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Bolstering her narrative with a rather cumbersome psychohistory, Kearns tries to explain Johnson's massive drive to power. She makes much of the fact that his father, a small farmer and real estate trader, insisted on displays of manliness from him, while his mother emphasized gentility. Lavish with her love at times, his mother withheld it when he displeased her. Out of these inner conflicts, Kearns traces the development of a tormented, driven politician. But Johnson may also have been shaped as much by Texas and national political traditions. His political education began amid rural poverty and the
Depression; he was schooled in governmental activism by the New Deal. As he scaled the political ladder in the years following World War II, Americans expected increasing benefits from Government, and L.B.J. was happy to provide them. He subscribed to what could be called a politics of plenty: more of everything for everybody. He was the ideal President for the insatiable 1960s.
Formidable Seduction. Johnson's brains were inferior to very few—his genes and his drives were second to none. He lacked only a sense of proportion and restraint. Early in life, he demonstrated a formidable gift of persuasion. He had an uncanny knack for attaching himself to men of power—in school, in the New Deal bureaucracy, in Congress, in the Senate. He was miffed that his talent was dismissed as "arm-twisting"; he considered it soul-catching of a very high order. Intellectuals, he complained to Kearns, "never take time to think about what goes on in these one-to-one sessions because they have never been involved in persuading anyone to do anything. They're just like a pack of nuns who've convinced themselves that sex is dirty and ugly and low-down because they can never have it. They see it as rape instead of seduction and they miss the elaborate preparation before the act is finally done."
Johnson practiced this seduction on everyone. He told Kearns: "You learn that Stewart Alsop cares a lot about appearing to be an intellectual and a historian, so whenever you talk to him, play down the gold cufflinks which you play up with TIME magazine, and to him, emphasize your relationship with F.D.R. and your roots in Texas. You learn that Mary McGrory likes dominant personalities and Doris Fleeson cares only about issues, so with McGrory, you come on strong and with Fleeson you make yourself sound like some impractical red-hot liberal."