In the first volume of this biography, a tall, gangling youth, humiliated and ridiculed during an impoverished boyhood in a tiny, isolated Texas Hill Country town that felt like “the end of the earth,” earns at twenty-one a reputation as a “wonder kid of politics,” and rises with spectacular speed both to a seat in Congress and to a toehold on nati

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Until that week at the Greenbrier, Brown had thought he had measured Johnson’s political ambition—had measured it easily, he thought, for Johnson talked so incessantly about what he wanted out of politics. He was always saying that he wanted to stay in Congress until a Senate seat opened up, and then run for the Senate. Well, his congressional dist

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For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history. Over his branch of

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