The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

The more one thus follows his life, the more apparent it becomes that alongside the thread of achievement running through it runs another thread, as dark as the other is bright, and as fraught with consequences for history: a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will.

he entered the Oval Office perhaps the richest man ever to occupy it.

crazy

during the entire five years of his Presidency, Johnson personally directed his business affairs, down to the most minute details. Of this there was virtually no public awareness, and Lyndon Johnson left the Presidency, and lived out his life, and died, with the American people still ignorant not only of the dimensions of his greed but of its intensity.

“He had always been ambitious, even back in Johnson City,”

Interesting that he didn't have this ambition until he left the wing of his dad.

The most striking characteristic of both his parents was that they were idealists who stuck to their ideals. They had been trying ever since he was a little boy to teach him that what mattered was principle, and sticking to principle. Lyndon Johnson’s college career—and his career after college, from beginning to end—would demonstrate what he thought of their teachings.

Actions louder than words...

“But Lyndon’s boasting and bragging were to an extent that was ridiculous. Nobody believed him.”

trump esque

On the porches of some of these houses, men sat on rusting metal chairs and stared vacantly straight ahead of them.

love this image

disgusted him,” a friend says. Johnson began making Jones take dictation from him while

And in scores of county seats in America’s farm belt, the same scene was repeated: when a foreclosed farm was to be auctioned, crowds of armed farmers would appear at the courthouse; prospective bidders would be jostled and shoved until they left, and the farm would be “bid in” for a dollar or two, and returned to the original owner.

And in 1934, the district received the type of “consideration” Johnson had had in mind; it was the first congressional district to have every one of its crop-reduction loan applications approved by the AAA.

The chance for press coverage made even the most famous political figures receptive to Johnson’s invitations to address it.

Once, a congressional aide, who had just heard him “talking conservative” with Martin Dies, came across him, “not an hour later,” “talking liberal” with Patman—espousing a point of view diametrically opposite to the one he had been espousing sixty minutes before.

“Lyndon goes which way the wind blows.”

Common for a politician?

Felony?

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.

A network had sprung up, a network of men linked by an acquaintance with Lyndon Johnson, who were willing, because of Lyndon Johnson, to help one another. Johnson had few jobs at his disposal; if one of them was vacated by the friend for whom he had obtained it, he wanted it to be passed on to another friend.

His energy and his talent, the talent that was beyond talent and was genius, were at the service of some hidden but vast ambition. And no one knew what it was.

i hope we find out

they say that the votes against Kleberg were an expression of dislike for Kleberg’s secretary.

ha

he was determined to marry money

And then, on this, their first date, he asked her to marry him.

the tone was similarly one of command; it was, in fact, little different from the tone in which he addressed Latimer and Jones.

“Y’all come back real soon, hear now?” that she really wanted them to. And this graciousness, Lady Bird Johnson’s remarkable ability to make anyone feel at home, was, within just a few months of their marriage, to give her husband’s career the biggest boost it had yet received.

articles were accompanied

Lyndon Johnson had not seen some of the people he was greeting for ten years, but his memory of good times they had shared seemed as vivid as if the times had been yesterday. And so was his memory of the names of their kinfolk. Recalls his cousin Ava: “He would say, ‘It’s been a long time. How’s so-and-so?’ And he’d always know some member of his family to talk about. Listening to him, I realized he had a mind that didn’t forget anything.

That was the key—he always knew somebody. I know your mother, or your father—or some friend.

And he would stand and chat with the farmer, one foot up on the wheel of the cultivator or the handle of the plow, as if he had nothing else in the world to do. Day after day, while his opponents rested for the next Saturday, or delivered a major speech or two, Lyndon Johnson campaigned like this.

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, There are thousands to prophesy failure; There are thousands to point out to you one by one, The dangers that wait to assail you. But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, Just take off your coat and go to it; Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.

“He was a pack rat for information,”

“Roosevelt and Rayburn liking him—that gave him the in. And the personal force did the rest. That had to be it, because there was nothing else. He didn’t have power, or money or anything. He just had this personal force—a huge, unique personal force.”

Johnson, after all, was not the only one of the two who was a reader and manipulator of men.

He still asked Marsh for advice—and was so grateful when Charles gave it that the older man gave more and more.

This is impressive. The new deal helped the farmers.

To observe the House of Representatives was to observe what absolute, untrammeled, unchallengeable power did to men.

In Washington, his leadership (together, of course, with that of Wirtz) of the fight was an open secret; in Texas, it was just a secret.

The fault, O’Daniel said, lay in the “professional politicians.” He was no politician, he told his listeners, he was a “common citizen”—one of them. And if he was Governor, he told them, “we” would be Governor.

“People all over Texas formed an impression over the years that Lyndon Johnson personified the New Deal … it would be an error to tag Johnson now as a strong New Dealer. That may come as a surprise, but it is true.”

Before the paint had faded on the billboards proclaiming his loyalty to Franklin D, Lyndon B had turned against him.