The Path to Power

The Making of Lyndon Johnson

Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson is widely considered the greatest work of American political biography in progress — a multi-volume examination of a single political life that has come to constitute a theory of how American power works. The Path to Power, its first volume, covers the years from Johnson’s birth in 1908 through his first Senate campaign in 1941.

This is, in chronological terms, the story of a young man from a poor family in the Texas Hill Country who goes to a third-rate teachers’ college, becomes a congressional secretary, and turns himself into one of the most effective political operators in the New Deal-era Congress. What Caro makes of this material is something else entirely: a portrait of consuming ambition, political genius, and the relationship between childhood deprivation and the hunger for power.

The Hill Country

The book’s first section — Caro’s portrait of the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up — is among the finest historical and social writing in American biography. Caro spent time living in the Hill Country, interviewing the elderly residents who remembered Johnson and his family, and reconstructing the specific texture of rural Texas poverty in the early twentieth century. The isolation, the brutal labor, the women who aged before their time carrying water and doing washing — these chapters establish the world that shaped Johnson’s understanding of what power could do and what poverty meant.

Johnson’s father, Sam Johnson, was a one-term state legislator whose political career ended in humiliation and financial failure. Lyndon watched this happen and drew his conclusions: power must never be relinquished, money must be accumulated, the appearance of wealth must be maintained. These are not attractive lessons, but they are understandable ones, and Caro traces their origins with sympathy without excusing what they produced.

The Political Animal

By the time Johnson reaches Washington as a congressional secretary in his mid-twenties, he is already recognizably the political force he will become. Caro documents his extraordinary capacity for work, his gift for identifying and servicing the needs of people with power, his willingness to flatter and to humiliate simultaneously, his complete subsumption of private self into political ambition. The young Johnson had no off position.

The Path to Power establishes the foundation on which the subsequent volumes rest. To understand why Johnson did what he did as President — the Great Society, Vietnam, the brutality and the brilliance — you must understand where he came from. Caro makes that understanding possible with a depth no other biographer has matched.

Our rating: 4.8/5 — The first volume of the greatest American political biography in progress — Caro’s portrait of Johnson’s origins is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand American power.