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

by Robert A. Caro

The voters Lyndon Johnson would have to convince to vote for him—voters most of whom had never even heard the name of Lyndon Johnson—were scattered on their isolated farms and ranches so thinly across those immense spaces that a candidate could drive miles between one voter and the next. Difficult miles. Two major highways ran through the district: east-west U.S. Highway 290, and north-south U.S. Highway 81. Most of the district’s other roads were unpaved; in 1937, the fifty-eight miles of “State Highway 66” between Johnson City and the northern boundary of Burnet County, for example, were largely unpaved. And most of the district’s voters did not live on 290 or 81—or even on 66. Their homes, the farms and ranches on which lay the votes which alone could enable him to take advantage of his great chance, lay on a thousand separate, long, winding, rutted roads that were little more than paths or cow trails.