The Path to Power

Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson traces Johnson's life from his ancestors' arrival in the Texas Hill Country through his narrow defeat in his first Senate race in 1941. Caro argues that Johnson's character was forged by the collision between inherited ambition and the brutal poverty of the Hill Country, and that the patterns established in these early decades would persist throughout his life: a genius for acquiring power, an utter ruthlessness in pursuing it, and a willingness to abandon any principle that stood in his way.

Caro begins with Johnson's family background. His maternal ancestors, the Buntons, were fiercely ambitious Texas pioneers who combined romantic idealism with hard-headed practicality. His paternal ancestors, the Johnsons, shared the Buntons' ambition but lacked their toughness. The Hill Country itself was a trap: its lush grass lured settlers who did not realize the thin limestone soil could not sustain farming. When cattle and cotton stripped away the grass, the soil eroded and the land's fertility vanished within a generation.

Lyndon's father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., inherited both the Bunton ambition and the Johnson impracticality. A gifted legislator who won a seat in the Texas Legislature at twenty-seven, he fought for Populist causes with conspicuous honesty. But in 1920, he gambled everything on buying the old Johnson ranch, went deeply into debt, and was ruined when cotton prices collapsed. The family's rapid fall from local prominence to ridicule in Johnson City scarred young Lyndon deeply.

Even before the family's disgrace, Lyndon had displayed an extraordinary need for attention and dominance. As a small child, he ran away repeatedly to force adults to search for him and demanded to lead every group of boys. After his father's failure, these traits intensified. He defied both parents on the subject of education, refusing to attend college for almost three years after high school before finally enrolling at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos in February 1927.

At San Marcos, Johnson displayed the full range of traits that would characterize his career. He cultivated the college president with extravagant flattery, maneuvering within five weeks into the position of presidential assistant. Toward fellow students, he was domineering and widely distrusted. He created campus politics where none had previously existed, organizing a secret fraternity called the White Stars and defeating the established order through strategic maneuvering and stolen elections, while keeping his role so secret that even his victims did not know he was behind their defeats.

After teaching stints in Cotulla and Houston, Johnson was hired as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg in November 1931. He learned the federal bureaucracy with frantic speed, cultivated powerful older men, and built a network of loyal subordinates across Texas. Privately, he held conservative views opposed to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the sweeping package of federal programs designed to combat the Great Depression. Publicly, he agreed with whatever his listener believed.

In September 1934, Johnson met and quickly married Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor, the shy daughter of a wealthy East Texas merchant. Her father's $10,000 enabled Johnson's first congressional campaign, and her graciousness proved crucial in deepening Johnson's bond with Sam Rayburn, the powerful Texas Congressman. Rayburn, who had risen from poverty to shepherd landmark New Deal financial regulation through Congress, was lonely after a failed marriage and had no children. Johnson cultivated Rayburn with calculated warmth, and the two developed a bond that endured for the rest of Rayburn's life.

In 1935, Rayburn secured for Johnson the directorship of the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Texas, a federal youth-employment and student-aid agency. At twenty-six, Johnson was the youngest of the forty-eight state directors. He drove his staff mercilessly and devised innovative work projects that became national models, while building his first statewide political organization with operatives in every one of Texas' 254 counties.

When Congressman James P. Buchanan died in February 1937, Johnson ran for the vacant seat. Attorney Alvin Wirtz, who needed a congressional champion for the Marshall Ford Dam, a major Texas dam project whose federal authorization and funding were in jeopardy, became his chief strategist. Johnson based his campaign entirely on support for Roosevelt, campaigned with desperate energy across the sprawling district, and won with 8,280 votes, drawing his margin from the impoverished Hill Country.

As a freshman Congressman, Johnson cultivated brilliant young New Deal insiders, including Tommy Corcoran, Abe Fortas, and James Rowe. Through their help, he secured the authorization and funding that saved the Marshall Ford Dam and, with it, the construction firm Brown & Root. The firm's owner, Herman Brown, became the principal financier of Johnson's rise.

Johnson's greatest accomplishment for his constituents was bringing electricity to the Hill Country. Caro provides a detailed portrait of life without electricity: women hauling water, washing clothes by hand, ironing with heavy irons heated on wood stoves, and canning food for days over blazing fires. When the Rural Electrification Administration refused to fund power lines in an area too sparsely populated to repay loans, Johnson persuaded farmers to form a cooperative and went directly to Roosevelt to override the refusal. In November 1939, the lights came on across the Hill Country.

By 1940, Johnson had maneuvered himself into the role of Roosevelt's man in Texas by exploiting the feud between the President and Vice President John Nance Garner. He served as Roosevelt's secret informant within the pro-Garner Texas congressional delegation and engineered a public rupture between Rayburn and the White House that eliminated Rayburn as a rival for Roosevelt's favor. That October, Johnson achieved his breakthrough to national power by obtaining an informal role distributing campaign funds to endangered Democratic Congressmen. He tapped Brown & Root and Texas oilmen for unprecedented sums and channeled support to some seventy-seven candidates. The Democrats gained seats instead of suffering predicted heavy losses, and Johnson suddenly controlled a pipeline of political money that made him indispensable on Capitol Hill.

Throughout these years, Johnson conducted a secret affair with Alice Glass, the idealistic mistress of his wealthy patron, the newspaper publisher Charles Marsh. The affair represented a rare instance in which Johnson's personal feelings ran counter to his political calculations, since discovery would have cost him Marsh's invaluable support.

When Senator Morris Sheppard died in April 1941, Johnson ran for the seat against Governor W. Lee O'Daniel with Roosevelt's backing and major financial support from Brown & Root, Texas oilmen, New York liberals, and the President's own apparatus. He led on election night but made a fatal error by having his South Texas allies report their lopsided returns immediately, letting opponents know exactly how many votes they needed. Conservative business interests who wanted O'Daniel out of the Governor's mansion arranged for late-reporting East Texas counties to alter their totals, and Johnson lost by 1,311 votes. Roosevelt subsequently intervened to shut down an IRS investigation into Brown & Root's illegal campaign financing, in which the firm had funneled approximately $200,000 through fictitious bonuses and fees. Brown & Root paid only $372,000 in back taxes with no indictments or publicity, preserving both Johnson's career and his access to the money that had fueled his rise.

Caro concludes with Johnson's abandonment, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, of the New Deal philosophy on which he had built his career. Johnson told Texas conservatives that his earlier liberalism had been tactical and opposed labor unions and government spending. Caro frames this reversal as confirmation of what Johnson's earliest associates, the young congressional aides who had lived alongside him in Washington's Dodge Hotel, had always understood: Johnson followed power, not principle.