We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon-raised in one of the country's most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father's slide into failure and financial ruin-lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate "impossible" goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be. We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate-coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson's political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas Hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered. The Path to Power-the first book of The Years of Lyndon Johnson-reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. No president-no era of American politics-has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facts of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak.
The conjunction has produced a monumental and galvanizing book that is a landmark in American biography.
Here is the perfect joining of subject and writer: Johnson, the man of awesome complexity, energy, ambition, and power-obsessed with secrecy, obscuring (often "rewriting") the facts of his personal and political life Caro, his biographer, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his life of Robert Moses, The Power Broker-and everywhere acclaimed for the brilliance, tenacity, and integrity of his research, for his grasp of character and of the workings of power. The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time.
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