Ezra's Bookshelf

The Years of Lyndon Johnson Series

by Robert A. Caro · 961 pages · ~17.5 hrs

Biography & MemoirHistoryPolitics & Government

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Robert Caro's first volume on Lyndon Johnson traces his subject from his birth in the Texas Hill Country through his years as a congressional aide to his first Senate race in 1948. Caro reveals the origins of Johnson's legendary drive for power in his childhood poverty and his father's failed political career, showing how young Lyndon learned manipulation and domination in the harsh landscape of rural Texas. The book follows Johnson through his transformative years at San Marcos teachers college, where he mastered campus politics, and into Washington as a congressional secretary who made himself indispensable to his boss and his boss's colleagues. Caro's exhaustive research - including interviews with hundreds of Hill Country residents and Johnson associates - reconstructs a world of brutal poverty and political deal-making that shaped one of the twentieth century's most consequential politicians. The narrative culminates in the notorious 1948 Senate primary, where Johnson defeated the popular former governor Coke Stevenson through vote fraud that Caro documents in devastating detail. Beyond the political narrative, the book is a social history of the Texas Hill Country and the New Deal era, showing how electrification and federal programs transformed rural America. Caro's prose brings these distant times to vivid life, making readers understand both Johnson's ruthlessness and the conditions that created him.

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