EVER SINCE HE HAD ARRIVED in Washington nine years before, Lyndon Johnson had, first as a congressional secretary and then as a Congressman, been touching every base: cultivating not only bureaucrats, but their secretaries and their assistants, and their assistants’ assistants, and their secretaries, until entire government bureaus knew him, liked

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In obtaining and filling patronage positions, Lyndon Johnson worked very hard. In no field were his energy and his willingness to do whatever was necessary to achieve a goal more evident. Hearing that a job—federal, state or county—was opening up, he would spend hours on the telephone talking to men who might be willing to make another telephone

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Those who knew only the public Lyndon Johnson saw the energy and the aggressiveness. Those who knew him best of all, the two youths who for years had not only worked in the same room with him but slept in the same room with him, saw the preparation—the long, intense, silent, secret preparation—behind the energy and aggressiveness. They did not know

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