the westward migration of settlers into central Texas is spellbinding and he does a masterful job tracing the dramatic rise and fall of LBJ’s grandparents. Two chapters on rural electrification (and life without electric power) are among the most interesting in the book. But the most valuable chapters may be those devoted to LBJ’s college years in San Marcos – replete with anecdotes, eyewitness testimony and other observations so revealing they seem to be the most important pages in the book.
The remaining twenty-two chapters are solid-to-excellent though not as consistently engaging or efficiently impactful as earlier chapters. Johnson’s successful campaign for the House and his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in 1941 are extremely well-told and the narrative is littered with so many marvelous mini-biographies of LBJ’s friends, enemies and colleagues it is difficult to keep count.
Nearly every one of these multi-page introductions is a literary jewel and in many cases they describe individuals not widely known: Alvin Wirtz, Herman Brown, Tommy Corcoran and Charles Marsh. The thirty-five-page chapter devoted to Sam Rayburn, in particular, is so well written it begs the question of whether there exists a full-scale biography of Rayburn as good as Caro’s summary.
But while Caro’s inaugural volume on Lyndon Johnson is excellent in most respects it is not without flaws. Few (if any) biographers can understand a subject and his or her surroundings, or place the reader in the thick of events, like Caro. But the cost is not trivial: this biography demands a much higher than average level of patience and perseverance from its audience.
You don’t read this volume to become casually acquainted with the young LBJ; you read it to become fully immersed in his early life. Caro seems compelled to include in the text each new, interesting morsel he unearthed in his research and appears to leave no stone unturned in his quest to decipher this complicated man.
And while Caro is prone to detail, he is equally inclined to digression. This biography frequently wanders from its primary arc in favor of some tangent Caro is interested in exploring. These deviations are often fascinating…but occasionally tedious. A skillful editor could probably excise up to a quarter of the book without harming the narrative.
In addition, some readers will find Caro too critical of his subject. While evaluating LBJ’s character, Caro finds much to abhor and he pulls no punches. Anyone seeking a more “balanced” view of the young LBJ can turn to the first volume of Robert Dallek’s series. Finally, while the depth of his research often seems unmatched, Caro eschews traditional footnotes in favor of abbreviated citations which often prove oddly enigmatic or incomplete.
Overall, “The Path to Power” proves an extraordinary opening act for one of the most significant biographical achievements ever. This volume requires time, patience and perseverance…but rewards its readers handsomely with unparalleled insight and appreciation for Johnson and his times. Robert Caro’s “The Path to Power” is a literary gem, a biographical treasure and a promising start to his ongoing five-volume journey through Lyndon Johnson’s life.
Overall rating: 4½ stars
May 25, 2009
For years I've shoved Caro's The Power Broker into people's hands like I got commission for it, like I was some kind of cheap pusher ("Just try it..."). It's the greatest nonfiction book I've ever read, hands down, bar none, no question. But the only other thing Caro ever wrote was this four volume (fourth volume still forthcoming, and he'll probably manage to split it up and turn it into two more door-stopping volumes) biography of Lyndon Johnson, and I knew there was no way I cared enough about Lyndon Johnson to read some 3000 small-print pages about him. I was especially not interested in the first book, which after 800 pages only takes him up to age 33.
So it turns out that it may be the second greatest non-fiction book I've ever read.
"Words won't come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty-how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was." THAT is the sort of quote you read presidential biographies before, and after interviewing everybody, I mean everybody, Caro shows that Lyndon Johnson must have been the suck-assingist person to ever attain high political office in this country. He was also a complete freak and a political mastermind, who managed, for instance, to turn a small social club at South West Texas Teacher's College into a secret society and mini-political machine that controlled campus jobs, grants, and dates. But the book would almost be worthwhile if Johnson never did another thing, because it also gives such perfect descriptions of so many different, and now vanished, social worlds, from the impoverished Texas Hill Country, to old Texas state politics, to a small teachers college, to an isolated Mexican town, and to 1930s DC.
I'll admit I'm taking a break before diving into the next one, but I might just start obnoxiously pushing this book on people too.
So it turns out that it may be the second greatest non-fiction book I've ever read.
"Words won't come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty-how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was." THAT is the sort of quote you read presidential biographies before, and after interviewing everybody, I mean everybody, Caro shows that Lyndon Johnson must have been the suck-assingist person to ever attain high political office in this country. He was also a complete freak and a political mastermind, who managed, for instance, to turn a small social club at South West Texas Teacher's College into a secret society and mini-political machine that controlled campus jobs, grants, and dates. But the book would almost be worthwhile if Johnson never did another thing, because it also gives such perfect descriptions of so many different, and now vanished, social worlds, from the impoverished Texas Hill Country, to old Texas state politics, to a small teachers college, to an isolated Mexican town, and to 1930s DC.
I'll admit I'm taking a break before diving into the next one, but I might just start obnoxiously pushing this book on people too.
April 5, 2014
I am currently reading Volume 3 of the 4 volumes Caro wrote about LBJ. What Caro has done here is to craft about as close to a perfect biography as is humanly possible. I am a former History teacher, and thought I knew LBJ well. But this series quite honestly does everything short of bring to life a hologram of Johnson, who comes alive in your presence and short of bleeding on your rug, lives with you as you progress through the series. My biggest challenge in writing this review is that I cannot come up with adjectives adequate to convey the sheer brilliance of what Caro has crafted. To call LBJ enigmatic is a gross understatement. I have despised him, admired him, been embarrassed for him, marveled at him: if ever a human being was crafted with one unambiguous goal, with all of the requisite skills needed to achieve that goal, it was LBJ. He wanted one thing-- power, and was capable of doing everything and nothing as he saw fit in myriad situations necessary to achieve that. He knew how to act when necessary, to sidle up to just the right people when he had to, and to become invisible when necessary so as to not leave a clue as to where he stood when he had to. Knowing of course that he became President, it seems quite unbelievable that this obnoxious pest of a kid, that few other kids liked, who claimed that he would be President one day could ever pull that off. How in the hell does he get from there to where he ended up? And it is not until one begins Volume 3 that what he saw his purpose as being becomes clear. He relentlessly sought out greater and greater power as he grew older, convincing liberals he was a liberal; conservatives that he was a conservative and moderates that he was a moderate. There will be a much longer review when I finish the series. As for my recommendation? Put down whatever you are reading and start this series. Now...
November 15, 2014
Where is my ten-star function when I need it? I have been waiting all year to pick up a fantastic non-fiction book, something along the lines of Taylor Branch's civil rights trilogy, "The Warmth of Other Suns," "Mayflower," "The Beauty and the Sorrow," or "Behind the Beautiful Forevers." I'm going to echo the words of another reviewer who describes reading this series as one of the greatest pleasures of his reading life.
I selected this book because I've long been interested in LBJ's largely-overlooked role as a great Civil Rights president. The beginning of his presidency is subsumed by the Kennedy assassination (let's face it, our most famous photo of LBJ is taking the oath on Air Force One with a brain-splattered Jackie Kennedy looking on) and the end is completely overshadowed by his monomaniacal mismanagement of the Vietnam War. As someone born years after American troops left Vietnam, it's been hard to see LBJ as more than a cartoonish bumbler whose presidency moved in lockstep with chaos, mistrust of government and social revolution of the 1960s; someone who missed a giant opportunity to shepherd the US through great social change.
To someone thinking about reading this book, set aside what you know about LBJ and buckle up for an enthralling character study set against an absolutely jaw-dropping backdrop. I didn't expect to be so taken with Texas, but Caro's thorough and compelling descriptions of life in the Hill Country are moving in their desperation and medieval character. LBJ's character as a child and as a student are fascinating. Parts of the book read like a manual for some goofy dork to become the Big Man on campus. LBJ is so calculating and so capable at outthinking everyone around him; it's mesmerizing. Even in retrospect, his motives and morals can seem impossible to decipher, except that again and again the ideal that governs his every move is how to maximize his own power and influence.
There are so many great little historical close calls: the August 1941 vote to renew the draft; the Texas Senate race that LBJ bought but didn't win and the IRS investigation thereafter. A chilling aspect of this history is how Johnson used his influence to win the first big government contract for Brown & Root to for the biggest hydroelectric project in Texas history. While the social implications of rural electrification were among the most touching passages of the book, the politicking and legal sleight-of-hand that went into the contract for the Marshall Ford were just grody harbingers of the profiteering and cozy government contracts that the unholy trifecta of Halliburton/KBR/future Texas politicians would create. That section of the book isn't called, "LBJ: Midwife to Satan" but when you know how things have gone down since then, it's pretty cringeworthy.
I have very little original thought to add to the scores of reviewers who describe the majesty of Caro's reportage and the beauty of the prose. I do think that I learned more about U.S. political history reading this book than I did in any political science class in college. Of course now I've got a huge crush on Sam Rayburn and kind of need to read a 3000 page multivolume saga about HIM, so I'm sure that all my regular followers will be watching for that with bated breath.
Worth EVERY penny of my overdue library book fine!
I selected this book because I've long been interested in LBJ's largely-overlooked role as a great Civil Rights president. The beginning of his presidency is subsumed by the Kennedy assassination (let's face it, our most famous photo of LBJ is taking the oath on Air Force One with a brain-splattered Jackie Kennedy looking on) and the end is completely overshadowed by his monomaniacal mismanagement of the Vietnam War. As someone born years after American troops left Vietnam, it's been hard to see LBJ as more than a cartoonish bumbler whose presidency moved in lockstep with chaos, mistrust of government and social revolution of the 1960s; someone who missed a giant opportunity to shepherd the US through great social change.
To someone thinking about reading this book, set aside what you know about LBJ and buckle up for an enthralling character study set against an absolutely jaw-dropping backdrop. I didn't expect to be so taken with Texas, but Caro's thorough and compelling descriptions of life in the Hill Country are moving in their desperation and medieval character. LBJ's character as a child and as a student are fascinating. Parts of the book read like a manual for some goofy dork to become the Big Man on campus. LBJ is so calculating and so capable at outthinking everyone around him; it's mesmerizing. Even in retrospect, his motives and morals can seem impossible to decipher, except that again and again the ideal that governs his every move is how to maximize his own power and influence.
There are so many great little historical close calls: the August 1941 vote to renew the draft; the Texas Senate race that LBJ bought but didn't win and the IRS investigation thereafter. A chilling aspect of this history is how Johnson used his influence to win the first big government contract for Brown & Root to for the biggest hydroelectric project in Texas history. While the social implications of rural electrification were among the most touching passages of the book, the politicking and legal sleight-of-hand that went into the contract for the Marshall Ford were just grody harbingers of the profiteering and cozy government contracts that the unholy trifecta of Halliburton/KBR/future Texas politicians would create. That section of the book isn't called, "LBJ: Midwife to Satan" but when you know how things have gone down since then, it's pretty cringeworthy.
I have very little original thought to add to the scores of reviewers who describe the majesty of Caro's reportage and the beauty of the prose. I do think that I learned more about U.S. political history reading this book than I did in any political science class in college. Of course now I've got a huge crush on Sam Rayburn and kind of need to read a 3000 page multivolume saga about HIM, so I'm sure that all my regular followers will be watching for that with bated breath.
Worth EVERY penny of my overdue library book fine!
February 6, 2017
Unbelievably great. One of those books that makes you want to knock every other book you've read down a star or two. A "I didn't know books could be this good" kind of book.
July 8, 2013
As a veteran devourer of fiction, I believe that we don’t live in an age of great fiction. But we do seem to live in an age of great biographies. I have come late – about thirty years late – to volume 1 of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” this riveting account of the early life of Lyndon Johnson. Last year when I read excerpts from volume four, I knew I had to get to the beginning of Caro’s great opus, expected eventually to be five volumes. (Continue in good health, Robert Caro!)
Volume 1 illumines family background, LBJ’s boyhood, his frenetic college career, his marriage, and his gaining of a seat in Congress. He brings pork home to the Hill Country in the form of rural electrification.
Plenty has been written in rebuttal of Caro’s often harsh depiction of the young LBJ as a bully who would cheat and lie to attain power; but it is impossible to ignore the depth of Caro’s probing, so it’s hard not to take his conclusions very seriously. When he wrote the book, many of the relevant players from LBJ’s youth and young adulthood were still living. He draws a compelling narrative from his many sources. Caro writes unforgettably of the hardscrabble life in the Texas Hill Country, of Johnson’s relentless ambition, of the corrupt political realities in Texas.
The most enduring impression of Johnson was his superhuman, all-consuming will to make something happen, no matter who and what he had to climb over. Not only did he have the drive to bend others to his will and to win elections, but in his early twenties, he also had the drive to be a good teacher to young Mexicans and to coach a high school debate team.
This volume carries us up to Johnson’s first political loss in 1941. By then, he had been a member of the House of Representatives for several years, a very young member, but he lusts for the Senate. In a rare slip of concentration, he allows Pappy O’Daniel to steal more votes than he steals, and Pappy is headed for the the Senate. Johnson is in President Roosevelt’s good graces, and is returning to Sam Rayburn’s good graces, but he is still a bit player in Congress, and he chafes.
Perhaps the most startling revelation was Johnson’s unwillingness to tip his hand about his ideology. He ran for office on his ability to get federal services for his district. He attached himself to Roosevelt’s coattails, but he never embraced or worked for the principles of the New Deal. Conservatives thought he was one of them, and liberals thought the same. Caro concludes that Johnson was not going to saddle himself with an opinion he’d have to defend. In other words, he was already preparing to run for President.
I’m on to volume 2.
Volume 1 illumines family background, LBJ’s boyhood, his frenetic college career, his marriage, and his gaining of a seat in Congress. He brings pork home to the Hill Country in the form of rural electrification.
Plenty has been written in rebuttal of Caro’s often harsh depiction of the young LBJ as a bully who would cheat and lie to attain power; but it is impossible to ignore the depth of Caro’s probing, so it’s hard not to take his conclusions very seriously. When he wrote the book, many of the relevant players from LBJ’s youth and young adulthood were still living. He draws a compelling narrative from his many sources. Caro writes unforgettably of the hardscrabble life in the Texas Hill Country, of Johnson’s relentless ambition, of the corrupt political realities in Texas.
The most enduring impression of Johnson was his superhuman, all-consuming will to make something happen, no matter who and what he had to climb over. Not only did he have the drive to bend others to his will and to win elections, but in his early twenties, he also had the drive to be a good teacher to young Mexicans and to coach a high school debate team.
This volume carries us up to Johnson’s first political loss in 1941. By then, he had been a member of the House of Representatives for several years, a very young member, but he lusts for the Senate. In a rare slip of concentration, he allows Pappy O’Daniel to steal more votes than he steals, and Pappy is headed for the the Senate. Johnson is in President Roosevelt’s good graces, and is returning to Sam Rayburn’s good graces, but he is still a bit player in Congress, and he chafes.
Perhaps the most startling revelation was Johnson’s unwillingness to tip his hand about his ideology. He ran for office on his ability to get federal services for his district. He attached himself to Roosevelt’s coattails, but he never embraced or worked for the principles of the New Deal. Conservatives thought he was one of them, and liberals thought the same. Caro concludes that Johnson was not going to saddle himself with an opinion he’d have to defend. In other words, he was already preparing to run for President.
I’m on to volume 2.
July 26, 2017
After years of putting it off, I finally dove into Robert A. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson series. Man, this guy can write. He has an historian's eye for detail, a reporter's gift for immediacy, a novelist's skill at characterization, context and narrative; the sort of absorptive historical writing that went out with Gibbon or, at least, Shelby Foote. Despite the often-doorstop lengths of his books, they are never dull. He makes 99 percent of other historians seem pedestrian and insignificant.
The Path to Power describes Johnson's early life growing up in the Texas Hill Country, his work as a teacher, early congressional career and his first (failed) Senate race in 1941. This book really immerses the reader in the travails of rural Texas, specifically dwelling on the crushing poverty and backwardness of daily life, the projection of Texan swagger and violent masculinity as a defense mechanism against the miserableness of daily life, along with the pervasive, off-handed corruption of local institutions, before it really gets to Johnson's life. LBJ is the product of such a crude, boisterous environment; if there's any shortcomings to Caro's work, it's that he dislikes Johnson and is apt to emphasize his flaws over his achievements. Thus he considers Johnson a pure pragmatist who talks a New Deal game to one crowd (supporting bills to develop Texas electricity and other resources, palling around with FDR) and acts like a conservative to others, especially his Texas chums. The decisive blow to his Senate chances, Caro argues, is that he took Election Day off, the ceaseless striver laid low by one day of rest - a lesson he took to heart. A breathtaking achievement.
The Path to Power describes Johnson's early life growing up in the Texas Hill Country, his work as a teacher, early congressional career and his first (failed) Senate race in 1941. This book really immerses the reader in the travails of rural Texas, specifically dwelling on the crushing poverty and backwardness of daily life, the projection of Texan swagger and violent masculinity as a defense mechanism against the miserableness of daily life, along with the pervasive, off-handed corruption of local institutions, before it really gets to Johnson's life. LBJ is the product of such a crude, boisterous environment; if there's any shortcomings to Caro's work, it's that he dislikes Johnson and is apt to emphasize his flaws over his achievements. Thus he considers Johnson a pure pragmatist who talks a New Deal game to one crowd (supporting bills to develop Texas electricity and other resources, palling around with FDR) and acts like a conservative to others, especially his Texas chums. The decisive blow to his Senate chances, Caro argues, is that he took Election Day off, the ceaseless striver laid low by one day of rest - a lesson he took to heart. A breathtaking achievement.
Read
August 18, 2021This book needed a serious developmental edit. I've worn that hat in my own work, and it was clear to me how it could have been done.
For example, at one point I knew all I needed know about the eco-system of the Texas Hill Country, especially due to a shortage of rain, but the author kept on as if writing a white paper for an Ag journal. He also is TMI about Johnson’s ancestors. It's more than many readers can absorb. On the flip side, he quotes the same physical descriptions numerous times----"dark eyes, black curls and white skin"---as if the reader cannot retain something that simple.
Throughout the book, the author is repetitive, both with certain concepts and providing extraneous detail, on several matters that have already been clearly established. For example, he writes twice as much about his relationship with the two debate students, Latimer and I.E., who came to assist LBJ in his work in DC, than is necessary. This kind of excess material is not needed to preserve the historical record. Sometimes less is more.
The original plan was for this series to be a trilogy. With proper editing, that goal could have been met and would likely raise the odds that these books would still be read in the future.
======
P.S.
I recently met someone who knew Caro's developmental editor. He fought with Caro constantly about cutting the excess. As Faulkner once said: "you must learn to kill your little darlings." Caro rarely conceded, which was obviously frustrating to his editor.....and bad for readers.
For example, at one point I knew all I needed know about the eco-system of the Texas Hill Country, especially due to a shortage of rain, but the author kept on as if writing a white paper for an Ag journal. He also is TMI about Johnson’s ancestors. It's more than many readers can absorb. On the flip side, he quotes the same physical descriptions numerous times----"dark eyes, black curls and white skin"---as if the reader cannot retain something that simple.
Throughout the book, the author is repetitive, both with certain concepts and providing extraneous detail, on several matters that have already been clearly established. For example, he writes twice as much about his relationship with the two debate students, Latimer and I.E., who came to assist LBJ in his work in DC, than is necessary. This kind of excess material is not needed to preserve the historical record. Sometimes less is more.
The original plan was for this series to be a trilogy. With proper editing, that goal could have been met and would likely raise the odds that these books would still be read in the future.
======
P.S.
I recently met someone who knew Caro's developmental editor. He fought with Caro constantly about cutting the excess. As Faulkner once said: "you must learn to kill your little darlings." Caro rarely conceded, which was obviously frustrating to his editor.....and bad for readers.
October 9, 2014
What can I add to the countless superlatives that have been used to describe this book except to say that they are all well-deserved. After reading Caro’s first book, The Power Broker, I thought it the best biography I had read. Based on this first volume, The Path to Power, The Years of Lyndon Johnson is even better. The rich detail flows effortless into your mind, delivered with prose that is a pure pleasure to devour.
We get Johnson in full context. We learn all about his parents and grandparents; the Texas Hill Country of his youth, its people and lifestyle; his coming of age, his driving ambition and political savvy; Austin and Washington politics, the politicians, including Sam Rayburn, FDR and so many and so much more. In Johnson’s story we get an unvarnished picture of American politics, the decisive influence of money and the overwhelming lust for power. It is a story artfully and masterfully told with a vibrancy that keeps pages turning. And the best thing after finishing this first volume is knowing there are three more volumes left to enjoy.
We get Johnson in full context. We learn all about his parents and grandparents; the Texas Hill Country of his youth, its people and lifestyle; his coming of age, his driving ambition and political savvy; Austin and Washington politics, the politicians, including Sam Rayburn, FDR and so many and so much more. In Johnson’s story we get an unvarnished picture of American politics, the decisive influence of money and the overwhelming lust for power. It is a story artfully and masterfully told with a vibrancy that keeps pages turning. And the best thing after finishing this first volume is knowing there are three more volumes left to enjoy.
November 1, 2020
4.75 Stars — What an undeniable achievement this first instalment of Caro’s masterpiece set is...
The researchers researcher is a master of storytelling. So much so that he can sweep up even the most un-cinematic content & make it so compelling, 35 pages passes & you wonder if you must have skipped 10-15 of them such is the absorbing nature of his prose.
However the most incredible component of this monster-read is that Caro manages to not portray and prejudice on his subject one way or the other, which is rather dumbfounding when you consider the dense nature of the text contained in these pages.
The researchers researcher is a master of storytelling. So much so that he can sweep up even the most un-cinematic content & make it so compelling, 35 pages passes & you wonder if you must have skipped 10-15 of them such is the absorbing nature of his prose.
However the most incredible component of this monster-read is that Caro manages to not portray and prejudice on his subject one way or the other, which is rather dumbfounding when you consider the dense nature of the text contained in these pages.
March 19, 2023
Reading “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” series is especially interesting as someone who was born and raised in Central Texas. The long list of political characters becomes a list of familiar place names I had seen often on maps or signs growing up. The Mansfield Dam, Tom Miller Dam, Wirtz Dam, Lake Buchanan, Inks Lake, Connolly High School, JJ Pickle Research Center, Oltorf street, Wurzbach parkway, and of course Lady Bird Lake, Lake LBJ, Lake Sam Rayburn, and the many other landmarks named for Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’ve even been to the Herman Brown library in Burnet.
It makes me glad to know others in far off places read this series and learn about the history of the Hill Country and the towns outside of Austin. The way Caro has included such detail in a political biography is why he’s one of the best.
I did get to wondering, what would LBJ think of what the Hill Country has become? A drive down 290 between Johnson City and Austin is one full of Teslas and million dollar homes tucked away in gated communities with names like “Belterra”, as wealth from Austin’s tech sector expands westward. The many new hosing developments that use “Hill Country views” as a selling point, the entire region has become desirable to the massive influx of money from California transplants. Now they grow wine in that thin hill country soil, with wineries and breweries sprouting up all the way to Fredericksburg and Llano.
Reading about the way it was and seeing the way it is, is what makes history so fascinating to me.
It makes me glad to know others in far off places read this series and learn about the history of the Hill Country and the towns outside of Austin. The way Caro has included such detail in a political biography is why he’s one of the best.
I did get to wondering, what would LBJ think of what the Hill Country has become? A drive down 290 between Johnson City and Austin is one full of Teslas and million dollar homes tucked away in gated communities with names like “Belterra”, as wealth from Austin’s tech sector expands westward. The many new hosing developments that use “Hill Country views” as a selling point, the entire region has become desirable to the massive influx of money from California transplants. Now they grow wine in that thin hill country soil, with wineries and breweries sprouting up all the way to Fredericksburg and Llano.
Reading about the way it was and seeing the way it is, is what makes history so fascinating to me.
January 22, 2020
“Before the paint had faded on the billboards proclaiming his loyalty to Franklin D., Lyndon B. had turned against him.” - p. 768
If I had to pick one quality presidential historian extraordinaire Robert Caro and LBJ share it would be meticulousness. Has any president’s life ever been so thoroughly dissected like this before? Readers willing to slog through this spralling 768-page biography of LBJ’s first 34 years will be rewarded with nuggets of superb writing and unforgettable scenes, but they come at the price of 50-100 pages of superfluous details and a protagonist Caro renders difficult to like. This leads to the question I am still trying to answer: Do I really want to read 3,500 pages about America’s tallest president? Abe (also 6’4”)? Yes! Teddy? Yes! FDR? Yes! LBJ???
Like “Truman,” “The Path to Power” gets off to a circuitous start. Caro spends the first 50 pages going into too much detail about LBJ’s ancestors and Texas Hill Country. At one point I realized that I. Was. Reading. Paragraphs. About. Grass. (Not.) Growing. But as Caro began to describe LBJ’s fascinating parents and their relationship, “wow” began appearing in my marginalia.
Caro’s nearly five-decade focus on (obsession with?) LBJ began in the 1970s at a time when he could intensively interview LBJ’s widow, siblings and contemporaries, but only after he had moved to the Hill Country and poured through thousands of boxes of documents at the LBJ Library in nearby Austin. Combined with brilliant insights and turns of phrase, Caro has set a new standard for presidential biographies. The problem is not only does he go into too much detail, there are also frequent redundancies. Interviewees often repeat themselves or provide statements already made by others. Caro also focuses almost exclusively on LBJ’s professional life. Other than his long-term affair with Alice Glass, there are no other examples of LBJ’s notorious womanizing. This is a book for policy wonks.
LBJ has his admirable qualities. He is whip sharp, charismatic and driven, but Caro makes it clear from the outset that he will not be pulling his punches. I had no idea that LBJ’s insatiable thirst for power would cause him to share many qualities with Tricky Dick and the Trumpster: Compulsive lying, ruthlessness, duplicity, opportunism, amorality and the quality in a leader I detested most during my time in Washington--LBJ was the kiss up, punch down type.
Caro’s deep dive is also one of the greatest strengths of “Path to Power.” I was fascinated by LBJ and his father’s relationship with the German immigrant community. I only knew this community existed thanks to Texas’ most famous beer, Shiner Bock. I had no idea how close LBJ became to FDR. I also really enjoyed the mini-biography of House Speaker Sam Rayburn--he never lost the idealism and sincerity that LBJ lacked. My favorite chapter was the innocuously titled “The Munsey Building.” LBJ’s skills as a master strategist and fundraiser are on full display as he almost single-handedly preserves the Democrats’ majority in the House in 1940. LBJ’s amorality is on full display the following year when he uses every legal and illegal trick in the book to try to win his first Senate race. In what can only be seen as poetic justice, one of his most under-handed techniques (vote-buying) would be used to defeat him.
Caro spent an average of ten years on each of the first four volumes of his LBJ saga, which means the final volume should appear in 2022 when he will turn 87. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John le Carre and Caro are at the top of my list of octogenarian public figures I hope will keep exercising and taking their vitamins!
If I had to pick one quality presidential historian extraordinaire Robert Caro and LBJ share it would be meticulousness. Has any president’s life ever been so thoroughly dissected like this before? Readers willing to slog through this spralling 768-page biography of LBJ’s first 34 years will be rewarded with nuggets of superb writing and unforgettable scenes, but they come at the price of 50-100 pages of superfluous details and a protagonist Caro renders difficult to like. This leads to the question I am still trying to answer: Do I really want to read 3,500 pages about America’s tallest president? Abe (also 6’4”)? Yes! Teddy? Yes! FDR? Yes! LBJ???
Like “Truman,” “The Path to Power” gets off to a circuitous start. Caro spends the first 50 pages going into too much detail about LBJ’s ancestors and Texas Hill Country. At one point I realized that I. Was. Reading. Paragraphs. About. Grass. (Not.) Growing. But as Caro began to describe LBJ’s fascinating parents and their relationship, “wow” began appearing in my marginalia.
Caro’s nearly five-decade focus on (obsession with?) LBJ began in the 1970s at a time when he could intensively interview LBJ’s widow, siblings and contemporaries, but only after he had moved to the Hill Country and poured through thousands of boxes of documents at the LBJ Library in nearby Austin. Combined with brilliant insights and turns of phrase, Caro has set a new standard for presidential biographies. The problem is not only does he go into too much detail, there are also frequent redundancies. Interviewees often repeat themselves or provide statements already made by others. Caro also focuses almost exclusively on LBJ’s professional life. Other than his long-term affair with Alice Glass, there are no other examples of LBJ’s notorious womanizing. This is a book for policy wonks.
LBJ has his admirable qualities. He is whip sharp, charismatic and driven, but Caro makes it clear from the outset that he will not be pulling his punches. I had no idea that LBJ’s insatiable thirst for power would cause him to share many qualities with Tricky Dick and the Trumpster: Compulsive lying, ruthlessness, duplicity, opportunism, amorality and the quality in a leader I detested most during my time in Washington--LBJ was the kiss up, punch down type.
Caro’s deep dive is also one of the greatest strengths of “Path to Power.” I was fascinated by LBJ and his father’s relationship with the German immigrant community. I only knew this community existed thanks to Texas’ most famous beer, Shiner Bock. I had no idea how close LBJ became to FDR. I also really enjoyed the mini-biography of House Speaker Sam Rayburn--he never lost the idealism and sincerity that LBJ lacked. My favorite chapter was the innocuously titled “The Munsey Building.” LBJ’s skills as a master strategist and fundraiser are on full display as he almost single-handedly preserves the Democrats’ majority in the House in 1940. LBJ’s amorality is on full display the following year when he uses every legal and illegal trick in the book to try to win his first Senate race. In what can only be seen as poetic justice, one of his most under-handed techniques (vote-buying) would be used to defeat him.
Caro spent an average of ten years on each of the first four volumes of his LBJ saga, which means the final volume should appear in 2022 when he will turn 87. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John le Carre and Caro are at the top of my list of octogenarian public figures I hope will keep exercising and taking their vitamins!
December 14, 2016
Essential reading--the entire trilogy is riveting and so well written.
February 3, 2020
Lyndon B. Johnson — what a magnificent, despicable, ingenious, unscrupulous, complicated bastard.
Johnson was president when I was born, so I have no personal memory of him. And I had no particular interest in him until I saw the two Tony Award-winning plays about him: All the Way and The Great Society.
These two plays covered Johnson's presidency, particularly his interactions with the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. There is little about his early life except what he relates in his own monologues. As we learn from this book, Johnson could never be considered a reliable narrator, especially about his own life.
I'd still not have been that interested in this book about Johnson but for the author's Audible freebie, On Power. In that short, Robert Caro spoke so compellingly about his lifelong journalistic investigation of the levers of power and how they are pulled, and how the movements of great men can grind and crush ordinary people unseen in their gears, that I was motivated to embark on the epic journey that is his life's work: a four volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Volume one, The Path to Power only takes us up through the end of World War II, and Johnson's first Senate win. But what a magnificent epic it already is. And Johnson... whatever you feel about the man, whatever your politics, this book paints him as a genius, a scoundrel, a political operator of unlimited ambition and zero scruples, yet a complicated man who was capable of accomplishing the impossible. Often he did the right thing for purely selfish reasons. He could be a best friend and a worst enemy. He demanded absolute, groveling allegiance from his underlings, getting rid of anyone insufficiently subservient. On the other hand, he was very good at looking after the people he valued, so loyalty to Johnson could be worth a great deal. Except that Johnson himself was not loyal at all, and would throw long-time allies under a bus in a heartbeat if it was to his political advantage.
By the end of this first volume, you will be convinced that Johnson was a ruthless, despicable, amoral bastard, and also understand why he was convinced he was going to be President someday even when he was just a poor boy from Texas without a hope of making such lofty dreams come true. And how he could have become the greatest president ever.
The Path to Power actually starts by laying out the landscape: a detailed description of the Texas Hill Country, and how its settlement and formation, generations before Johnson was born, shaped the future president.
Today, Austin, Texas is a wealthy dot of blue in a red sea, largely due to immigrant Californians.
The original settlers of the Texas Hill Country would not recognize this high-tech hipster town of artsy coffee shops and concert venues proclaiming "Keep Austin Weird!" They were dirt farmers and cattle ranchers who spent decades living in fear of Comanches. By the time Lyndon Johnson came around, the frontier was gone but the dirt farming was still a way of life. A combination of bad environmental management, bad economic bets, and inhospitable terrain had turned the once-lush hill country into eroded terrain that would never again support the production it had for its first farmers, and this part of Texas would, as Caro describes it, be supporting an agrarian population that lived and farmed under conditions that were literally medieval well after the major cities of America had been transformed by electricity and motor cars.
Lyndon Johnson was born here, the son of Samuel Johnson, who was a remarkable politician in his own right. But Samuel Ealy Johnson, despite having a successful political career, failed economically in his farming and cattle business, and by the time Johnson came of age, his old man was a broke and broken old alcoholic.
A more loyal son might show some respect for what his father had done, but Johnson was referred to often throughout his career as a "professional son" — he would attach himself sycophantically to a powerful older man who viewed himself as a father figure. His actual father, however, was a failure in Lyndon's eyes, and so their relationship never warmed. When Samuel Ealy Johnson died in 1937, Lyndon Johnson's friends and associates were surprised at what a large and prestigious gathering turned out to give their respects to the one-time Texas state senator; from what LBJ had told them about his father, they thought he was just a washed up old drunk and had no idea that he had once been a highly respected and accomplished man, who had brought highways and construction projects to Texas, secured pensions for veterans and their widows, and been a guiding force in post-Reconstruction Texas.
Similarly, Johnson backstabbed just about all of his mentors at one time or another, up to and including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ingratiating himself early with FDR, who gave unprecedented support to a young freshman Congressman from Texas, LBJ ran in Texas as an "FDR man." His entire platform was wholehearted, unquestioning support for Roosevelt's New Deal.
This did not stop him, a few years later running as Senator, when Texas was turning more conservative, from claiming he'd never been a Roosevelt supporter and had always been against the New Deal.
This sort of lack of scruples shows up over and over again in Caro's biography. Johnson was, as described in many, many incidents going all the way back to his childhood, a liar, a fabricator, a coward, a cheater, and as a politician, the quintessential cynical opportunist. "Johnson will be found on no barricades," said one of his former supporters, realizing that Johnson never committed himself on any issue until he saw which way the wind was blowing. Over and over, Johnson proved very good at convincing liberals he was a liberal and conservatives he was a conservative, and even decades later, many of his victims still hadn't noticed the knife he'd stuck in their ribs.
You might be getting the impression that Caro has written an anti-Johnson polemic, but that's far from the case. Certainly he does not paint a flattering picture of the man, speaking frankly about how Johnson stole elections, shamelessly participated in voter fraud, lied right and left, made up stories, and incidentally, cheated on Ladybird and bragged about it, over and over. And yet there is still something magnificent about this unscrupulous bastard. He's a genius who somehow knew he was destined for power, even as he languished for years in seemingly dead-end positions. He had a knack for taking over moribund organizations and turning them into powerful political machines. He had a knack for ingratiating himself with powerful men who'd help him up the ladder of power. He had a knack for using people who'd help him up, and then stepping on their heads to boost himself up.
And if all this makes Johnson seem like an unsympathetic bastard, Caro also describes in compelling detail just how politics, especially in Texas, worked back then. Everyone stole votes. The word for a principled politician who stood on his convictions was "loser." Elections... did not work the way they work today. Sure, we have concerns today about voter fraud, but we're talking about manipulation of a few critical percentage points, when back in Johnson's day, entire counties were literally bought and sold.
Caro also describes the political environment as it was then. Johnson was a Democrat, but as we all know now, a Democrat or a Republican in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s (the time period covered by this volume) was not the same as a Democrat or a Republican today. The very loose mapping of "Democrats=liberal" and "Republicans=conservative" was already present, but even those terms didn't mean the same thing. Texas was Democrat because the Democrats were the party of farmers and poor people, while Republicans represented cities and businessmen. Texas was also Democrat because the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction was still alive. Johnson's Hill Country had been a stronghold of the Progressive Party. It was not yet Oil Country (though oil would soon shape its economy and politics), and it was generations from being the culturally-driven Red State it is today.
All of this, Caro brings together to make sure we are evaluating Johnson in the full context of his life and times. And yes, he's still an unscrupulous son-of-a-bitch, the sort of anti-hero whose wins you celebrate while still thinking he deserves to get knocked into the dirt.
Caro interviewed everyone, from Johnson himself and his wife to all the politicians and aides he could find. He collected a vast amount of material to make sure every quote was documented. Perhaps most compelling among his interviews are those with old Hill Country wives (he spoke to some of the last survivors of those old pre-electricity Hill Country families) who described to him just what it meant to have electricity. This was one of Johnson's signature accomplishments: at a time when the power companies were dead set against rural electrification (not even because it wouldn't be profitable, but because it wouldn't be profitable enough) and used every dirty trick they could to avoid having to provide it, Johnson brought electricity to the Hill Country. And this shows his genius, his cunning, and his occasional flashes of humanity, because he really did care about those Hill Country folks, and he really was proud of what he did for them, and he really did keep his promise.
I never thought, upon starting this book, that I'd find LBJ so fascinating and an enormous epic about his entire life so listenable. But now I am hooked and in for the long haul. And we're still not even into the 50s yet. I highly recommend this volume, even if you aren't particularly interested in LBJ himself, because it is such a readable and informative account of a major part of American history and how the politics we have today evolved from the politics of previous generations, and how small things can cause big things, and how one man really can rise to power on ambition and force of will.
Johnson was president when I was born, so I have no personal memory of him. And I had no particular interest in him until I saw the two Tony Award-winning plays about him: All the Way and The Great Society.
These two plays covered Johnson's presidency, particularly his interactions with the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. There is little about his early life except what he relates in his own monologues. As we learn from this book, Johnson could never be considered a reliable narrator, especially about his own life.
I'd still not have been that interested in this book about Johnson but for the author's Audible freebie, On Power. In that short, Robert Caro spoke so compellingly about his lifelong journalistic investigation of the levers of power and how they are pulled, and how the movements of great men can grind and crush ordinary people unseen in their gears, that I was motivated to embark on the epic journey that is his life's work: a four volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Volume one, The Path to Power only takes us up through the end of World War II, and Johnson's first Senate win. But what a magnificent epic it already is. And Johnson... whatever you feel about the man, whatever your politics, this book paints him as a genius, a scoundrel, a political operator of unlimited ambition and zero scruples, yet a complicated man who was capable of accomplishing the impossible. Often he did the right thing for purely selfish reasons. He could be a best friend and a worst enemy. He demanded absolute, groveling allegiance from his underlings, getting rid of anyone insufficiently subservient. On the other hand, he was very good at looking after the people he valued, so loyalty to Johnson could be worth a great deal. Except that Johnson himself was not loyal at all, and would throw long-time allies under a bus in a heartbeat if it was to his political advantage.
By the end of this first volume, you will be convinced that Johnson was a ruthless, despicable, amoral bastard, and also understand why he was convinced he was going to be President someday even when he was just a poor boy from Texas without a hope of making such lofty dreams come true. And how he could have become the greatest president ever.
The Path to Power actually starts by laying out the landscape: a detailed description of the Texas Hill Country, and how its settlement and formation, generations before Johnson was born, shaped the future president.
Today, Austin, Texas is a wealthy dot of blue in a red sea, largely due to immigrant Californians.
The original settlers of the Texas Hill Country would not recognize this high-tech hipster town of artsy coffee shops and concert venues proclaiming "Keep Austin Weird!" They were dirt farmers and cattle ranchers who spent decades living in fear of Comanches. By the time Lyndon Johnson came around, the frontier was gone but the dirt farming was still a way of life. A combination of bad environmental management, bad economic bets, and inhospitable terrain had turned the once-lush hill country into eroded terrain that would never again support the production it had for its first farmers, and this part of Texas would, as Caro describes it, be supporting an agrarian population that lived and farmed under conditions that were literally medieval well after the major cities of America had been transformed by electricity and motor cars.
Lyndon Johnson was born here, the son of Samuel Johnson, who was a remarkable politician in his own right. But Samuel Ealy Johnson, despite having a successful political career, failed economically in his farming and cattle business, and by the time Johnson came of age, his old man was a broke and broken old alcoholic.
A more loyal son might show some respect for what his father had done, but Johnson was referred to often throughout his career as a "professional son" — he would attach himself sycophantically to a powerful older man who viewed himself as a father figure. His actual father, however, was a failure in Lyndon's eyes, and so their relationship never warmed. When Samuel Ealy Johnson died in 1937, Lyndon Johnson's friends and associates were surprised at what a large and prestigious gathering turned out to give their respects to the one-time Texas state senator; from what LBJ had told them about his father, they thought he was just a washed up old drunk and had no idea that he had once been a highly respected and accomplished man, who had brought highways and construction projects to Texas, secured pensions for veterans and their widows, and been a guiding force in post-Reconstruction Texas.
Similarly, Johnson backstabbed just about all of his mentors at one time or another, up to and including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ingratiating himself early with FDR, who gave unprecedented support to a young freshman Congressman from Texas, LBJ ran in Texas as an "FDR man." His entire platform was wholehearted, unquestioning support for Roosevelt's New Deal.
This did not stop him, a few years later running as Senator, when Texas was turning more conservative, from claiming he'd never been a Roosevelt supporter and had always been against the New Deal.
This sort of lack of scruples shows up over and over again in Caro's biography. Johnson was, as described in many, many incidents going all the way back to his childhood, a liar, a fabricator, a coward, a cheater, and as a politician, the quintessential cynical opportunist. "Johnson will be found on no barricades," said one of his former supporters, realizing that Johnson never committed himself on any issue until he saw which way the wind was blowing. Over and over, Johnson proved very good at convincing liberals he was a liberal and conservatives he was a conservative, and even decades later, many of his victims still hadn't noticed the knife he'd stuck in their ribs.
You might be getting the impression that Caro has written an anti-Johnson polemic, but that's far from the case. Certainly he does not paint a flattering picture of the man, speaking frankly about how Johnson stole elections, shamelessly participated in voter fraud, lied right and left, made up stories, and incidentally, cheated on Ladybird and bragged about it, over and over. And yet there is still something magnificent about this unscrupulous bastard. He's a genius who somehow knew he was destined for power, even as he languished for years in seemingly dead-end positions. He had a knack for taking over moribund organizations and turning them into powerful political machines. He had a knack for ingratiating himself with powerful men who'd help him up the ladder of power. He had a knack for using people who'd help him up, and then stepping on their heads to boost himself up.
And if all this makes Johnson seem like an unsympathetic bastard, Caro also describes in compelling detail just how politics, especially in Texas, worked back then. Everyone stole votes. The word for a principled politician who stood on his convictions was "loser." Elections... did not work the way they work today. Sure, we have concerns today about voter fraud, but we're talking about manipulation of a few critical percentage points, when back in Johnson's day, entire counties were literally bought and sold.
Caro also describes the political environment as it was then. Johnson was a Democrat, but as we all know now, a Democrat or a Republican in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s (the time period covered by this volume) was not the same as a Democrat or a Republican today. The very loose mapping of "Democrats=liberal" and "Republicans=conservative" was already present, but even those terms didn't mean the same thing. Texas was Democrat because the Democrats were the party of farmers and poor people, while Republicans represented cities and businessmen. Texas was also Democrat because the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction was still alive. Johnson's Hill Country had been a stronghold of the Progressive Party. It was not yet Oil Country (though oil would soon shape its economy and politics), and it was generations from being the culturally-driven Red State it is today.
All of this, Caro brings together to make sure we are evaluating Johnson in the full context of his life and times. And yes, he's still an unscrupulous son-of-a-bitch, the sort of anti-hero whose wins you celebrate while still thinking he deserves to get knocked into the dirt.
Caro interviewed everyone, from Johnson himself and his wife to all the politicians and aides he could find. He collected a vast amount of material to make sure every quote was documented. Perhaps most compelling among his interviews are those with old Hill Country wives (he spoke to some of the last survivors of those old pre-electricity Hill Country families) who described to him just what it meant to have electricity. This was one of Johnson's signature accomplishments: at a time when the power companies were dead set against rural electrification (not even because it wouldn't be profitable, but because it wouldn't be profitable enough) and used every dirty trick they could to avoid having to provide it, Johnson brought electricity to the Hill Country. And this shows his genius, his cunning, and his occasional flashes of humanity, because he really did care about those Hill Country folks, and he really was proud of what he did for them, and he really did keep his promise.
I never thought, upon starting this book, that I'd find LBJ so fascinating and an enormous epic about his entire life so listenable. But now I am hooked and in for the long haul. And we're still not even into the 50s yet. I highly recommend this volume, even if you aren't particularly interested in LBJ himself, because it is such a readable and informative account of a major part of American history and how the politics we have today evolved from the politics of previous generations, and how small things can cause big things, and how one man really can rise to power on ambition and force of will.
September 25, 2020
Prior to reading Robert Caro’s book The Path to Power, I thought I had a reasonably good idea of who Lyndon Johnson was. After all, Johnson became President when I was in the eighth grade and he remained President until my freshman year in college. I remember hearing the chants on the evening news, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" The first hint that I might not know LBJ as well as I thought occurred when I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, a work that incudes mini-biographies of four presidents who in the author’s opinion demonstrated unusual leadership abilities: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. It was after reading Goodwin’s work that I decided to read Caro’s book — the first of what is now expected to be five volumes in a series titled The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Born and raised in New York City, Robert A. Caro graduated from Princeton University. He was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. The list of awards he has received is quite impressive. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has also won numerous other major literary honors, including two National Book Awards, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best book in American history. In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal, the highest award in the humanities given in the United States. The accolades for Caro’s works are numerous:
“By writing the best presidential biography the country has ever seen, Caro has forever changed the way we think about, and read, American history” (NPR);
“Caro has a unique place among American political biographers, . . . He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” (The Boston Globe)
“Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.” (The London Times)
A brief review cannot possibly do justice to the depth and detail of this impressive biography. It was, simply put, a fascinating story. The depth of research is extraordinary—Caro and his wife spent seven years conducting research for the book, during which he conducted roughly 1,000 interviews. The Path to Power only covers the first 33 years of Johnson’s life, from 1908 to 1941 and his defeat in his first bid for the U.S. Senate. From earliest childhood, we see in LBJ a voracious need to be first, to win, to dominate, and a deep need to be the center of attention—united with a limitless capacity for hard work to achieve his goals.
Caro describes Johnson’s ancestry and the westward migration of settlers into the impoverished, isolated Texas hill country—one of the country’s most desperately poor areas, where Johnson’s pride was stung by his father’s failure in the cotton futures market and ensuing financial ruin. Caro covers LBJ’s college years at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, where we start to see his deviousness in his dealings with others, as he cultivates powerful older men and coldly uses weaker personalities in campus politics—politics he started because he was not part of the “in crowd” on campus. For nine months, Johnson taught Mexican–American children at the Wellhausen School in Cotulla to make money to go back to finish at San Marcos. He demanded that his students pay attention in class, but he also inspired them—telling them that if they learned, they would experience success in life.
Following college, as the 23-year-old aide to Texas congressman Richard Kleberg, Johnson again demonstrated his political aspirations and his ability to organize a power base for himself. Then, as the Texas director of the National Youth Administration (a New Deal agency that focused on providing work and education for American youths), a congressional vacancy opens up. Johnson decides to run for the office and wins with the financial backing of the Texas contractor Brown & Root. It is during this period of time that we are treated to two of the best sections of the book: Caro devotes two chapters to Johnson’s work for rural electrification of the Hill Country; another chapter is devoted to Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. But we also learn of Johnson’s long and secret love affair with the mistress of one of his financial supporters.
Johnson’s time in the House of Representatives is marked by his exceptional inner drive and energy. While driving his people to the point of exhaustion, he also inspires their loyalty. Johnson is an enigma—he is at once unscrupulous and treacherous, while he is commendable and dedicated. Sadly, we also witness one of his greatest sins—his betrayal of his father, misrepresenting him as an irresponsible drunk, and his betrayal of two of his most ardent supporters, Sam Rayburn and FDR.
Robert Caro is even-handed in his approach. He exposes Lyndon Johnson's ruthlessness, dishonesty, and readiness to buy votes with cash, but he also reveals Johnson's empathy, benevolence and his political genius. The reader is both sickened by Johnson, and awed by him. It is a breathtaking biography. The Path to Power is widely considered one of the most extraordinary presidential biographies ever published, and with good reason.
"By every measure—depth of research, brilliance of conception, the seamless flow of the prose—it is a masterpiece of biography." —Dan Cryer, Newsday
Born and raised in New York City, Robert A. Caro graduated from Princeton University. He was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. The list of awards he has received is quite impressive. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has also won numerous other major literary honors, including two National Book Awards, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best book in American history. In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal, the highest award in the humanities given in the United States. The accolades for Caro’s works are numerous:
“By writing the best presidential biography the country has ever seen, Caro has forever changed the way we think about, and read, American history” (NPR);
“Caro has a unique place among American political biographers, . . . He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” (The Boston Globe)
“Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.” (The London Times)
A brief review cannot possibly do justice to the depth and detail of this impressive biography. It was, simply put, a fascinating story. The depth of research is extraordinary—Caro and his wife spent seven years conducting research for the book, during which he conducted roughly 1,000 interviews. The Path to Power only covers the first 33 years of Johnson’s life, from 1908 to 1941 and his defeat in his first bid for the U.S. Senate. From earliest childhood, we see in LBJ a voracious need to be first, to win, to dominate, and a deep need to be the center of attention—united with a limitless capacity for hard work to achieve his goals.
Caro describes Johnson’s ancestry and the westward migration of settlers into the impoverished, isolated Texas hill country—one of the country’s most desperately poor areas, where Johnson’s pride was stung by his father’s failure in the cotton futures market and ensuing financial ruin. Caro covers LBJ’s college years at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, where we start to see his deviousness in his dealings with others, as he cultivates powerful older men and coldly uses weaker personalities in campus politics—politics he started because he was not part of the “in crowd” on campus. For nine months, Johnson taught Mexican–American children at the Wellhausen School in Cotulla to make money to go back to finish at San Marcos. He demanded that his students pay attention in class, but he also inspired them—telling them that if they learned, they would experience success in life.
Following college, as the 23-year-old aide to Texas congressman Richard Kleberg, Johnson again demonstrated his political aspirations and his ability to organize a power base for himself. Then, as the Texas director of the National Youth Administration (a New Deal agency that focused on providing work and education for American youths), a congressional vacancy opens up. Johnson decides to run for the office and wins with the financial backing of the Texas contractor Brown & Root. It is during this period of time that we are treated to two of the best sections of the book: Caro devotes two chapters to Johnson’s work for rural electrification of the Hill Country; another chapter is devoted to Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. But we also learn of Johnson’s long and secret love affair with the mistress of one of his financial supporters.
Johnson’s time in the House of Representatives is marked by his exceptional inner drive and energy. While driving his people to the point of exhaustion, he also inspires their loyalty. Johnson is an enigma—he is at once unscrupulous and treacherous, while he is commendable and dedicated. Sadly, we also witness one of his greatest sins—his betrayal of his father, misrepresenting him as an irresponsible drunk, and his betrayal of two of his most ardent supporters, Sam Rayburn and FDR.
Robert Caro is even-handed in his approach. He exposes Lyndon Johnson's ruthlessness, dishonesty, and readiness to buy votes with cash, but he also reveals Johnson's empathy, benevolence and his political genius. The reader is both sickened by Johnson, and awed by him. It is a breathtaking biography. The Path to Power is widely considered one of the most extraordinary presidential biographies ever published, and with good reason.
"By every measure—depth of research, brilliance of conception, the seamless flow of the prose—it is a masterpiece of biography." —Dan Cryer, Newsday
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