The birth and early years of the Johnson financial empire illuminate very clearly the subtle means by which favoritism and influence are exercised, and their effect on other individuals and on the body politic as a whole.

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

Other public officials in Washington would not take such a risk, if taking it meant they might, should they lose, have to leave Washington; other congressmen and Senators talked of how they were anxious not to return to the towns or cities from which they had come because they would miss the excitement and glamour of Washington, or the ability to b

The love between Coke and Teeney was striking, too, as was the contentment they brought to each other. They were to have twenty-one years together, and they seemed to fall only more and more in love. When he rode his ranch, by horse or car, inspecting it or cutting out cattle, Teeney still rode with him; when he was doing work in which she couldn’t

Connally realized that Johnson was talking about revolutionizing Texas politics. Thanks to polling, Johnson would be able to discover exactly what issues “touched” Texas voters. And when he found one that touched, he could hammer it into the voters’ consciousness, in speeches on the radio, in ads on the radio, in ads in newspapers, in mailings—with

As a general rule (the most notable exceptions in these early years were John Connally and Horace Busby), the men he picked were not the brightest available, nor the men with the most initiative or ability. They were, rather, the men who had demonstrated the most unquestioning obedience—not merely a willingness but an eagerness to take orders, to b

IN THIS CAMPAIGN—his last chance—personal as well as political patterns that had marked Lyndon Johnson’s entire career emerged stark and unadorned. Almost every great crisis of his career had been accompanied by a crisis in his health, for example, but he had done his best not to let it interfere, complaining endlessly, loudly, violently about the

Lyndon Johnson had tried to buy a state, and, although he had paid the highest price in Texas history, he had failed. So now he was trying to steal it. The telephone calls were to local Johnson managers in thousands of precincts all across Texas. Some of the calls were to ask the managers to be vigilant against any Stevenson attempt to steal votes

COKE STEVENSON and Lyndon Johnson never saw each other again. Stevenson’s hatred and contempt for Johnson never faded, and occasionally it would surface. Asked once, during Johnson’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, to evaluate him, he said, after a long pause: “Well, of course, he is a very, how should I say, skillful politician,” and dropped the