THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE PATH TO POWER by Robert A. Caro; Knopf; 882 pages; $19.95
Even before it was published, this book, like so much else about Lyndon Johnson, was making people angry. Robert A. Caro, whose awesomely detailed, 1,246-page biography of Builder-Bureaucrat Robert Moses, The Power Broker, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, has been toiling for seven years on a three-part study of the 36th President. Excerpts from the first volume, which takes Johnson from his hardscrabble beginnings up to his World War II service, began appearing a year ago in the Atlantic Monthly. In one such episode, Caro disclosed that Johnson had for years accepted "envelopes stuffed with cash" from backers, even when he was Vice President. A number of L.B.J.'s associates denied the charge strenuously, and Caro has deleted it from Volume I. He has, however, promised to reopen the subject in the second installment, scheduled for completion in two years.
It may take some readers that long to finish this one. As in the Moses book, Caro leaves practically nothing about his man unexamined.*There are seven scholarly pages on the rainfall and soil composition of the Texas hill country in the 19th century. Not for nothing: Caro is explaining why Johnson's farming forebears were doomed to failure despite their heroic labors, a trauma that helped shape the young Lyndon. He began running away from home while still a toddler. As a cousin puts it, "He wanted attention. He wanted to be somebody." After watching his father Sam, an incorruptible six-term state legislator, go broke trying to raise crops in the merciless hill-country dirt, Lyndon opened a propaganda campaign against him. Whenever the boy received a mild thrashing, he would holler loud enough to be heard across Johnson City. He seemed, as Caro puts it, "to be going out of his way to reinforce the impression of his father's brutality." Then, as he did later in life, Johnson also exaggerated reports of his father's drinking, his mother's slovenly housekeeping and the general unhappiness of his upbringing, accounts that are mostly refuted by friends and relatives. Theorizes one: "He wanted people to feel sorry for him."
At Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson was similarly manipulative. He wrote fawning notes to faculty members at the end of his exams and so flattered the college president that the man made Lyndon his assistant. He also stole his first election, a student government contest. L.B.J. was just as smarmy at the next major stop: assistant to Texas Congressman Dick Kleberg. In Washington he cheated his way to victory in another election (for leadership of a group of legislative aides) and carefully cultivated the crowned heads of Congress. Chief among them was House Minority Leader (later Speaker) Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan who became his beloved mentor, and whom Johnson eventually betrayed in a competition to become Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief operative in Texas. "Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men," recalls F.D.R. Brain Truster Tommy Corcoran, whose boss was among those captivated by the Johnson treatment. "He could follow someone's mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going."