What Made Lyndon Run

...Not soon again will we have so microscopic an examination of a life—let alone a President's—as Caro provides in this first of his planned three volumes on the Great Society Chief...

...He rightly concluded: "Boy, there must be a better way to make a living than this...

...When he wore out the men who served him, often mesmerizing and terrorizing them on the way with his icy stare, he was quite as much a leader as he was a tyrant...

...Perhaps "the education President"—a designation Johnson coveted as his monument—was then being molded...

...From his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, who taught Lyndon how to put his arm on people and serve the cause of social justice in the bargain, he acquired a model and the confidence to go and do likewise...

...Caro explores to a fuller extent than anyone ever has how Johnson and the Hill Country of Texas from which he sprang are a part of the American cultural landscape that students of history and political science must reckon with...

...From Lyndon's mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, a woman of cultivation and substantial learning, the future Chief Executive acquired a sense of what he could make of himself...

...Even in his most rebellious time as a destructive and occasionally violent youth, minutely reported here in several new and distressing anecdotes, Johnson must have had a picture in his mind's eye of a better young man who would one day please Mother...

...No less than Caro, we are deeply in debt to the hundreds of men and women he interviewed because they knew or observed Johnson on various steps of his unique career...

...As the biographer writes, "He wanted to be somebody, to stand out, to lead, to dominate...

...author, "The Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on Peace and War Under Lyndon B. Johnson" More than 20 years have passed since crowds cheered a departing President in gratitude for his accomplishments and service...

...Readers will eagerly await Caro's future volumes to see how the Presi-dent-in-the-making and the office were brought together...

...No other biographer of a President has so thoroughly verified the role of money in elevating his man...

...They may hope to see their man presented more favorably when his lust for office and recognition is better satisfied in the coming volumes...

...The significance of casting aside a President soon after an overwhelming popular endorsement of him remains to be fully established...

...At his best, I like to think, there was another Johnson very different from the one who occupies most of Robert Caro's chapters...

...The vagaries of circumstance saved Johnson from his nightmare of being sandwiched between two Kennedys in the line of succession, only to impose this more unpleasant fate...

...When Johnson was in the White House beseeching Northern city bosses and Southern confreres to take his way on civil rights, his nose almost on top of theirs, Texas oldtimers could see Sam Johnson come alive again...

...And he was willing to pay the physical and moral price...

...Even Lincoln could say on the eve of his nomination in 1860 that "the taste is in my mouth a little...

...In passing, though, it is reasonable to ask if Johnson's predecessors as President, by contrast, reached for the brass ring simply to qualify posthumously for a place on the nation's coins and postage stamps...

...There is a creditable tradition in statecraft as in sports that "nice guys finish last," that "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," and that "you don't get angry, you get even...

...Meantime, in the boy we glimpse the man and the world that formed him, each stage in his life providing preparation and training for the next...

...all previous accounts of our Presidents' growing-up years seem scanty and uninformative by comparison...

...No President has yet been dragged into the White House and forced to put in his time...

...Or, indeed, into those of Caro, whose hostile life of Robert Moses published eight years ago, The Power Broker, was a warm-up for the current project...

...If an earlier famous Johnson had his Bos well, and Abraham Lincoln his Sandburg, LBJ has found a portraitist who similarly will owe his fame to his great subject and his certitude in taking control of it...

...Do you know that more people in India are going to die of starvation there next year then there are in all of Vietnam...

...He is imbued with qualities that we try to tell ourselves only the wicked possess: unbridled ambition, ferocious greed, conscienceless self-regard, cynical lip-service to good causes, and above all, an insistent affection for power as an end in itself...

...Johnson, in an ancient tradition of natural leaders, also detested physical labor...

...The effect is to present an appalling man, abusing every acquaintance, most employees, friends, and even the faithful Lady Bird, his bride, who learned his requirements and provided unsung political assistance?as Caro's subsequent volumes will no doubt demonstrate in fresh and instructive detail...

...His staffs relied on him for direction, not the other way around...

...People who admired the cowboy President, forgiving him everything because he, a Southerner, ran the interference for the civil rights legislation of the 1 960s and waged war on poverty as if it were a crusade against the infidel, will be astonished as well as irritated by Caro's book...

...Author and informants have combined to etch an ineradicable likeness of an American giant...

...This big, bulging book, then, places a searing picture in the gallery of Chief Executives...

...follows his life, the more apparent it becomes thai alongside the thread of achievement running through it runs another thread, as dark as the other is bright, and as fraught with consequences for history: a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will...

...Some of Caro's choicest contributions are in his asides...

...As in those other masterpieces, the biographer here has revivified not only a man but an entire era and physical setting...

...Johnson's cousin, Asa Johnson Cox, so valuable to Caro in recalling intimate information about childhood in the Hill Country, once related to me how Rebekah Johnson used to walk Lyndon to the front gate of their house morning after morning, stuffing him with the contents of his lessons for the day...

...This is particularly true of his unforgettable evocation of the Hill Country: its topographical shortcomings, its need for the electric power that finally arrived through the New Deal, the stoicism of its women in the face of grinding loneliness and lack of amenities, and mostly how it could form—as if set in concrete—the personality of a young man who both resented his environment and was rooted in it inextricably...

...Caro documents to a fare-thee-well the cajoling, wheedling and deceiving that early gave Johnson's trajectory its shape and direction...

...This review is not the appropriate place to inquire deeply into Presidential motives throughout history...

...He slaved at it full time, giving a special comfort and satisfaction to the people on whose behalf he worked, first as Congressman Richard M. Kleberg's secretary, then as Congressman, later as Senator...

...And Caro's cameo of Sam Rayburn—a separate biography, in fact—is an ornament that sheds fresh luster on a titan of Congressional history while showing how Ray-burn and the young Johnson used each other to mutual advantage...

...Caro already concludes about his emerging politician: "[Tl he more one...

...Lyndon Johnson's metier was politics...

...At age 15 he had a job gravel-topping a section of highway near Johnson City...

...The Johnson who strides forth from these pages is not a lovely person...

...The public has long known that Johnson's career and the fortunes of the construction firm of Brown and Root were intertwined...

...Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon left office reviled, scorned and almost without defenders, staking their hopes on history to temper the public's appraisal of their performance...

...Caro's rich book reveals that the niche he found in politics was one of the few he was suited for, one he was born to fill...

...Such national behavior may well prove the most dramatic evidence of television's role in the American political process...

...Indira Gandhi was in here last week...

...He was a mama's boy, like many high achievers in politics and outside it...

...Caro's account of Johnson's dalliance with Alice Glass, a beauty whose attentions Johnson is said to have shared with the Texas multimillionaire Charles E. Marsh, is less convincing because less well-supported by the evidence...

...Although he may have dissimulated so often on some questions that possibly he no longer knew the truth from the embroidery, I still credit the substance of his assertion to me in the White House that he never took an important decision without consulting his mother...

...As the fallen Chiefs of back-to-back Presidencies, their names are linked forever...

...It was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it...

...How this association was born and how it fared is so scintillatingly detailed as to constitute an event in the writing of national history...

...I recall bidding Johnson goodbye one day at the door of the Oval Office after a long discussion with him about the Vietnam War...

...I'm going to try to help her...

...In episode after episode Caro bares Johnson in his native habitat, honing the techniques and skill at manipulating others that the world years later would label his "wheeler-dealer" style...

...It may also be special proof that elected officials today reflect the electorate better than ever before, and that the people, revolted at what they see in their President, smash the mirror so that they no longer must gaze upon themselves and quickly seek one offering a more acceptable self-image...

...He said to me softly that other things were also on his mind...

...The Path to Power is massive in every respect—physical size, historical scope, narrative detail...

...It is not simply that Caro takes 882 pages to get Johnson to his 33rd year: Without psychologizing or concocting conversations, he has brought to life a young man so believable and unforgettable that we can hear his heartbeat and touch him (or, more accurately, in the case of this figure, feel his grip on us...

...Reading Robert A. Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson in the light of these recent tendencies is helpful...