The Path to Power

Robert Caro’s book is nothing less than a masterpiece.

I love it for the unique perspective Caro has for his subject, Johnson, which is rare among biographers. Most biographers love their subjects and want their readers to admire their subjects as well. They gloss over their faults or explain them away so the reader is left with the positive impression the biographer has. Not so with Caro. 

Caro admires Lyndon Johnson as a politician but also loathes him; he respects Lyndon’s radical ability to read and manipulate other individuals and Lyndon’s pure, unadulterated pursuit of power and higher office, but… show more.

For years I resisted reading Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Caro’s four-volume (soon-to-be-five) series on Lyndon Baines Johnson. 

Growing up in the 1960s, I disliked Johnson’s disastrously tragic approach to the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t imagine reading a four-volume series on someone “I didn’t like.” But after fifty pages I was hooked. Caro taught me that the role of a biographer is to seek to understand their subject, not excessively praise or condemn them. 

The series also showed me how to incorporate just the right amount of context in the narrative (not too much, not too little). The book is… show more.

Robert Caro’s meticulous biography of Lyndon Johnson is the stuff of legends. I have known about it for years but finally decided this year that it was time to dive in. 

It is a fascinating biography of one of the pivotal figures in 20th-century American politics and the times in which he lived. This volume traces Johnson’s early life and career (well, it begins with the geological forces that shaped the part of Texas in which he grew up and a lot of detail about his grandparents before it ever gets to Lyndon).

Learning how Johnson ascended to political power… show more.

Great biographers never ignore the warts, and Lyndon Johnson—the subject of Robert Caro’s masterful quartet of biographies—had plenty of them. For starters, LBJ mishandled the war in Vietnam, for which history will never forgive him. But Johnson was also a stunning contradiction—a rural Texas conservative who did more for urban society than anyone in modern history—and an absolute force of nature. I served as a White House Fellow under him in 1966-67. Close to Johnson, you could sense his nobility.

This book is the first of four on LBJ by Caso (and, we're waiting on the fifth and final volume), the series is spectacular, though the Path to Power is my favorite. No one goes deeper in researching his subject than Caro, and he’s quite simply the most dazzling non-fiction writer in the world. LBJ is a fascinating study in how someone will do whatever it takes to acquire and use power, with absolutely no regard for ethical considerations.

The first volume in Robert Caro’s magisterial, multi-volume biography of LBJ describes in unprecedented detail the daunting obstacles—financial, geographical, educational, familial—that Johnson had to overcome during his extraordinary career, and the phenomenal drive that allowed him to rise to the summit of political power in the United States. Caro’s brilliant biography sheds light not only on an extraordinary man but also on the political processes that are the nation’s lifeblood.