The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I

Lyndon Johnson had looked for power in the Senate, and had found it—and now that he was Majority Leader, he was using it. During his first six years in the Senate, he had concealed certain aspects of his character, adapting his personality to the institutional personality of the Senate, but now, in the seventh year, he was forcing the Senate to ada

He was always telling his aides, “If you do everything, you’ll win,” and during his decade-long ascent of the political ladder, he had done “everything,” had worked so hard that a tough Texas political boss said “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard,” had worked with a feverish, almost frantic intensity that journalists woul

No Vice President had ever come to office with so little time in which to establish a record on which he could run in his own right. Johnson, Neustadt was to write, “faced the unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year.” Needing a record on which to run, he had very little time to create one.

Johnson accomplished this transformation not by the pronouncement or fiat or order that is the method of executive initiative, but out of the very nature and fabric of the legislative process itself. He was not only the youngest but the greatest Senate Leader in America’s history. His colleagues called him Leader.

At each previous stage of his career, then, Lyndon Johnson’s election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course; the coups or assassinations that characterize other countries’ politics were not and never would be included in his calculations) whatever political s