Kennedy, to accept the Vice Presidency, to rise to the White House with Kennedy’s assassination and, then, as president, to force through the Congress a wealth of social legislation while, at the same time, engaging the nation every deeper in the Vietnam War. Of course, anyone reading The Path to Power today knows that Johnson was able to get back on track - to win election to the Senate in a second race, to rise in the ranks to become the powerful Senate Majority Leader, to seek to run for President only to be elbowed out of the way by John F.

Senate from Texas, one he had been certain to win, and, then, with the derailing of all his plans by World War II.

The Path to Power only covers the initial 33 years of Johnson’s life (1908-1941), and it ends with, first, his defeat in an election for the U.S. And about Johnson’s talk from early in his life about becoming President of the United States, a goal that framed nearly everything he did as an adult, a relentless, unswerving, devious, intense focus to his life and relationships. About Johnson’s ferocious hunger for power. About Johnson’s readiness to stuff ballot boxes and to subvert election machinery and to buy votes with cash money.Ībout Johnson’s desperation to escape poverty. About Johnson’s convoluted relationship with his father, the man in whose footsteps he followed, the man whose mannerisms he copied, the man he once idolized and then came to disdain.Ībout Johnson’s compassion in teaching, for a year, a classroom of Mexican-American children in Cotulla in South Texas near the Mexican border and in obtaining for the isolated farms and towns of the Hill Country, then living a medieval existence, the miracles of electricity.Ībout Johnson’s ability to brilliantly spot how to accomplish a job that others thought impossible and his willingness, indeed, inner drive, to do that job in every detail, even the most minute, with grueling, unsparing energy over weeks and months - and to lead others to devote themselves heart and soul to that accomplishment. About Johnson’s need to be the center of attention.Ībout Johnson’s ability to attract men of strong skills but weak personalities and his cold use of them, regardless their desires, for his own purposes for decades at a time. About Johnson’s physical and emotional restlessness. In this book - the first of what is now expected to be five volumes in a series titled The Years of Lyndon Johnson - Caro writes deeply about many aspects of LBJ’s personality.Ībout Johnson’s flattery of older, powerful men, a latter-day Uriah Heep. Caro’s The Path to Power might easily come away wondering: After 768 pages of text and more than 350,000 words, the reader of Robert A.

The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro