The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I

“I remember hearing Lyndon say that this business of getting these people jobs is really the nucleus of a political organization for the future,” Russell Brown says. In his attempts to obtain patronage, he did not—the secretary to an obscure Congressman—have much ammunition to work with. So he could not afford to let any opening slip away.

“Lyndon was like a crazy man,” Jones says. “He just worked night and day, he just worked his staff to distraction.” By June, 1936, 135 parks would be under construction, and 3,600 youths would be earning thirty dollars per month working on them.2

Johnson’s refusal to take a public stand against Garner even while he was peddling his story about the John L. Lewis episode in the right quarters, his success in keeping his name off the two telegrams to Rayburn (and out of the subsequent press coverage of those telegrams), the care taken to keep his name out of the entire 1940 Garner-Roosevelt fi

After his father re-entered politics in 1917, when Lyndon was nine, politicians, state and local, began dropping by the Johnson home for chats and strategy discussions. Usually, these were held on the porch. Behind that porch was a bedroom, with a window opening onto the porch. Lyndon would hide in the bedroom, sitting on the floor, craning upward

During his second year in the House, he wrote—himself, with no staff assistance—a bill embodying the old People’s Party dream of intensified government regulation of railroads, by giving the government authority over the issuance of new securities by the railroads. Happening, by chance, to see the bill, Louis D. Brandeis, then one of President Wils

When, in 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, Johnson became their Congressman, Hill Country farmers were still plowing their fields with mules because they could not afford tractors. Because they had no electricity, they were still doing every chore by hand, while trying to scratch a living from soil from which the fertility had been drained decades

And Johnson had a strategy—and he knew how to use a strategy. The White Stars were told to concentrate on a single, simple point. “When we asked what we should tell people,” one recalls, “they told us that the campaign would have many slogans, but that there was only one slogan that mattered: ‘Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Roosevelt. One hundred percent fo

Dreamers of big dreams, the Buntons were also, to an extent somewhat unusual among Texas frontier families, interested in ideas and abstractions. John Bunton was one of the founders of the short-lived Philosophical Society of Texas, which was formed in 1837 to explore “topics of interest which our new and rising republic unfolds to the philosopher,

Historians may puzzle over when Franklin Roosevelt decided to defy the Third Term tradition and run for the Presidency again, but John Garner’s intimates never had the slightest doubt as to what the decision would be—“Why, he is panting to run,” one of them said as early as the Autumn of 1938—and neither did Garner, although Roosevelt had assured h