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

by Robert A. Caro

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 its 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 announceme...

“With men who had power, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson was a professional son.”

His silence in this area was especially conspicuous because of his volubility in all others. If political tactics, for example, were being discussed, Johnson would be the center of the discussion; if the discussion concerned political issues—philosophy, principles, ideas, ideals—Johnson would not even be part of it. Realizing, as he entered a room in which a bull session was being held, that its topic was a serious issue, he would try to duck back out of the room before he was seen. If he was already participating in a bull session and it turned to such an issue, he would quietly slip out of the room, or, if he remained, would refuse, even if drawn into the discussion, to allow himself to be pinned down to a specific stand. He would refuse to take a stand even when directly challenged to do so, turning aside the challenge with a joke, or a Texas anecdote. Pressed to the wall, he would say he simply hadn’t yet made up his mind on the issue. During those first exciting years of the New Deal, discussion of great issues swirled through Washington, and nowhere was discussion more animated than in that basement home of a hundred bright young men in government. Amidst the swirl of ideas, Lyndon Johnson seemed unmoved. The son of the man who had said, “It’s high time a man stood up for what he believes in” seemed ready to stand up for nothing. At San Marcos, it was assumed this behavior stemmed from ambition. “He never took strong positions, positions where you knew where Lyndon s...