And the people believed he would. In 1938, he had gotten 51 percent of the vote; in 1940, he got 53 percent, winning re-election as he had won election, by beating a field of well-known politicians without even a run-off. He had stormed out of Fort Worth waving a flour sack in one hand and the Decalogue in the other—and had become the greatest

Four years before, campaigning in a district whose voters hardly knew his name, Johnson had overhauled far better-known and more experienced candidates partly through the use of money on a scale unprecedented in that district. Now he was using money on the same scale in twenty-one districts—all across Texas. Lyndon Johnson, in his first campaign

The more one thus follows his life, the more apparent it becomes that alongside the thread of achievement running through it runs another thread, as dark as the other is bright, and as fraught with consequences for history: a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them,

They admired his thoroughness, his tirelessness—the way he threw himself into every aspect of politics, into everything he did, with an enthusiasm and effort that seemed limitless. He already possessed an amazing store of knowledge about individual Congressmen and their districts through his capacity for absorbing and retaining information. “He was

He helped the Hill Country through his implementation of a score of New Deal programs. One improvement he made seems rather poignant when one remembers his father: in 1938 alone, 135 miles of paved farm-to-market roads were completed in Travis County, thanks to WPA grants Lyndon Johnson obtained; farmers were able now not only to grow more on their

“It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” Pride, embarrassment, gloating: such emotions could only hinder his progress along the road he saw so clearly before him—the “vision” he had indeed held for so long. They were luxuries in which he would not indulge himself.

Lyndon Johnson’s loss had been due to a political fluke. He had been beaten not by his opponent’s friends but by his opponent’s foes; O’Daniel had won the Senate seat not because these men wanted him to be Senator, but because they didn’t want him to be Governor—because they wanted to get him out of Texas. But it was Johnson’s mistake that had

On May 11, 1936, Congress passed the new REA bill. Within the next eighteen months, electricity was brought to half a million American farms. Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forming cooperatives so that they could get electricity, too—and rural electric rates were beginning to drop in many areas.

Many of the men who owned those herds made no money from them—but the Buntons did. Robert Bunton made enough so that he was able to retire comfortably, and to give his six children a start in life when they married: money to his daughters—one of whom, Eliza Bunton, was Lyndon Johnson’s grandmother—and land to his sons. And the sons made successes